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In this seminar we will discuss what we can learn about the prospects for mass broadband multimedia from both the history of earlier consumer electronics products and contemporary case studies. Why did Prestel fail, and Minitel and the WWW succeed? Why has the Sony PlayStation been such a success? How far do producer strategies and common standards influence adoption, and how far is success due to meeting consumer needs? We also look at the use of the internet in the home. What is the use value of the home page to individuals and why is the web camera a popular form? A central question is that of the blurring of the boundaries between consumption and production.
Core Readings
o Cawson, Alan. 'Compact Disc-based Interactive Multimedia', in A.
Cawson, L. Haddon and I. Miles, The Shape of Things to Consume: Delivering
Information Technology into the Home, Aldershot: Avebury, 1995 (full text
on-line at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/ssfd2/title.htm)
o Cawson, Alan. 'Innovation and Consumer Electronics' in M. Dodgson
and R. Rothwell, (eds) The Handbook of Industrial Innovation, Aldershot:
Edward Elgar, 1994.
o Miles, Ian. Cawson, Alan and Haddon, Leslie 'The shape of things
to consume' in Roger Silverstone and Eric Hirsch, eds., Consuming Technologies:
Media and Information in Domestic Spaces, London: Routledge, 1992.
o O'Riordan, Kate. 'Playing With Lara in Virtual Space' in Munt, S.R.
(ed) Technospaces: Inside the New Media. London: Continuum, 2001.
Supplementary Reading
o Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication In The Late Nineteenth Century. New York: O.U.P. 1988.
Additional Web Resources
o Frank Beacham, series of articles around the theme of 'techno-realism' at http://www.beacham.com
o Web materials on digital TV at http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/ssfd2/digital_consumers. They concern whether digital TV/high definition TV is likely to succeed in the US - both sides of the argument are presented.
A Previous Case Study
One example of the innovation/take up relationship is that of a recent
failure: Divx - a version of a current success DVD - which used a specially
adapted DVD player to read encoded DVD discs which could be unlocked on
payment. Search the Web to try to find out why Divx failed and DVD appears
to have succeeded. You can start at http://www.unik.no/~robert/hifi/dvd/divx.html
look also at the case of Personal Video Recorders such as ReplayTV
and TiVO. Start with the article at http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2705775,00.html
and follow some of the related links to collect material.
Publication Details
Page Created By: Kate O'Riordan
Email: k.s.o-riordan@sussex.ac.uk
Page Last Modified: Wednesday, 27-Nov-2002 10:10:54 GMT
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