Journal of Transnational American
Studies
Volume 1, Issue 1
2009
Article 13
Self-Colonizing eEurope: The Information
Society Merges onto the Information
Superhighway
Stephanie R. Schulte∗
∗
University of Arkansas
Copyright c 2009 by the authors, unless otherwise noted. This article is part of the collected
publications of Journal of Transnational American Studies. Journal of Transnational American
Studies is produced by the eScholarship Repository and bepress.
Abstract
This comparative article investigates the different views of the internet—what it could do
and what it was for—as they emerged in news media, popular culture, and policy in the United
State and Europe before the year 2000. In the United States, the internet was imagined as
an inevitability, as the domain of private corporations, and as a new frontier that would usher
the United States into an era of global economic dominance. In Europe, the internet was
imagined as a technological choice, as a technology subordinate to national institutions, and
as a public utility that the state should provide citizens through national telecommunications
corporations. Despite these differences, this article shows how, as the century concluded, the
political imaginings of the internet in the two locations converged. While EU policymakers
increasingly envisioned the internet as a free market and a means for global economic power,
U.S. policymakers envisaged it more and more as a requirement for competent democratic citizenship. Europe “Americanized” its internet policies by increasing competition through cuts
in state support for national telecommunications corporations, and the United States ”Europeanized” theirs by promoting policies designed to bridge the ”digital divide.” Ultimately, this
article shows how the internet served both as an agent of change and a discursive construction through which varying imaginings were contested. In particular, Europe’s adoption of the
eEurope 2005 project—an endorsement of American-style unsubsidized corporations instead
of European-style statist traditions—suggests that the internet functioned as a transatlantic
cultural carrier of advanced capitalism.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Melani McAlister, Chad Heap, Sean Aday, Laura Cook
Kenna, Julie Passanante Elman, Kyle Riismandel, Laurel Clark, and the JTAS anonymous
reviewers for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this project.
Keywords: Internet, European Union, United States, popular culture, policy
Suggested Citation:
Schulte, Stephanie R. “Self-Colonizing eEurope: The Information Society Merges onto the
Information Superhighway” Journal of Transnational American Studies 1:1 (2009),
http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/vol1/iss1/art13
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
Self‐Colonizing eEurope:
The Information Society Merges onto
the Information Superhighway
STEPHANIE R. SCHULTE
The 2002 German film Halbe Miete (Half the Rent) follows a computer hacker in his
thirties named Peter as he “unplugs,” that is, as he makes the conscious decision to
live his life off‐line.1 The gaunt hacker emerges from his darkened computer room to
discover that his girlfriend has died in their apartment under ambiguous
circumstances. Distraught, he puffs a cigarette in a daze until his cellular telephone
rings and frightens him; instead of answering, Peter flips the phone over, removes
the data chip from the back, and burns the chip with his cigarette. In this moment,
Peter literally and symbolically destroys his means of digital communication and
deliberately disconnects from telecommunications networks; in Peter’s words, “I am
no longer reachable.” In few American films about the internet in the 1990s or early
2000s does a main character decide to unplug, or completely disengage.2 Instead, the
main characters in films like The Matrix and The Net almost always battle with evil
forces over control of the internet, ultimately using the technology as a weapon with
which to defeat their foe. In short, in American film, “winning” means mastery of the
internet, not avoidance or rejection. Although American films far outsell German
films in Germany, even domestic German‐language films like Halbe Miete, this
alternative representation suggests that the internet was “thinkable” in different
terms in Germany and that a certain anti‐internet sentiment made sense. As German
cultural studies has shown, this skepticism toward technology stemmed in part from
Germany’s legacy of anticapitalism, meaning that technology became equated with
the capitalist domination critiqued by German thinkers.3
This comparative article is about the varying national imaginings of the
internet in Europe and the United States, how they intersected with and were
promoted by different policies regulating the technology. I argue that the United
States and European Union member states had very different views of the internet—
1
Self-Colonizing eEurope
what it could do and what it was for—and their governments also took varying
approaches to its regulation before the year 2000. While the internet was
conceptualized in the United States as a “new frontier,” or as simultaneously global
in reach and essentially American, European news media, popular culture, and
policymakers imagined the internet in local and material terms.4 By this I mean that,
in Europe in the 1990s, the internet was conceptualized as subordinate to national
structures, or as a tool of the state. Not necessarily an expansive and shapeless space
where individuals could escape their bodies and self‐actualize, the internet was
imagined as materially located in computers and as an important yet optional tool for
people to use. Unlike policymakers in the United States, who promoted free‐market
capitalism and aimed to help corporations set up camps on this new virtual frontier,
policymakers in Europe in the 1980s and early 1990s regulated the internet using the
nationalist and protectionist models used to regulate other media (e.g., the BBC in
the United Kingdom and the BRF in Germany).5 This regulation subsidized national
telecommunications corporations with public funds as these corporations expanded
service into internet providership. With these subsidies, European Union member
states hoped to protect domestic jobs in the face of what they viewed as U.S.
