Likewise, the representation of educational subjectivity in The Lawnmower Man (1992 provides an ancillary contrast for exploring the technicalization of educational space. Particularly an interrogation of its operations on the body and its intellects could prove helpful in an analysis of the symbolic dynamics that operate in the “virtual classrooms.”[1] These are emerging through new multimedia communications technology and telecinematic simulation equipment.

This post examines two films that address the production of modern educational spaces and subjectivities. Through them we can begin to figure the symbolic and energetic configurations in the “virtual classroom” and other technological environments for learning and training. Note that this is from my PhD dissertation Symbolic Economies and the Politics of Global Cyberspaces (1993).

The boarding school’s repressed libidinous and spiritual “economies” invite a reading of The Dead Poets Society that focuses on socio-signifying practices. Notably, it figures the role of the teacher as what Goux termed a symbolic third. Drawing on his quest for a general economics based on symbolic energies, we can not only figure the teacher as representative of patriarchal but also logocentric significance. Like money, a condensation of value occurs that raises his position to the privileged subject and evaluator. Also, the chosen text rises to the select mode of signifying. Their role becomes the mediator and arbitrator of intellectual values and texts. Consequently, they develop a monopoly on the construction of facticity and truth.

The teacher, played by Robin Williams, is a “media event” in the sense that, by elaborating a series of emotionally and intellectually rich forms of signification, he disrupts the school’s anti-erotic sovereignties and traditional forms of educational worship. John Keating is a carefully constructed teacher-character who maintains a credible front to his peers while engaging his students in a series of revaluing exercises. His invoking the philosophy of “carpe diem,” for example, disrupts the ascetic delays of pleasure and self-gratification. Instead, these serve to channel emotional and intellectual investments into the subjectivities prescribed by the school’s bourgeois govern-mentality.

His unusual behavior and pedagogy invoke a curiosity in his students that addresses their subjugated desires and self-construction. His former pact with a secret society of self-proclaimed poets awakens their dormant dreams of social adventure and expressive identities. This secret knowledge, time-tested by the ancients of their alma mater, promises sexual conquest and alternative forms of imagination. “Spirits soared, women swooned, and gods were created.” By re-presenting literary classics of Shakespeare and Milton, but with the voice of macho film star and arch-American John Wayne, he distorts the distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures and encourages the dissolution of aesthetic boundaries that work to solidify not only class distinctions but the socio-symbolic rigidifications of emotional affect.

The reincarnated “Dead Poets Society” organize their meetings in a cave located off the campus in a nearby forest. There they read unauthorized poetry, smoke cigarettes, and mix with women – all the activities that are forbidden at the school. As Gebauer points out, the symbology of the cave has never been about the outside world, but about the inside one. “Our imagination remains captive in the cave. We do, in fact, repeatably seek out the cave in a different form.” Our ontology has its commencement in the topography of the cave and he points out: “In one way or another, all our notions of paradise are linked with situations of the cave.”[2] This is also the encapsulating trajectory of Virillio’s last vehicle.

However, Keating’s enthusiastic ideations soon conflict with other domains of symbolic controls, including the potent Oedipal dynamics that have proved to rein too tight a grip on one of his students. In his quest to act in a community play, the student goes against his father’s demands to cut down on his extracurricular activities, forges a permission slip, and performs the leading role of Buck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The father inadvertently discovers the disobedience and shows up at the play to observe. Despite the acclaim and evident success, he fiercely pulls his son away from the backstage party. After a confrontation at home, where among other things, the mother’s disappointment is invoked to punish the son, the son is forbidden to act again or at least until he goes on and finishes medical school. Faced with this paternal injunction, he takes his own life.

The death of the student presents a moral catastrophe that overpowers Keating’s privileged text of spontaneity and impunity. These are now recoded as degenerate improprieties and their “unproductive” forms of expenditure are tallied against the teacher as infractions within the Calvinistic ledgers of the schoolmasters. The conflicting father is able to easily organize the dismissal of the teacher.

As Keating collects his things from the classroom, the students respond by pledging their allegiance to the teacher and the teachings of the Dead Poets Society. They stand on top of their class desks and recite, “My captain, my captain,” from Walt Whitman’s 1865 tribute to the recently assassinated U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. With this they honor Keating’s role as their navigator through the uncharted course of adolescent squanderings and discoveries.

