Theme 3: Research and theory

New Media & Society is a peer reviewed journal. They publish research from communication, media and cultural studies. It caught my interest by having a top ten impact factor in the field of communication, (1.824). I expect this journal to cover the social aspects of media technology fairly well.

The paper I choose was named Technical code and the social construction of the internet by Flanagin, Flanagin and Flanagin, published in New Media & Society in 2010. The aim of the paper is to use the concept of technical code to examine the current state of the internet. Flanagin (and Flanagin and Flanagin) defines technical code as ‘a background of unexamined cultural assumptions literally designed into the technology itself’. By examing the technical code the authors hope to find the values and and assumptions that was important during the development of the internet, and understand the internets evolution, current form and future.

To accomplish this the authors reviews a large number of articles on the subject. A large focus of the article is the openness of the internet. The authors point out that one of the most important decitions in designing the internet is the end-to-end principle. The end-to-end principle means that the “inteligence” or the processing of the network happens primarily at the sender and reciever nodes, the network in between is neutral, handeling all data indifferently. This causes conflict, as the neutrality of the internet is challenged by laws, for example laws agains file sharing. The authors finishes by concluding that there are choices to be made in the future development of the internet, and those choices will likely determine to what degree the internet will continue to be “the technology of freedom”.