Money and Motivation in Star Trek
Posted on | July 25, 2010 | No Comments
A perennial SF question of mine was asked in the movie Star Trek: First Contact (1996), when the starship Enterprise E of Star Trek: Next Generation fame goes back into time to Earth, circa 2063, about a decade after World War III ends.
They are following a Borg ship that is attacking early Earth to reduce its threat in the future. Lily Sloane, an assistant to the famous inventor of the dominant propulsion system known as warp drive, Zefram Cochrane, gets a chance to go on board the futuristic Enterprise. After getting a brief tour from Captain Jean-Luc Picard and a description of the amazing ship, Lily innocently asks “How much did this thing cost?”
Picard responds with an intriguing if not disappointing, “the economics of the future are somewhat different.” He goes on, “money doesn’t exist in the 24th century”. Lily responds understandably, “No money, you mean you don’t get paid?” He replies, the “acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force for humanity. We work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity”. And then he adds “Actually we are much like yourself and Dr. Cochrane.” With this last, Picard has a moral, we are not so much different from you and neither are the motivations for the work we do.
Space ships are recurring icons of speculative fictions. They are usually focused on imaginative new technologies. I often wonder why we don’t have more stories dealing with imagining the new economic systems we would need to build them.
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor of Global Media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.
Tags: Star Trek: Next Generation > Starship Enterprise E > World War III > Zefram Cochrane
Revisiting “Multimedia”
Posted on | July 24, 2010 | No Comments
The term “multimedia” has struggled over the years to keep its relevance but continues to be a major moniker of technological change and integration in the media area.
The name emerged during the 1960s and 1970s to refer to adding light shows to live music events and later when carousels of photographic slides were synchronized with hi-fi stereos and voice tracks for live presentations. The term took on new meanings in the late 1980s as the Apple Macintosh matured and hypermedia introduced the notion of linking various media content stored in different files.
In the early 1990s hard drives and CD-ROMs finally provided sufficient storage capacity for combining images and video with text and voice-overs. “Authorware” technologies such as Macromedia’s Director enabled more sophisticated convergence of different medias (text, audio, still images, animation, video, as well as interactivity) into various narrative forms for education, entertainment, or commercial uses. At the center of Director’s utility was the Lingo scripting language introduced in 1988. Lingo was an object-oriented programming (OOP) language developed by John H. Thompson that was designed to mimic spoken grammar. For example, “if sprite 5 is visible then go to the frame”. Lingo and Director became nearly synonymous with multimedia at that time.
I remember giving a keynote address at a New Zealand educational conference held at Massey University in 1994 on “Multi-media and Multi-Intelligences,” borrowing from Howard Gardner’s (1993) Frames Of Mind: The Theory Of Multiple Intelligences book. In that speech, I talked about how multimedia could enhance Gardiner’s different types of human intelligence: linguistic, musical, spatial, logical-mathematical, interpersonal and bodily-kinesthetic.
The popularity of the Internet by the mid-1990s disenfranchised multimedia from its star role, particularly as the web itself was less sophisticated. The early web browsers were primarily text with some jpeg images while audio and video were scarce and poor in quality. The fantastic reach of the World Wide Web held much promise for the future of communications. Multimedia still had relevance in industrial and scientific applications and in museums. Workstations produced by Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems also enhanced multimedia applications in scientific simulations and in financial modeling. Kiosks in malls and other venues exposed the general public to multimedia, but the Internet largely sidelined interest in “multimedia” during the mid-1990s as the web gained in popularity.