The Dead Poets Society reflects the profound symbolic and historic investments structuring traditional education and how the currency of the teacher can facilitate new types of energetic and intellective exchanges. What will occur in new virtual environments of the Metaverse? If educational space is to become cyberspace in a socially and politically responsive way, than it behooves us to mark its inception with at least one strategy that is sensitive to the “economies” which mediate and control its symbolic investments.

Suppose we view education as the inscription of subject sovereignties and the socialization of new moral and administrative subjectivities required by the post-industrial information society (“proto-sovereignties”). In that case, the virtual classroom presents an alluring new vehicle for liberating expressive capabilities, massaging sensory intelligences, and prescribing new competencies in terms of workplace requirements or prevailing art and intellectual practices.

The Dead Poets Society reflects the profound symbolic and historic investments structuring traditional education and how the currency of the teacher can facilitate new types of energetic and intellective exchanges.

An instructive approach has been taken up by writers developing a history of computer technology around the theme of the “military information society.”[4] They rightly point to the military’s significant influence on the development of computer-generated simulation environments and information technology in general. Noble, for example, writes about the militarization of learning and the production of what he calls “mental materiel.”[5]

The merging of educational technology and the cognitive sciences received its impetus from recognizing that behaviorist theory had reached diminishing returns. Technical advances in cognitive/instructional technology would be more fruitful.[5] This combination emerged metaphorically in popular culture as the ‘cyborg’ imagery. Machinery is directly implanted into the corporeality of the docile body or, in most cases, designed to interface effectively. Cognitive science since its beginnings has been the “science of the artificial,” with the production of prescribed mental processes modeled on computer procedures and systems foremost on its laboratorial agenda.[6]

The film Lawnmower Man presented a “cyberpunk” vision of the new technology. While the film has been criticized for its overbearing Frankensteinish narrative, its visual and technological settings drew from industry leaders and became a showcase for the potential of virtual reality VR technology. Its poster subheading, “Nature made him an idiot, science made him a god” allows us a foray into the disciplining aspect of the new technology.

Virtual reality uses computer-controlled 3-D graphics and an interactive environment which is oriented from a learner or viewer perspective and which tends to suspend the viewer’s belief that the environment is produced. In virtual reality, the body is encased in a computer-mediated and what Zuboff called an informated environment that continuously records performative data. The user wears a sensor-laden set of goggles and often gloves tied to a megacomputing system capable of tracking and responding to the movements and commands of the user. This system is still in the process of transformation and it is likely that the variety of user interfaces will be marketed and brought into use.

In this story, Dr. Angelo of Virtual Space Industries has major contracts with the US government to experiment with VR to produce better fighting and technology-competent soldiers. His initial work is with chimpanzees, who are fitted into a sensory bodysuit and helmet and hang suspended in a gyroscopic device that allows the body to turn 360 degrees in any direction. In combination with constant injections of vitamins and neurotropic drugs, the chimp is subjected to long training hours of fighting within various electronically simulated environments.

When Dr. Angelo’s chimp escapes and kills a guard, it is hunted down and killed. The investigator then turns to a human subject to continue his work “on the evolution of the human mind.” Jobe is a dim-witted ward of St. Anthony’s Church who makes his living caring for the church and mowing lawns, one of which belongs to Dr. Angelo. Cajoled by the doctor’s argument that he could become smarter and thus avoid “people taking advantage of him,” Jobe agrees to undergo some tests and participate in the VR training.

Unfortunately, the government liaison tampers with the serums and computer learning programs. He installs “Project Five” formulas that were designed to produce extreme forms of aggression for warfare. The continuous work on Jobe had originally transformed him into an attractive, socially graceful, and intelligent subject, but the new program transforms him into a symbolic authority figure and a despotic shaman. Through his electronically enhanced and meticulous training, Jobe becomes a “cyberchrist” and enters the world’s telecommunications networks with the promise that he will give us what we yearn for — a figurehead to lead us.

The Lawnmower Man counters the mythic tendency that VR is becoming a liberation technology, that it will soothe our souls and free our consciousness. Instead, it suggests VR’s trajectory is one of efficiency and training that presents its own positivities and productions. The movie lacks the moral subtlety that might have made it more successful. Still, it serves to pick up on some of the discourse that VR has fit into and exposes a large audience to questions regarding VR technology.

