Cyber Profit

The Internet is a playground for our capitalist societies to not only develop new, innovative technologies but to make as much profit as possible. The idea of the Internet spawned great promise and hope for the intellectual communities because it would give them an opportunity to thrive on vast amounts of knowledge and information. On the other hand, the government and monopolistic corporations saw the Internet as a breeding ground for advertising and for developing their businesses. “There is more media than ever before” said Joe Mandese, editor-in-chief of Media Post, “media is being spawned every second.” In our modern society new innovations on technology are created every single day and they are being used not only to seek out information but to sell products and services as well. Since the development of the World Wide Web in 1990 I believe that the Internet has become more profitable than educational.

It is argued in McChesney’s Digital Disconnect that the Internet has become more commercialized and is used for more profit seeking purposes such as advertising and campaign promotion. I actually disagree and say it is equally distributed because according to Education Week “Public schools now provide at least one computer for every five students” (Ed Week, 2016) and it allows more students to be exposed to the technology within the classroom. It mentions briefly in the article by Education Week that faculty are slower to adapting this technology to their teachings because they don’t know what influence it has on its student’s performance. However, according to former governor of West Virginia and president of the Alliance of Excellent Education, Bob Wise, “strong gains in achievement occur by pairing technology with classroom teachers who provide real-time support and encouragement to under deserved students.” (Stanford, 2014) In my opinion by pairing teachers with technology it allows the student to be introduced to a new way of learning while also receiving personal instruction from their teachers. It also helps the students thrive when they move on to the following grades because with each grade the content and nature of the information being presented gets more intense and the usage of the technology will become more obvious. Although technology is slowly making its way into the public school sphere it is not as obvious as the advertisements the American public witnesses every day.

According to the 1993 trade publication Advertising Age “marketers stated that they feared a tidal wave of flaming from a cyberspace community peopled by academics and intellectuals who regarded a commercialized Internet as advertising hell” (McChesney, 102) and in my opinion the publication is correct and the marketers should be afraid. The American public sees an advertisement each time they log on to the Internet and they are manipulated into buying products on a daily basis. The baseline goal of a corporation is to make enough profits to pay their workers, create new products, and to advertise its products to the public. Corporations spend thousands or even millions of dollars to flash its name on a billboard so that it can attract new audiences. In my opinion it is amazing how far some corporations will go and how much money they will spend to get a tiny glimpse from the American public. According to the online magazine Digi Day an ad on the” Yahoo homepage is around $450,000 and on the YouTube home page it is about $400,000”. (Digi Day, 2013) In short a corporation would have to pay close to half a million dollars to plaster its companies name on the top websites on the Internet. This reality defies the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, because he said it “would have been unthinkable to patent it or ask it for fees” (McChesney, 103) the point of the Internet was sharing for the common good” said Lee. But sharing for the common good only gave corporations more of a reason to invest in the Internet because it was a profit making market. According to Al Gore in McChesney’s Digital Disconnect, who helped fund the Internet, “the foundation for the “information superhighway” should be a public network analogous to the interstate highway system.” (McChesney, 116) He basically argued that corporations should use the Internet as much as they use the highway system to promote their products and services. The corporations since then have taken advantage of the Internet because the American public not only sees it while they drive them also receive it through its email-based inbox. But now the American public can now control what ads they want to see and which ones they don’t which can jeopardize a corporation’s goal to obtain more consumers. The fact that consumers can now control what they see can limit how much power corporations and even the government has on how the Internet is to be run.

In conclusion the Internet has grown into a vast superhighway of information and knowledge since it was first thought of in the post-World War II era. It is clear that it has become more commercialized through the use of advertising and new innovative technologies. It is also clear that technology has morphed its way into our lives more than ever before with the adaptation to the public school system. It is unclear how commercialized the Internet will become and what new technologies will arise because of its development. But one thing is certain that the Internet usage has grown from hundreds to billions of people worldwide and that each person who has access to it is subjected to the commercialization of hundreds of monopolistic corporations.

Works Cited

Herold, B. (2016, February 5). Technology in Education: An Overview. Education Week, 1. doi:http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/technology-in-education/

Johnson, C. (2006, September 17). Cutting Through Advertising Clutter. Retrieved April 9, 2016, from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cutting-through-advertising-clutter/

Marshall, J. (2013, February 22). What Online Ads Really Cost. DIGIDAY. doi:http://digiday.com/publishers/what-online-ads-really-cost/

McChesney, R. W. (2013). Digital Disconnect. New York/ London, NY: The New press.

Technology can close achievement gaps, improve learning. (2014, September 10). Stanford Graduate School of Education. Retrieved April 9, 2016, from https://ed.stanford.edu/news/technology-can-close-achievement-gaps-and-improve-learning-outcomes