Macromedia quickly recognized the potential of the web and began to develop authorware that would use the language of the web – HTML- for more sophisticated multimedia websites. While many early website designers preferred coding HTML by hand on text formats like Microsoft Notepad, applications emerged like Coffeecup that began to automate web coding activities. Microsoft’s Frontpage offered a WYSIWYG application for those who didn’t want to bother learning the intricacies of HTML code and Macromedia offered its Dreamweaver application that allowed website designers to switch back and forth from HTML code to a WYSIWYG view. Dreamweaver has become the standard-bearer of multimedia website production and it has techniques embedded that allow different types of media to be integrated easily, as shown in this video:
Multimedia is default condition of nearly all digital media these days. As I write this I can hear my daughter playing a Disney game on my Droid X smartphone. Other applications let me play a guitar, watch Youtube videos, and do Google searches from voice commands. We live in a global society of multi-mediated communications. In future posts I want to pose more meaningful questions about the state and influence of multimedia communications in our lives. One of the first things that I want to investigate is how Medium Theory is being applied to study this new environment.
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is the Professor of Global Media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He also taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii in the 1990s.
Tags: CD-ROMs > Director > hypermedia > Lingo > Macromedia > multi-mediated communications
How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.4: Global Money and Spreadsheet Capitalism
Posted on | July 18, 2010 | No Comments
The growth of “petrodollars” due to increasing foreign oil consumption during the 1970s combined with the accelerating developments in computing and communications technologies to create a new realm of electronic finance with vast political and economic repercussions throughout the world. What emerged was a new system of digital capitalism that was propelled, in part, by the new utility in spreadsheet calculation and global markets connected via undersea fiber optics and orbital satellites. I have called this the regime of digital monetarism.
The new regime was unwieldy, but within this turmoil, an important set of technologies emerged that would add a major new dimension in the process of electrifying money and capital. With Cold War technologies, a global infrastructure for data communications emerged with satellites and undersea communications cables leading the way. Simultaneously, Apple Computers released the Apple II microcomputer based on a Motorola microprocessor. Of central importance was the electronic spreadsheet. VisiCalc (Visible Calculator) was designed for use on the Apple II in 1979, and it became an immediate hit for a large number of different people needing to make financial calculations. In August of 1981, IBM introduced its own “Personal Computer” and soon after Lotus 1-2-3 became available for the “PC” and all the “IBM-compatible” clones such as AST, Compaq, and Dell.
In an era of incredible economic and financial flux, the electronic spreadsheet became the “killer app” that guaranteed the success of the PC industry and also provided an incredible new utility for individuals who were empowered to create dramatic new numerical calculations and construct new financial “what-if” scenarios in unprecedented short timeframes. Spreadsheet technology was foundational for digital monetarism because it provided a calculative tool that became universally available and provided immediate feedback via the accessibility of the personal computer.
This global political economy combined a new “free enterprise” fundamentalism (Reagan-Thatcherism) with a system of unprecedented capital mobility. Empowered by the calculative and organizing powers of the spreadsheet, global finance targeted debt-ridden governments and began a process of privatizing public assets such as airlines, broadcasting, electricity, transportation, oil fields and telecommunications by valuing assets, creating state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and then finally selling them off as corporate entities to global institutional investors such as pension and sovereign funds.
In the process, national barriers to unregulated capital flows broke down and new forms of communications (Internet) and news (“Bloomberg Box”) emerged to facilitate the information flows needed for investment decisions. Combined with innovations in mathematical algorithms, global money morphed into a variety of financial instruments traded in electronic “dark pools” and on interconnected financial exchanges.
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor and Associate Chair of the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught at Hannam University in South Korea and from 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, Marist College in New York, and Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Tags: digital spreadsheet > petrodollars > spreadsheet capitalism
The Meaning Makers: Google
Posted on | July 12, 2010 | No Comments
As I mentioned previously, my talk in Hawaii about Internet TV turned into a discussion of Google and its increasing dominance of the advertising industry. In particular, how Google was porting its advertising technologies into an integrated ad management system that includes online, audio, and video. TV is about to turn into “Smart TV” with Google as the major “packager” of its video content, providing the results of searches and associated advertising.