Educational “visionaries” are “tripping over themselves to transform the schools, unwittingly, into a staging ground for playing out militarized scenarios.”[7] Combined with the new imperatives of international capital, which has become totally dependent on the new information technologies, mechanized learning “becomes a site for the actual production of ‘mental materiel’ – for the design and manufacture of ‘intellectual capital.” Public education is implicated as both a laboratory and a site of legitimization for the new technical learning. A new “cognitivist agenda” was responding to the demands of corporations with “problem-solving” skills and the ability to interpret and construct “abstract symbolizations.”

The lessons of film analyses textualize both the romantic and disciplinary notions of education to inform contemporary circulations and ideations of educational policy and practice. A long tradition of involving the viewer in a cinematic experience of suspended belief has resulted in a rich body of textual interpretation that may be helpful for the analysis of virtual reality applications in educational spaces.

Postscript

The Covid-19 era is giving VR new life due to the urgency of social distancing and the possibilities of technology. In Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (2005), author Edward Castronova pointed to three trends transforming the gaming version of VR that are relevant to education. Most people associated VR with hardware: goggles, gloves, and other haptic devices. But the advancements in software and network protocols have given confidence to its developments; particularly, software engines like Unreal have accelerated speeds and increased resolution for both augmented and virtual reality. The other development was the enhancement of communities and collaboration. It’s not just about individuals, but individuals working together. Another is the development of commercial markets for virtual environments, items, and even avatars. Particularly with the Metaverse now the focus of corporations like Facebook and Nvidia, we are entering a wild west of virtual life.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2021, Nov 04) Symbolic Economies in the Virtual Classroom: Dead Poets and the Lawnmower Man. apennings.com https://apennings.com/meaningful_play/symbolic-economies-in-the-virtual-classroom-dead-poets-and-the-lawnmower-man/

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Notes

[1] Hiltz, R.S. (1986) “The Virtual Classroom,” Journal of Communication. Spring.
[2] Gebauer, G. (1989) “The Place of Beginning and End: Caves and Their Systems of Symbols,” In Kamper & Wulf (eds.) Looking Back on the End of the World. (NY: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series). p. 28.
[3] See Chapter 5.
[4] Levidow, L. and Robins, K. (1989) Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. (London: Free Association Books).
[5] Noble, D. D. (1989) “Mental Materiel: The Militarization of Learning and Intelligence in US Education,” in Levidow, L. and Robins, K. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. (London: Free Association Books). p. 22.
[6] Quote from H.A. Simon (1981) “Cognitive science: the newest science of the artificial,” in D.A. Norman, ed. Perspectives on Cognitive Science. (Hillsdale, NJ: Ablex/Erlbaum). pp. 13-25.
[7] Noble, D. D. (1989) “Mental Materiel: The Militarization of Learning and Intelligence in US Education,” in Levidow, L. and Robins, K. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. (London: Free Association Books). p. 35.
ibid, p, 34.

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© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. Before joining SUNY, he taught in the Digital MBA program at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas. Most of his career was in New York at Marist College in New York for three years, and New York University for 10 years. His first academic position was at Victoria University in New Zealand. He has also spent time as a Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Category: artificial intelligence, books and films, educational innovations, meaningful play, visual literacy and rhetoric

Building Dystopian Economies in Facebook’s Metaverse

Posted on | October 31, 2021 | No Comments

Facebook’s new name “Meta” and its interest in a VR metaverse has me flashing back to a talk I gave on April 17, 2008 about Second Life, an online virtual world that was popular before social media began to dominate the Web. This post examines the dynamics and economies of virtual worlds while considering the hybrid conversions and interactions with the world outside it.

It’s no mistake that I’m writing this on Halloween, the holiday of expressive meanings and facades. Virtual environments like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox explode with creative representations, not just as places to visit virtually but opportunities to interact, play, and conduct commerce. Now Metaverse promises new online services like working virtually and digital goods like designable avatars and transactable NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). But are people ready to don VR helmets and live, play, and work in a Ready Player One universe?

