THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INTERNET

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE INTERNET: AN EXAMINATION OF THE FULFILLMENT OF THE PROMISE OF THE INTERNET

Cass Sunstein (2002) observed that the promise of the Internet to provides people in all walks of life with greater access to more information than could have been imagined two decades ago is a double-edged sword. If realized as the potential of the Internet is envisioned, a better informed public could create a more just society. Conversely, Sunstein (2002) points out that the same technology could stifle public discourse by allowing users of the Internet to have all information delivered via the Internet "tailored" so that, if desired, an individual would never encounter ideas or opinions with which they disagree.

Patelis (1999) contends, however, that commercialism and overt regulation of the Internet are crippling the promise of the Internet in its infancy even for those people who want to use the medium to improve society and themselves. Commercialization of the Internet leads to control of information, a crowding out of non-commercial information and information that is not controlled by commercial interests, and access costs that exclude millions of potential users of the Internet (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Neuman, & Robinson, 2001). Overt regulation of the Internet can lead to a stifling of public dissent, allow governmental misconduct to be hidden behind a veil of secrecy, and grant power to control the functioning of th

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ledge base in future society will differ markedly from that of the past (DiMaggio, Hargittai, Neuman, & Robinson, 2001). The term "digital divide" has almost as many meanings as there are people who use the term. Essentially, however, the terms means that some members of society gain advantages over other members of society because they (a) have greater access to information technology tools, (b) become more proficient in the use of such tools, and (c) develop a greater sense of self-efficacy in their ability to apply such tools to problem solving (Van Horn, 2003). Within this broad context, the term "digital divide" refers to all information technology tools, as opposed simply to access to the internet, to ability to extract information from a CD-ROM data base in a school library, the ability to access a database as a part of one's work responsibilities, the ability to write a term paper using a computer-based word processor, or any one of a myriad other activities (Van Horn, 2003). Bainbridge (2002) wrote that the digital divide grows larger every day. The meaning of this statement, however, is not that an increasing number of people in the United States are entering the classification of computer illiterates. Rather, the me

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