corporate/economic imperialism. Thus, Europeans initially conceptualized and tried
to regulate the internet as if it were a public utility, a public space, or an arm of
national media organizations; this meant that nation‐states focused on providing
access to, and protecting the privacy of, all citizens, as well as advocating for global
regulations of internet content to further protect their citizenry.
However, this article is ultimately about the failure of these European policies;
it is about a policy road tried but ultimately not taken, or about the failure of
European policymakers to put a particularly European stamp on internet regulation.
It charts the European Union’s eventual adoption of the free‐market capitalist
approach to the internet developed in the United States. Although in the 1980s and
early 1990s, it was imaginable in Europe that the internet would fit into the
established regulatory systems for radio and television, this notion became
increasingly less viable in the late 1990s. As a result, deregulatory laws began to
emerge that released the member states’ national hold on media.6 The European
telecommunications market was increasingly liberalized and privatized, meaning that
what was once controlled by the state—including broadcasting—increasingly
became the domain of private enterprise.
As Hardt and Negri note in their book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire, this privatization is central to neoliberalism, or the assumption that
humanity is best served through corporate, not state, organizations, because
capitalism produces individualism and the state produces homogenization or unity.
Neoliberalism positions globalization as “determined by an unregulated capitalism—
with free markets and free trade,” a notion Hardt and Negri critique by pointing out
that globalization is actually highly regulated, for example, through the annual World
Economic Forum, where, they argue, the world’s oligarchies “plan the destiny of
2
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
capitalist globalization.”7 The early 1990s marked Europe’s foray into neoliberalist
statehood; increasingly throughout the decade, it “regulate[d] capitalist
development in the interest of global capital itself” (280). This assumption, that
capital—in itself—held the key to the liberation of its peoples, meant that Europe
had become in some sense Americanized or subject to American global power. As
Hardt and Negri suggest, neoliberalism masks American imperial (not imperialist)
power in that it works to produce the United States and its corporations as
inherently benevolent forces.8 John Krige makes a similar argument in American
Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe. Although he does not
use the term “neoliberalism,” he describes the emergence of a “consensus empire”
and argues that notions such as “internationalism,” while appearing universal and
therefore benign, actually support American interests in spreading capitalism and
opening foreign markets to U.S. corporations.9 In serving the interests of capital and
opening its media markets to globally dominant U.S. media corporations, Europe’s
regulatory shift served the immediate interests of U.S. policymakers, or of those
interested in promoting U.S. economic interests abroad.
The focus in this article is on these shifts—privatization, neoliberalism,
globalization, Americanization—as they relate to internet policy. The turn of the
century brought the EU’s eEurope 2005 project, which was the nail in the proverbial
coffin for statist internet policy in Europe.10 The eEurope initiative, proposed in 2000,
identified the internet as a distinctly American space, as a source of U.S. power and,
therefore, as a threat to European economic power. This project relinquished
European policymakers’ assumption that they could regulate the internet in its statist
tradition and instead suggested that, in order for the European Union to compete
economically, it would have to adopt U.S.‐like policies. These policies would focus not
on subsidizing national corporations but rather on dismantling those protections to
promote competition, entrepreneurialism, and innovation. These policies did not
generate new funds but redirected existing spending.