The talk was held in downtown New York City at the Woolworth Building, known as the “Cathedral of Commerce” when it was built in 1913. The location was strangely appropriate given the topic, a wrap-up of a year-long project at New York University on Second Life. The project involved an animation class taught by Mechthild Schmidt-Feist, and my class, the Political Economy of Digital Media. I still have the tee-shirt my students gave me that says “Got Linden?” a reference to Second Life’s currency, the Linden. Click on the image for a larger view of the mind map notes from my talk:

The talk gave me a chance to tie in discussions from my PhD dissertation, Symbolic Economies and the Politics of Global Cyberspaces (1993). I went back to my dissertation because it looked at money in fictional virtual worlds, from Sir Thomas Moore’s (1516) Utopia to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and William Gibson’s cyberspace trilogy. His classic Neuromancer (1984)[1] originally conceived “cyberspace” as a digital world, the “matrix,” that someone could “jack into” with a neural plug in their skull. I also discussed Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) that coined the term “Metaverse.”

At the time, I was looking for a way to understand how money could become electronic. My Masters thesis was on banking and telecommunications deregulation and how it led to the “Third World debt crisis” and the privatization of public assets worldwide. But it was empirical and largely descriptive. Cyberpunk was intriguing as a way to theorize money in some “future” settings.

So it was useful to examine historical texts regarding money. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was central as it imagined a place WITHOUT MONEY. Utopia, which means “no place,” was an imaginary land ruled by its leader Utopus. The island nation outlawed gold and often ridiculed it. But it was not within certain symbolic formations, including the significance of its leader Utopus. So I used the notion of symbolic thirds from Jean-Joseph Goux to analyze the political economy of utopias and the “dys”-topias of these cyberpunk genre novels.[2] This strategy also involved a reversal. In this case, what happens to a place with an excess of money and other symbolic forms?

Dystopias are places with excesses – of money and other significations. Meanings circulate, slide about, and proliferate. Symbolic economies refer to society’s tendency to both fix meanings and elevate certain things into “symbolic thirds.” Social pressures tend to isolate and elevate a member of a category to a higher position that is then used to judge the other members of that class. Money is the most recognizable symbolic third, but others include certain artists, captains, creative works, monarchs, and other and political leaders. Donald Trump, it can be argued, rose to a type of symbolic currency for the MAGA movement. These thirds evaluate relationships between things, assign and reconcile corresponding values, and facilitate exchanges. I decided to revisit my old work that examined Second Life and now turn to Facebook’s Metaverse to investigate how economies and monies can emerge in these electronic/digital environments.

I had a helpful bridge, the work of Cory Ondrejka, a Second Life co-founder and Chief Technical Officer for Linden Labs, the developer of Second Life. His “Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse” also used the cyberpunk genre as a point of departure and demonstrated how online infrastructures can provide opportunities for different kinds of online worlds and economies to emerge and harness the power of player creativity. He focused on the costs and strategies of producing video games (particularly massively multiplayer online games-MMOGs) and virtual environments to build a online spaces to match the richness and complexity of the real world.[3]

Ondrejka addressed problems that plagued virtual reality and identified four issues with creating content in digital worlds like Second Life and also video games for the consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox. They were difficulties in:

1. creating first-class art;
2. the lengthy development cycles needed;
3. the hours of gameplay that had to be produced;
4. the many players that needed to be accommodated, and;
5. the large teams that had to be hired and managed effectively to create digital content.

These technical issues continued to be addressed by software engines like Unity and Unreal. They have combined with innovations in hardware such as the Oculus Rift headset goggles and the HTC Vive Virtual Reality System to create significant advances virtual environment and interaction. Increases in computation speed and facility in scripting languages have also empowered professional designers and players to create new immersive experiences.

The resultant tools and techniques of these VR engines include:

1. better scripts for avatar and player locomotion;
2. responsive user interface synchronization and haptic (feeling) controls;
3. editor techniques to create virtual 3D environments such as landscapes and urban architectures;
4. adjustable stereo media for VR Head Mounted Displays (HMD);
5. advanced plugins to expand and facilitate VR interactions and gameplay elements, and;
6. high-volume high-speed/low-latency data networking that connects the temporal and spatial dimensions of a VR/AR environment with the user navigation actions.

They can be combined to continue to improve the desired quality of the virtual experience for the end user, despite expected limitations in available system resources. However, they are insufficient to maintain the gameplay and psychic investments necessary to ensure long-term engagements in a virtual world like the Metaverse.

Creating successful virtual worlds and economies with the traditional model of a single group is highly unlikely. User-created content is a key ingredient for a dynamic online world with a vibrant economy and that requires vesting user participation. Do it yourself (DIY) tools and techniques need to be tied to online and real world rewards.

