[an error occurred while processing this directive] Week 5: Digital producers
Digital technologies have fostered new practices, organisations and new companies, which have grown rapidly, and have transformed others. Indymedia is a global media organisation on the level of production. How does it relate to the political economy of the media?  Media production, it is argued, has been democratised by the dissemination of cheaper and more accessible technologies. Following on from last week we discuss what the implications of alternative media production are in relation to new media.

The two biggest world corporations are General Electric (old) and Microsoft (new). What do old firms struggling to cope with technological change have in common with new firms that pioneer the technologies? Are the 'new media' companies different kinds of firms, with new cultures and ways of working? Another important issue is that of who has the upper hand: the producers who own the content or the producers who own the delivery systems?  See Andrew Odlyzko's article below.

There is no 'essential' reading for this week. The following is a selection of books about producers, there are many more in the Library. You will also find a wealth of information on the Web for this topic.
 

o Odlyzko, Andrew, 'Content is not King', First Monday, Issue 6, online only at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_2/odlyzko/
o Gill, Rosalind. 2002. 'Cool, Creative and Egalitarian? Exploring Gender in Project-Based New Media Work in Europe.' in Green, Eileen and Adam, Alison (eds) Occasional Papers No 1. Centre for Social policy Research: University of Teeside, UK. Also printed in the routledge journal: Information, Communication & Society, Vol 5, No 1. This volume of Information, Communication and Society is a special issue on new media.
o Moody, Fred. I Sing the Body Electronic: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995
o Stross, R.E. The Microsoft Way: The Real Story of How the Company Outsmarts its Competition, London: Little Brown, 1996
o Taylor, Paul. Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime. London:Routledge,1999
o Downing, John. Radical Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
o Atton, Chris. Alternative Media. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
o Cusumano, Michael A.  and Selby, Richard W. Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People, London: Harper Collins, 1996
o Cawson, Alan et al, Hostile Brothers: Competition and Closure in the European Electronics Industry, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990
o Dai, X. Corporate Strategy, Public Policy and New Technologies: Philips and the European Consumer Electronics Industry, Oxford: Pergamon, 1996
o Sculley, John. Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple... a journey of adventure, ideas and the Future, New York: Harper and Row, 1987
o Wolff, Michael, Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998

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