This policy shift emerged in part because of a newfound primacy of
continental cultural impulses over national ones. The internet was not only
envisioned as a powerful vehicle in the global marketplace but also seen as a tool for
the construction of a continental cultural identity. This impulse extended to
broadcast media as well. During this period, EU governments reconfigured their
goals for media to include fostering a particularly European identity in addition to a
German or French one. While acknowledging the European Union’s diversity—the
various backgrounds, cultures, and histories of its nation‐states—this article focuses
on the ways the range of renderings of the internet available in these states
contributed to “European” cultural imaginings that helped produce and were
produced by the eEurope project.11 Source materials include film, websites, and news
media from several EU member states, and I focus in particular on policy images and
debates, treating these materials like other cultural products. The internet was
reimagined by policymakers as a transnational public space that could help diverse
3
Self-Colonizing eEurope
Europeans overcome language, spatial, and cultural barriers to form a collective
identity in the form of one “Information Society.” This society was conceptualized in
the eEurope policies as a universally accessible but distinctly European space. As a
tool for domestic community‐building, for economic equality and uplift, the internet
was presented as a new sphere within which previously disadvantaged and disparate
people might form a collective identity and, together, rise in social and economic
stature. But this effect would occur through free‐market capitalism. This policy
reallocation was produced by and helped to generate a discursive shift; what was
imagined as a national “public utility” was reconfigured as an inherently global
“capitalist space.” The adoption of the eEurope 2005 action plan—including the
endorsement of American‐style unsubsidized corporations and hands‐off
government instead of European‐style statist traditions—suggested that the internet
functioned as a transatlantic cultural carrier of advanced capitalism.
However, this is not a story of U.S. imperialism in the traditional sense but a
more complex story of what Reinhold Wagnleitner terms self‐colonization.12 While
recognizing American economic and cultural power, I do not intend to argue that an
invader intentionally overpowered the European Union; instead, I acknowledge
Europe’s role as an actor that willingly adopted attractive cultural, political, and
economic models.13 The adoption of a U.S. economic model in regard to the internet
was understood as mostly beneficial to Europe and not imposed through an overt
exertion of U.S. power. Further, the European Union attempted to engage in U.S.
economic tactics in order to make the internet in Europe less statist but no less
European. The notion of the internet as a virtual nation simultaneously enabled the
European Union to imagine itself and produce itself as a unified entity or a collective.
In addition, the flow of ideas about the internet and how to use it was not
unidirectional. Discussion of the “digital divide”—or the gap between people with
and without access to computer networking technology—which preoccupied EU
policymakers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, became a national focus in the United
States in the late 1990s. Although U.S. news media did not usually cite European
policy or media for bringing this focus to the U.S. agenda, I argue that the emergence
of digital divide discourse in the United States may provide an example of
globalization’s variable flows.
Protectionist Precedents: Europe Before the “e”
European nation‐states conceptualized and produced the internet differently.
Although variations existed between the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the
Netherlands, these various, nation‐specific cultural and technological histories of the
internet worked collectively to produce a “European” imagination of the internet—
one physically, culturally, and politically distinct from that of the United States in the
late 1980s and early 1990s. Although I place European protectionist policies next to
examples of resistance or opposition to new technology, I do not intend to argue that
4
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
the two are the same; instead, the two distinct notions are related in that both are
part of European fears of American expansionism and global economic dominance.
Public service broadcasting (PSB) has traditionally dominated in Europe
(although their audience has declined since the 1980s).14 State‐supported national
media corporations—like British Telecom in the UK, France Telecom in France, and
Deutsche Telekom in Germany—were designed to ensure representations of minority
interests and national culture, meaning that, for all practical purposes, these
corporations were the “voice of the state.”15 Although policies varied between EU
member states, these corporations were (and, to some extent, are) powerful in
almost all European nations.16 Initially, policymakers in the various member states
viewed these corporations as the natural means to enter online spaces, thereby
assuming that public corporations would retain their public support and power with
regard to the internet. For example, France created a widespread yet primitive
internet system called the Minitel in the early 1980s, which claimed twenty‐two
million connections in 1985.17 The system was created by France Telecom, France’s
national telephone company, and included content as varied as train schedules,
telephone directories, news, and information. The Minitel terminals—or computer
monitors hooked up to telephone lines—were free to telephone subscribers and, in
the early 1990s, boasted 6.5 million terminals, or one for every ten French citizens; in
addition, almost a million standard computers were connected to the system.18 In
1997, the French government began to move away from this system and instead
generated a lengthy and complicated plan through which the French government
would support France Telecom in the creation of national access to the internet.