One of Ondrejka’s inspirations was the The Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto, a popular economist throughout the “Third World,” who focused on capitalism being a system of representations and rights. He argued that connecting poor people to property via a system of legal representations was the most effective way to empower them to build wealth. Connecting the construction of online wealth to individuals would be crucial to successful virtual economies.[4]

Ondrejka suggested that online virtual worlds with vibrant economies are really only possible if:

1. users are given the power to collaboratively create the content within it;
2. each of those users receive broad rights to their creations. These would be primarily property rights over virtual land, in-world games, avatar clothes, etc.;
3. they also need to convert those creations into real world capital and wealth.

Online virtual worlds need a system of incentives and symbolic currencies to propel them. The software tools to create and program virtual content are readily available but the legal systems need to be refined for online environments to protect property rights both within the virtual sphere and outside it.

Player-created content was not entirely new to virtual environments. id Software, a small Texas-based company, used the ego-centric perspective to create the first-person shooter (FPS) game, Wolfenstein, in May of 1991. id followed with the extraordinarily successful DOOM in December 1994. DOOM combined a shareware business model with the distribution capabilities of the emerging Internet. Just two months after Netscape introduced its first browser as freeware over the Web, DOOM enthusiasts by the droves were downloading the game by FTP to their PCs, many of them with just a 14.4 kb modem. In a prescient move, id decided to make DOOM’s source code available to its users. Making the code available allowed new modifications to the game called “mods.”

This innovation allowed their fans to create their own 2.5D (not quite 3-D) levels and distribute them to other players. A popular one involved using the characters from the Simpsons’ animated TV show running around the DOOM environment. Homer Simpson was able to renew his health by finding and eating donuts. The US military created a version called Marine DOOM designed to introduce soldiers to urban fighting and the idea of killing. Many of the company’s new employees were recruited because of the excellence of their mods, and the extra help allowed them to create the next stage of their innovative online gameplay, QUAKE.

Second Life was born in June 2003 and offered users the ability to create content using built-in tools. They could develop objects and give them scripted behaviors (i.e., a tree and its leaves swaying in the wind). They could create their own avatar (representation of themselves or an entirely fictitious persona) and architectural structures. They could buy and sell land and any other objects they made because they had an in-world currency and sought to protect intellectual property. Some 99% of the new world was user-created, and no permits, pre-approval processes, or separate submission were required. The key was the ability to perform transactions and maintain property rights.

It will be interesting to watch these dystopian virtual worlds emerge. Gibson used the motif of “the biz” to refer to the dangerous circulations of various currencies in his cyberspace trilogy, both online and in the gritty urbanscape where natural bodies existed. But virtual markets for currency exchanges had existed since at least the 1970s when Reuters introduced its Money Monitor Rates.

We’ve been living in this online/offline world for a while. Databases and spreadsheets structure the “real” world, but we don’t often perceive the changes or attribute causality to online dynamics. Amazon’s impact on retailing is one of the more pronounced effects, but you must go to the mall or see a local store close to conceptualize its effects in the offline world. Amazon excels in its offline infrastructure, but its online capabilities’ integration gives it a special power. Big data collection and search, recommendation algorithms, one-click payment capabilities (licensed from Apple), combined with its delivery information and extensive logistics and warehouse system, give it massive economic power. These trends suggest that the Metaverse, or Nvidia’s Omniverse, will have synergistic economic effects in the offline world.

The dynamism of virtual worlds will depend on the ability of participants to communicate, collaborate and sell items to each other for in-game virtual currency or barter effectively for such things. This market environment will require a legal framework and rules for purchasing and owning in-game items and properties. Converting virtual currencies for real-world currencies and vice-versa are also crucial in the dystopic economies of the metaverse vision.

The type of personal interactions via avatars are what makes the metaverse intriguing, and controversial. Second Life ultimately wasn’t that impressive because people were just walking around in their avatar “costumes” most of the time and wound up insulting or hitting on people with sexual innuendos. I think successful participation will be a matter of how these environments and interactions are organized. Multiplayer games illicit a lot of “trash talk,” but they are structured around the gameplay. Productive online places might need to have dress codes and other parameters for behavior, depending on their purpose.