Advertising reached global sales of $377 billion with 40% ($151 billion) of total advertising sales coming through television sales and another $61 billion through online advertising. Global spending on paid search amounted to $29.79 billion, or 48.8% of all online spending according to www.magnaglobal.com. It is likely that online advertising will overtake newspapers as the second-largest advertising medium by 2013, and total $103 billion in 2015.
Google pulled ahead of its search ad rivals due to a couple of algorithmic innovations that still remain largely proprietary, and its adoption of auction theories for selling advertising. Steven Levy’s article on “Secret of Googlenomics: Data-Fueled Recipe Brews Profitability” in Wired Magazine gives a great introduction to what may be the most extraordinary business idea ever devised.
Google’s $23.6 billion in 2009 revenues , 97% coming from advertising, puts it ahead of the world’s largest advertising holding companies: Omnicon, Publicis, WPP, and Interpublic. Yet it sees additional opportunities such as Internet TV. Television’s global advertising revenues of $151 billion is expected to grow significantly. That figure represents a major growth potential for Google.
As TV becomes part of the link economy, every click represents an intention, an interest, a bit of meaning that is stored in Google’s huge data bases located around the country in huge data farms. Google’s goal of “organizing the world’s information” looks to be on schedule.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global political economy.
Tags: Googlenomics > Internet TV > online advertising > Smart TV > Steven Levy > video content
Back from Hawaii and the EWC Conference
Posted on | July 7, 2010 | No Comments
Just back from a week in Hawaii to attend the EWC/EWCA 50th Anniversary International Conference of the East-West Center. I moderated a panel on the “The Digital Divide: Bridges and Developments” and gave a talk on “Digital Television and the Impact of Global E-Commerce and Social Media” which turned out be more about the stakeholders involved in Internet TV and the competitive advantages of Google in a possible transformation of television to what Amanda Lotz calls the “post-network era”.
I was lucky to be a part of the EWC from 1983 to 1988. I started off as a research intern studying computerization in Asian countries and then they sponsored my Masters degree and half of my Ph.D. I was lucky to stay on a few more years as a Graduate Assistant at the University of Hawaii Communications Department and as a Henry R. Luce Fellow before taking my first faculty position at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand.
EWC and an Economic Heritage
The EWC is becoming more popular because it was the place where Barack Obama’s parents met 
and as a major reason APEC will be in Honolulu next year. The conference had an interesting session on his mother, Ann Dunham Soetoro, which was moderated by her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng, who now works at the East-West Center. President Obama’s mother did some impressive field work in the poorest areas of Indonesia and was an early advocate of micro-credit, providing small loans to aspiring entrepreneurs. Although she was an anthropologist, her work was a very practical inquiry into the economic processes of these poor areas and people working and living in them. Although no particular speaker stood out, they each helped paint an overall picture of a very bright, practical and dedicated academic who turned into a tireless advocate for economic development.
The question I raised with Maya afterward was about the influence of her grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who was a banker in Honolulu, rising to the position of Vice-President in one of Hawaii’s major banks. Banks scrutinize economic activities at a very micro level. I mention this because I think there is an interesting economic linkage between grandmother-mother-President that bares some scrutiny. I have no idea if they had contentious or controversial discussions. But I do wonder if the President’s mother’s emphasis on entrepreneurship had been influenced by her own mother’s experience as a banker.
The President’s community organizing experience for example makes more sense within context of this heritage. It shows an appreciation of the day-to-day economic processes that make up community success and life. I hope President Obama stays in touch with his roots as I think these issues are crucial for the transformation the US is going through. The US needs to rebuild from the ground up, reconstruct its circuits of credit, produce its energy locally, clean up its food supply, re-educate itself, and smartly stay integrated within the world economy.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global political economy.