Although U.S. telecommunications firms—in particular AT&T in the early 1900s—
shared a similar history of state support, this French program was far from the
corporate‐led policy approach promoted by Al Gore in the United States in the same
year.19 The French plan made the Minitel a primarily governmental project, leaving
only “those things the state cannot or does not wish to do” up to private
corporations, prompting the French Minister of the Economy, Industry, and
Employment to say that France was a “capitalist country without capital or
capitalists.”20
Although European states like France retained control of media access
through national corporate institutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they could
not control content; sexual content in particular became a major focus of European
public debate about the internet, as states dealt in various ways with reactions to the
technology’s use for sex and pornography.21 Mirroring the early histories in the
United States and elsewhere of other communication technologies—print,
photography, film—one of the internet’s early uses in Europe was for distributing
pornography.22 This was especially the case with the French Minitel, which “first
climbed from obscurity to critical mass by becoming the favored distribution
mechanism for what are euphemistically described as ‘sexual services.’”23 The “pink
Minitel” or “Minitel rosé”—a portion of the system dedicated to dating, erotic
5
Self-Colonizing eEurope
conversations, and even prostitution—accounted for eight percent of all Minitel
activity and was so profitable that the state enacted a thirty‐three percent “sin tax”
and profited heartily.24 France was unique, as most European nations struggled to
suppress sexual content online. Instead of accepting yet taxing such content, many
European nations resisted what they called transborder data flows, or content
produced in different countries but available online within national boundaries.25 This
decision suggests policymakers imagined the internet as a threat to national
sovereignty, to citizens, and to private property. These European nations attempted
to map territorial boundaries onto internet spaces or to create filtering devices or
“electronic barriers” that would “impose their boundaries onto the new electronic
medium” (109). For example, in 1995 Germany ordered the American company
CompuServe to disable German access to particular newsgroups, which the
government claimed contained sexual content illegal according to German decency
laws.26 Authorities claimed CompuServe violated German law by failing to remove
materials, which included over two hundred alt.sex newsgroup sites that contained
materials on pedophilia, bestiality, and initially even some on homosexuality,
although the latter were eventually stricken from the list.27 German authorities raided
CompuServe’s offices in Munich and indicted its manager.28 London’s Financial Times
reported that this incident marked the first time an internet provider restricted
access to content in response to Germany’s legal action.29 In this CompuServe
example, Germany attempted to enforce its national legal system onto the nationless
territory of the internet. This state action against an internet corporation is an
example of what Joel Reidenberg has called Europe’s attempt to “preserve
important, yet vaporizing, foundations based on territorial principles and sectoral
distinctions.”30 The outcome of this conflict, however, also demonstrates that the
ultimate control was with the corporate provider and not the hosting nation‐state.
CompuServe was not required by any national German law to obey the request
issued by German government officials. Although the corporation initially obliged,
CompuServe eventually repealed the ban and instead offered users a program that
allowed them to restrict content of their choosing.31 The incident caused
international conflict after Americans began complaining that their freedom of
speech rights were being restricted by German law.32
Statist policies within the European Union—like those in France that created
the Minitel and those in Germany that attempted to control internet content—were
produced by and were part of a discourse that imagined internet technology as a
choice and not an inevitability. U.S. news media celebrated the internet, or what
Marshall McLuhan called its “extensions” of the human body;33 media outlets
celebrated how the internet allowed individuals to communicate transnationally and
to form new kinds of interpersonal connections.34 While European news media
shared this celebratory nature, European news media and popular culture—
especially in Germany—also focused on the technology’s “amputations.”35 By this I
mean news media focused not only on what German society might gain but also on
6
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
what it might lose as it adopted internet technology. To give one example, an article
appearing in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, one of the premier newspapers in Germany,
opened by suggesting that online shopping would destroy the art of shop‐window
decoration.36 In addition to focusing on potential losses, other news media
questioned the usefulness or necessity of the internet in their articles’ very titles, for
example, “The Web Is the Goal: Internet, InterNOT; Must We All Really Be Online?”37
A comparison of U.S. and European film also reveals the different cultural
renderings available in these different places. In Germany, the internet was
imaginable as a choice; in the United States, it was inevitable. In the film previously
mentioned—Halbe Miete (Half the Rent)—the main character, Peter, decides
“internot,” or to live his life off‐line. After his girlfriend’s death, he disengages from
communication networks by throwing his laptop into the river. Although he is no
longer online, Peter remains a hacker of sorts; he begins to “hack” into physical
spaces, breaking into people’s apartments instead of their computers. Upon his
arrival in Cologne, he randomly tries door handles until he manages to sneak in after
someone. He explores the man’s apartment, his bookshelves, his files, his bulletin
boards, his furniture, and his food. From this point on in the film, Peter begins
“lurking,” a term used in chat rooms for being in a chat room but not participating;
he sits in public places and watches how people interact, tracking their schedules and
activities. He notes where people keep their spare keys and breaks into their
apartments when he knows they are out. But, unlike a cyberspace hacker, who tries
to come and go undetected, this urban‐space hacker leaves gifts, like beer in the
refrigerator. Through this spatial hacking, Peter rediscovers non‐computer‐mediated
forms of communication, thereby reterritorializing and relocalizing his interactions.