Ironically, it was Facebook (and the digital camera) that largely displaced Second Life. People quickly became bored of living through avatars in a world of impersonal, jerky, low-resolution graphics. Second Life became a sort of continuous online Halloween party with people hidden in costumes and behind constructed facial and body facades. Instead, people gravitated to Facebook and then Instagram because they preferred a representational style that was closer to real-life. They wanted to post pictures of friends and family, and of course, their cats, dogs, and dinner foods. They wanted to construct stories of themselves and share memes and narratives about what they found funny and important in the world.

So are people ready for the Ready Player One universe? That remains to be seen.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2021, Oct 31) Building Dystopian Economies in Facebook’s Metaverse https://apennings.com/meaningful_play/dystopian-economies-in-facebooks-metaverse/

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Notes

[1] Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books.
[2] Goux, J. (1990) Symbolic Economies. Ithaca: Cornell University Press).
[3] Ondrejka, Cory R., Escaping the Gilded Cage: User Created Content and Building the Metaverse. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=538362
[4] Soto, Hernando de, (2000) The Mystery of Capital : Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books.

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a Professor at the State University of New York, Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He has been examining the emergence of digital money and monetary policy since he wrote his Masters thesis on telecommunications and banking deregulation and how it led to the “Third World Debt Crisis” in the early 1980s.

Category: digital media economics, dystopian economies, educational innovations, meaning makers, meaningful play, multimedia, political economies in sf, political economy of media, social media, technologies of meaning, visual literacy and rhetoric
Tags: Cory Ondrejka > cyberspace > Jean-Joseph Goux > metaverse > Neuromancer > Political Economy of Digital Media > Second Life > Snow Crash > Symbolic Economies > symbolic thirds

Hypertext, Ad Inventory, and the Use of Behavioral Data

Posted on | October 14, 2021 | No Comments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the collection of “big data” are quickly transforming from technical and economic challenges to governance and political problems. This post discusses how the World Wide Web (WWW) protocols became the foundation for new advertising techniques based initially on hypertext coding and online auction systems. It also discusses how the digital ad economy became the basis of a new means of economic production based on the wide-scale collection of data and its processing into extrapolation products and recommendation engines that influence and guide user behaviors.

As Shoshana Zuboff points out in her book, Surveillance Capitalism (2019), the economy expands by finding new things to commodify, to make into products or services that can be sold.[1] When the Internet was opened to commercial traffic in the early 1990s and the World Wide Web established the protocols for hypertext and webpages, a dramatic increase in content and ad space became available. New virtual “worlds” of online real estate emerged. These digital media spaces were made profitable by placing digitized ads on them.

Then, search engines emerged that commodified popular search terms for advertising and also began to produce extraordinary amounts of new data to improve internal services and monitor customer behaviors. Data was increasingly turned into prediction products for e-commerce and social entertainment. Much of the data is collected via advertising processes, but also purchasing behaviors and general sentiment analysis based on all the online activity that can be effectively monitored and registered. The result is a systemic expansion of a new system of wealth accumulation that is dramatically changing the conditions of the prevailing political economy.

The Internet’s Killer App

The World Wide Web was the “killer app” of the Internet and became central to the modern economy’s advertising, data collection, e-commerce, and search industries. Killer apps are computer applications that make the technology worth purchasing. Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome were the main browsers for the WWW that turned Internet activities into popular and sometimes profitable pastimes.

In addition, computer languages made the WWW malleable. Markup languages like HTML were utilized to display text, hypertext links, and digital images on web pages. Programming languages like JavaScript, Java, Python, and others made web pages dynamic. First by working with the browser and then servers that could determine the assembly and content of a web page, including where to place advertisements.

Hypertext and the Link Economy

The World Wide Web actualized the dream of hypertext, linking a “multiverse” of documents long theorized by computer visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Hypertext provides digital documents with links to other computer resources. What emerged from these innovations was the link economy and the meticulous collection and tracking of information based on the words, numbers, graphics or images what that people “clicked.”

Apple’s HyperCard in the late 1980s created documents with “hot buttons” that could access other documents within that Apple Macintosh computer. Tim Berners-Lee at CERN used one of Steve Jobs’ Next Computers to create the hypertext environment grafted on the Internet to become the World Wide Web. The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) allowed links in a cyber document on a web browser to retrieve information from anywhere on the Internet, thus the term World Wide Web.