Tags: Amanda Lotz > Ann Dunham Soetoro > EWC/EWCA 50th Anniversary International Conference > Google TV > Madelyn Dunham
The Meaning-Makers: WPP
Posted on | June 28, 2010 | No Comments
This is my second post for The Meaning-Makers series. The first discussed advertising behemoth, Omnicom, one of the top four global holding companies in the advertising, PR, and media buying field along with the Interpublic Group and the Publicis Groupe. This industry continues to be dominated by 4 major holding companies and the case can be made that they have significant power over the production of cultural and political meanings in our world.
From the UK comes another of the big four advertising/PR/media holding companies, WPP. A $US 14 billion dollar company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland that is publicly traded in London and on NASDAQ. With over a 105,000 employees, WPP operates all around the globe and its noted for its flagship companies, Kantar, Ogilvy & Mather and Young & Rubicam.
WPP’s holdings offer creative campaign development, brand management, public relations, services as well as media buying and planning support. Its Kantar Group division is one of the world’s leading market research organizations.
Despite a major contraction in 2008 of over 10%, global advertising sales are expected to increase during 2010 by 4.2% to total of $377 billion according to MagnaGlobal.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global political economy.
Tags: brand management > global advertising sales > Kantar > Ogilvy & Mather > production of meaning > WPP > Young & Rubicam
How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.3: Data Packets for Dollars
Posted on | June 25, 2010 | No Comments
This is the 18th post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World and addresses some of the earliest attempts to privatize and globalize the Internet. Here, the early Internet, called ARPANET, was privatized by a bunch of entrepreneurial engineers who worked with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to make a pre-TCP standard, the X.25 and X.75 protocols to provide data networking for banks and other multinational users.
Larry Roberts, the Chief Scientist at ARPA who oversaw the development of the ARPANET, became the CEO of the new subsidiary – Telenet, that went into operation in 1974 offering packet-switched data communications commercially. Telenet also set out to plan a new international data-networking standard and quickly began working on packet-switching standards with the ITU, the organization that set standards for world’s telephone organizations.
Generally called PTTs (Post, Telephone, and Telegraph), these organizations were nearly universally controlled by the governments of their respective countries. They were concerned that privately owned data networks would cut them economically out of potentially profitable new services and were thus motivated to facilitate the new standards that would allow them to manage and tariff (price) international data flows. They were also politically concerned that proprietary data networks would become “Trojan Horses”, allowing sensitive national information to pass easily through their borders.
Roberts negotiated a series of new protocols that left more control at the level of the telecommunications network rather than at the individual host (as it would with TCP/IP). The X.25 and related X.75 protocols allowed countries to set up their own public-switched data networks such as Uninet, Euronet and the Nordic Data Network. The new data communications standards would not end the economic and political debates. In fact, they would just begin, as packet-switching networks began to have a revolutionary new role as a major conduit for a brave new world of electronic money and international news. Before email and the World Wide Web, electronic money was the “killer app” for data networking.
Using the new X.25 series of packet-switching protocols embraced by the ITU, banks developed extensive international networks and clearinghouse systems to offer information services for the movement of credit information and money and to settle accounts. The supranational fund of electronic eurodollars that emerged out of the OPEC surpluses of the 1970s’ oil crises an provided an important step to the global Internet as the packet-switched technology was implemented in banking networks to coordinate the resultant flows of international currency exchange and debt. This newly forming regime of electronic money led to dramatic transformations of the world’s electronic infrastructure, including the privatization of the global satellite system and national telephony systems that had previously set up formidable obstacles to the flows of digital communication.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD was on the NYU faculty from 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global political economy.
Tags: ARPA > eurodollars > ITU > Larry Roberts > OPEC > PTTs > TCP/IP > X.25
How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.2: Eurodollars, Petrodollars
Posted on | June 22, 2010 | No Comments
How did the world of global digital monetarism emerge? How did fluid capital transcend the containment policies and national boundaries erected in the period up to 1970s? How did it develop in the 1980s and beyond into a global financial environment?