For example, he cleans a woman’s house, leaving a Post‐it note in one of her books
near a quote he thinks she would find meaningful. Although initially alarmed to
realize someone has been in her apartment, the woman is persuaded by the Post‐it
that the intruder is benevolent; she replies to him by placing a Post‐it in a different
book. The two continue this dialogue through the woman’s library until he eventually
arrives in person at the end of the movie and the two (presumably) begin a romance.
Peter, trained in and accustomed to computing, does not shift from computer‐
mediated to direct or oral communication but instead chooses a new screen of
invisibility: the book. However, this film suggests that interactions in off‐line physical
spaces—especially domestic ones—are more meaningful than those online. This film
represents the internet as a choice, in that a person could conceivably choose not to
be online and, in the world of the film, live a more enlightened life.
While clearly one film is not proof of any dominant sentiment, the
conspicuous absence of anything similar in American films suggests that this kind of
message may not have found the same cultural traction in the United States. As
previously mentioned, in no mainstream American film in the 1990s or 2000s that
takes up the internet as a major plot element does a character decide to unplug.
Instead, the main characters almost always use the internet for good, as a weapon
7
Self-Colonizing eEurope
with which to defeat evil forces. For example, in the film The Net, Sandra Bullock stars
as Angela Bennett, a computer programmer who lives most of her life on computers,
even ordering her pizzas online. When Bennett stumbles upon a program that allows
users to bypass almost any security system, her life gets hacked by an underground
conspiracy of hackers; her identity is stolen and replaced with that of “Ruth Marx,” a
convicted and wanted felon. For Bennett to best her foe, she must out‐hack the
hackers. In the final scene, while much has changed about her—she is bathed and
tan, has off‐line relationships, and ventures outdoors—she is still on her computer. I
do not intend to argue that Halbe Miete and The Net are comparable films, but what I
do intend to suggest is that the representation of the internet as something that
could be escaped or avoided—a representation largely absent from American film—
in confluence with news media questioning the necessity of the technology, indicates
that the internet was “thinkable” in different terms in Germany than in the United
States. This suggests that German culture incorporated an opposing impulse to the
well‐documented technological determinism present in the United States; that is to
say, perhaps Germans imagined themselves as dominant over technology—as
controlling their destiny—in contrast to Americans, who imagined technology as
driving history.38
This alternative notion of the internet as a choice may stem from the different
histories the technology had in each location. The roots of the internet lie in the U.S.
military. The Department of Defense in 1969 built the first internet technology
through its creation of ARPANET as part of a cold war military defense project.39 The
term internet first appeared in 1974 in reference to a technology that networked
various networks—“Internet Protocol” (IP)—a phrase used in combination with
“Transmission Control Protocol” (TCP) to describe packet‐switching, or the process
through which computers transfer bits of information over networked wires.40
Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the term became increasingly applied to
the variously networked computer systems used by a minority of individuals in
primarily military and university locations that operated alongside one another—
including computers networked via satellites, radio waves, telephone lines, time‐
sharing lines, and through private intranet systems.41
Unlike in the United States, the absence of European military involvement in
the history of the internet’s development meant that Europeans did not necessarily
imagine the internet as a weapon. In Europe, nonmilitary arms of the state fostered
the internet, meaning it was not necessarily tied to cold war military anxieties. But
instead of military involvement, perhaps the legacy of oppressive governments in
Nazi and communist Europe shaped the way it was imagined. In post‐World War II
Europe, the state was imagined as responsible for engendering a “healthy”
nationalism, meaning that it was responsible for protecting diverse voices in the
public sphere as a means to counter the national fanaticism associated especially
with German national identity. Policy scholar Andrew Murray described this
protectionist and state‐controlled system as “paternalist” and “functionalist,” one in
8
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
which “state action is considered a means to correct market failures.”42 The internet
was imagined as part of this project. The internet, therefore, was less a part of cold
war military fears than it was in the United States, and perhaps more a part of
anxieties about government surveillance and protecting citizens than about teaching
appropriate internet use. This connection offers some explanation as to why
anxieties in Germany were more evident than those in France or Britain, given its
history of National Socialism and closer proximity to communism.