The “click” within the WWW is an action with a finger on a mouse or scratchpad that initiates a computer request for information from a remote server. For example, online advertising entices a user to click on a banner to an advertiser’s website. The ability to point and click to retrieve a specific information source created an opportunity to produce data trails that could be registered and analyzed for additional value. This information could be used for quality improvement and also probabilities of future behaviors

All these new websites, called “publishers” by the ad industry, contained the potential for “impressions” – spaces on the website that contained code that called to an ad server to place a banner ad on the website. The banner presented the brand and allowed visitors to click on the ad to go to a designated site. Over the years, this process became quite automated.

Ad Metrics

When a web page retrieves and displays an ad, it is called an impression. Cost per impression (CPM) is one monetization strategy that measures an advertiser’s costs when their ad is shown. It is based on the number of times the ad is called to the site per one thousand impressions. Online ads have undergone a bit of a resurgence because they do more for branding than previously recognized.

A somewhat different strategy is based on the click-through rate or CTR. In the advertising world, CTR is a fundamental metric. It is the number of clicks that a link receives divided by the number of times the ad is shown:

clicks ÷ impressions x 100 = CTR

For example, if an ad has 1,000 impressions and five clicks, then your CTR would be 0.5%. A high CTR is a good indication that users find your ads intriguing enough to click. Averages closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent are considered quite successful as banner popularity has decreased.

The Monetization of Search

An advertiser can also pay the publisher when they specifically drive traffic to a website. This is called Pay-per-click (PPC) or cost per click (CPC). PPC is now used by search engines as well as some website publishers.

PPC can be traced to 1996 when Planet Oasis launched the first pay-per-click advertising campaign. A year later, the Yahoo! search engine and hundreds of other content providers began using PPC as a marketing strategy. Pricing was based on a flat-rate cost per click ranging from $0.005 to $0.25. Companies vied for the prime locations on host websites that attracted the most web traffic. As competition increased for preferred online ad spaces, the click-based payment system needed a way to arbitrate the advertisers’ interest.

This led to the first auction systems based on PPC. A company called Overture.com was created at Idealabs, a Pasadena-based incubator run by Bill Gross. Later called GoTo.com, they launched the first online auction system for search in 1998.

Gross thought the concept of Yellow Pages could be applied to search engines. These large books were significant money makers for telephone companies. Businesses would pay to have their names and telephone numbers listed or purchase an ad listed under a category like bookstore, car insurance, or plumber.

Many words entered into online searches were also strongly connected to commercial activities and potential purchases. Therefore, it made sense that advertisers might pay to divert a keyword search to their proprietary websites. How much they would pay was the question.

Overture.com’s real-time keyword bidding system paid online publishers a specific price each time their link was clicked. They even developed an online marketplace so advertisers could bid against one another for better placement. They started with clicks worth only 1 cent but planning that valuable keywords would be worth far more. They invented PPC to emphasize that it was more important that the link be clicked than seen. By the end of the dot.com bubble in 2001, Overture was making a quarter of a billion dollars a year.

The tech recession in the early 2000s put new pressures on Internet companies to develop viable revenue models. Google had developed the best search engine with its PageRank system but wasn’t making enough money to cover its costs. PageRank ordered search results based on how many valid websites linked to a website. So a company like Panasonic would have many valid sites connected to them. Sites that attracted other search engines just because they listed the names of major companies would not get the same priority as with Google. But good search did not mean good profits.

The dominant strategy at the time was to build a portal to other sites. People would come to the website for the content, and the banner ads would provide revenues. Companies would license search capabilities from DEC’s AltaVista or Inktomi and build content around it. This is how companies like HotBot and Yahoo! progressed. So it was a mystifying surprise when Google rolled out its website with no content or banners. Just a logo with an empty form line for entering search terms.

Informed by Overture, Google rolled out a new advertising model called AdWords in late 2000. Initially a CPM (Cost-per-thousand-impressions) model, it developed into a subscription model that allowed Google to manage marketing campaigns. Then, in 2002, a revamped AdWords Select incorporated PPC advertising with an auction-based system based on the work at Idealabs.

Overture sued Google for infringement of their intellectual property but eventually settled. They had changed their name to Goto.com and were acquired by Yahoo! At Goto.com, advertisers “bid” against each other to be ranked high for popular words. When someone searches and clicks on a word like “insurance,” the sites for the highest bidders will appear according to the highest bids. They also automated the subscriber account process. A settlement was agreed to for millions of Google shares in exchange for intellectual property rights to their bidding and pay-per-click and systems. The move marked an offshoot of the digital ad economy. Emerging powerfully with keyword search and auctioning, and combined with MapReduce and Hadoop-driven “big data” processing, Google’s AdWords became an immediate revenue driver.