While origins are often difficult to delineate, the phenomenon of “eurodollars” – US dollars held outside of the geographical boundaries of the United States – bare scrutiny. US currencies, real and numeric, began to increase in the post-WWII years, as US military commitments and commercial investments grew in Europe and later Asia. Legend has it that the name of the errant currency came about when a Russian bank, trying to avoid confiscation of its foreign assets as the Cold War escalated, parked its dollars in a French bank with a telegram address of “eurobank.” US banks during the 1960s also moved money offshore to avoid regulations under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. It was the oil crises of the 1970s that dramatically increased the amounts of US dollars overseas.
Late 1973 marked the beginning of the first oil crisis, an event that would contribute substantially to a surplus fund of supranational electronic money. Untethered from gold, the value of the dollar had dropped appreciably after Nixon “closed the gold window” in 1971, raising concerns by the oil-exporting countries and other countries selling goods and services for dollars. Political instability increased when war broke out in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria, supported by a coalition of Arab states conducted a surprise attack on Israeli.
Caught by surprise, and mired by the Watergate investigation, the White House supported Israel and increased their defense condition from DefCon 4 to DefCon 3, provoking the USSR and nearly causing a nuclear conflict. OPEC countries boycotted the U.S and other Western countries to punish the supporters of Israel. As oil prices quadrupled, US dollars, the only accepted currency in the oil markets, poured into OPEC countries and were subsequently deposited into the major banks of the international financial system.
Seeking profits, banks began investing heavily in computer communications to help recycle OPEC funds, sometimes called “petrodollars.” A prime target was “Third World” and other countries eager for the money. Sometimes pressured by “economic hit men,” countries took loans for infrastructure projects, paying for oil, and sometimes to stash away in private accounts.
Information technologies became helpful as banks decided to form syndicated loan networks to spread their lending risks. A lead bank would arrange the funding and supply a significant share of the loan while contacting many other banks to contribute smaller amounts to the loan. However, the telegraph system needed to be faster and smoother, and soon, these processes were computerized with word processors and data communications. This move toward the automation and globalization of Eurodollars led to increasing pressure from banks and other transnational companies to create a more efficient global telecommunications system.
By the early 1980s, many countries accepting these petrodollars began to face financial difficulties, leading to the infamous “Third World Debt Crisis” that rocked countries like Mexico, Poland, and New Zealand. The crisis led to major austerity programs, as the Reagan administration retasked the IMF with approving additional loans based on “structural adjustments” that would lead to more open markets for capital and information flows as well as trade.
One of the primary targets of the structural adjustment was government-controlled and/or owned telecommunications systems, leading to their deregulation and, eventually, privatization in liberalized telecommunications markets. This led to further pressure to reduce barriers to international flows of data and capital, and arguably the global Internet and the modern realm of digital monetarism.
Starting with Eurodollars in the 1950s, US-denominated (though not sanctioned initially) money held outside America’s borders, a new system of unfettered capital and transborder data flows emerged. Further freed from the Bretton Woods constraints by President Nixon, a global system of computerized and algorithmic financial trading emerged. This phenomenon has morphed into complex high-volume markets for an array of financial instruments. Floating in secret “dark pools” of electronic mirth, highly leveraged assets and debts are transacted across the globe. These include currency derivatives, stock index futures, CDOs, and other computer-based financial instruments.
Citation APA (7th Edition)
Pennings, A.J. (2010, Jun 22). How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.2: Eurodollars, Petrodollars. apennings.com https://apennings.com/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world/how-it-came-to-rule-the-world-2-2-petrodollars/
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. From 2002-2012 was on the faculty of New York University where he taught comparative political economy, digital economics and traditional macroeconomics. He also taught in the Digital Media MBA at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, where he lives when not in the Republic of Korea.
Tags: algorithmic trading > eurodollars > OPEC > petrodollars > structural adjustments > Third World Debt Crisis
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About Me
Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.
You can reach me at:
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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