From Visually.

Google also bought YouTube in 2006 and eventually created a new ad market for streaming videos. They used a new advertising product called AdSense that was offered in 2003 after Google acquired Applied Semantics. AdSense served advertisements based on site content and audience. It placed ads around or on the video based on what it sensed the content was about. Monetization depended on the type of ad, the cost of views or CPM, and the number of views.

Using Behavioral Data

Facebook’s social media platform started its ascent in 2005, but it also needed a way to monetize its content. It first focused on gathering users and building its capital base. That it used, in part, to acquire several companies for their technical base, such as the news-gatherer FriendFeed. By 2009, it had determined that advertising and data-gathering would necessarily be its profit-making strategy with Facebook Ads and Pages.

Facebook started as a more traditional advertising medium, at least conceptually. It would provide content designed to capture the user’s awareness and time, and then sell that attention to advertisers. Advertising had always merged creativity and metrics to build its business model. Facebook capitalized on the economies of the user-generated content model (UGC) and added user feedback experiences such as the “like” button. Also, sharing and space for comments to provided a more interactive experience, i.e., adding dopamine hits.

Facebook had the tools and capital to build an even more elaborate data capturing and analysis system. They started to integrate news provided via various feeders using coding techniques and XML components to move beyond just a users’ friends’ content. Facebook built EdgeRank, an algorithm that decided which stories appeared in each user’s newsfeed. It used hundreds of parameters to determine what would show up at the top of the user’s newsfeed based on their clicking, commenting, liking, sharing, tagging, and, of course, friending.

Facebook then moved to more dynamic machine learning-based algorithms. In addition to the Affinity, Weight, and Time Decay metrics that were central to EdgeRank, some 100,000 individual weights were factored into the new algorithms. Facebook began using what we can call artificial intelligence to curate the pictures, videos, and news that users visitors saw. This aggressive curation has raised concerns and increased scrutiny of Facebook and its algorithms’ impact on teens, democracy, and society.

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee testified in October 2021 to Congress about the potential dangers of Facebook’s algorithms. Legal protections allowed her to present thousands of pages of data from Facebook research.[2] The new scrutiny has raised questions about how much Facebook, and other platforms like it, can operate opaque “black box” AI systems outside of regulatory oversight.

Summary

This post discussed how the hypertext protocols created an opportunity to gather useful data for advertisers and also became money makers for web publishers and search engines. The Internet and the World Wide Web established the protocols for hypertext and webpages allowing for a dramatic increase in content to be made available and with it, ad space. The web’s click economy not only allowed users to “surf” the net but collected information on those activities to be tallied and processed by artificial intelligence.

Subsequently, information on human actions, emotions, and sentiments were technologically mined as part of a new means of economic production and wealth accumulation based on advanced algorithmic and data science techniques used to gather and utilize behavioral data to predict and groom user behaviors.

Citation APA (7th Edition)

Pennings, A.J. (2021, Oct 14). Hypertext, Ad Inventory, and the Use of Behavioral Data. apennings.com https://apennings.com/global-e-commerce/hypertext-ad-inventory-and-the-production-of-behavioral-data/

Notes

[1] Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.

[2] Legal protections based on federal laws including the Dodd-Frank Act, a 2010 Wall Street reform law, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a 2002 legal reaction to the Enron scandal give some protections to corporate “whistleblowers.”

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Anthony J. Pennings, Ph.D. is Professor at the Department of Technology and Society, State University of New York, Korea. From 2002-2012 he was on the faculty of New York University where he taught economics of media, and a course on New Technologies in Advertising and PR. He keeps his American home in Austin, Texas and has taught in the Digital Media MBA program at St. Edwards University He joyfully spent 9 years at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Category: data analytics and meaning, digital media economics, digital media management, global e-commerce, media strategies, multimedia, political economy of media, social media, technologies of meaning
Tags: Adsense > Adwords > click-through-rate (CTR) > Cost per Click (CPC) > Cost per impression (CPM) > DEC AltaVista > Goto.com > HotBot > hypertext > Hypertext theory > Overture.com > Pay-per-click (PPC) > Shosana Zuboff

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