The internet was not only conceptualized as a protected public sphere, or as a
space with the potential to inoculate a population against the “wrong” kinds of
nationalisms, but it was also imagined as a local space. The “De Digitale Stad,” or
Amsterdam’s Digital City, went online in 1994 (and still exists today) and is an
example of how policy and culture work in confluence.43 The online city, which was
an online presence for the city of Amsterdam, was wildly popular locally, and, during
its inaugural week, Amsterdam suffered a modem shortage as well as overloaded
telephone lines as the Dutch scrambled to get online. By December of its inaugural
year, it averaged over 4,000 visitors a day and 120,000 a month.44 A government
initiative and national telecommunications corporation Dutch Telecom founded and
funded the digital city.45 The project worked to rematerialize the internet by giving it
a center and locating it in a historical and urban marketplace; the city also localized
the internet in that it created a language‐ and location‐specific online presence for
citizens of the Netherlands and inhabitants of Amsterdam. The Digital City’s
technology was cutting edge in that it incorporated sound as well as moving images,
and in that it was the “first real on‐line presence for a city” (37); yet this online city’s
servers and public‐access computers were headquartered in De Waag, a famous and
historic building built to house and weigh goods in the fifteenth century (37). As a
result, the internet was placed in the context of over five centuries of mercantilism,
updating it to cyber‐mercantilism but still enabling access to the historic spaces
present in Amsterdam. By 1996, the Digital City website was almost entirely in Dutch.
It had a colorful homepage featuring a sleek black background and red and white
letters. The focal image pictured a blue, impressionist, and digital rendering of
Amsterdam as if it were shot from an airplane. Within this graphic were two clickable
hyperlinks—“Visit the City as an Occupant” (“Bezoek de Stad als Bewoner”) and
“Visit the City as a Tourist” (“Bezoek de Stad als Tourist”)—both in Dutch. In
addition, other links on the site were to “Latest News” (“Laatste Nieuws”), which
contained information on Amsterdam (both its digital and analog incarnations), and
“Price Information” (“Prijs Informatie”), where users could find out how to advertise
on the site or become a sponsor. The only English on the page was a hyperlink on the
left titled simply “English,” which led users not only to “official” information from
the creators of the Digital City, but also to “unofficial” websites of people from
Amsterdam that happened to have English content. The latter pages were described
as a tourist guide to the city, or “a selection, to help you find your way. The city
9
Self-Colonizing eEurope
consists of squares with information on a theme, and neighbourhoods with
homepages.”46
This city illustrates how the internet was produced as local in Europe—
specifically in the Netherlands. The website worked culturally to spatialize the
internet, delimiting it metaphorically in a way that notions of the internet as a global
nonspace in the United States did not; a “city,” a fixed location with a center, is not a
sprawling space like a new frontier or an information superhighway. In its own
history, written on a page within its website called “The Digital City Foundation,”
governmental supporters and founders of the project describe it in local terms, or as
a “‘test bed,’ where the first shoots of an electronic community can begin to
grow.”47 Imagined as a public sphere that would help produce a more functional
state, the Digital City was presented as a new, communal space, a technology that
would provide users with information about and access to their government. The
city’s goal—as identified by Marleen Stikker, its founder (and its “mayor,” in that she
continued to have controlling power over its organization)—was to provide a new
transparency to the government of Amsterdam; for example, she encouraged
citizens to scroll through local government meeting minutes. Users were defined as
“not consumers but participants,” allowed to “join in the construction of the city,
and thus take part in the shaping of the electronic society.”48 Thus, the Digital City
promised universal and open access to all citizens who wanted to be knowledgeable
or involved in their government, thereby supposedly creating better and more
efficient policy.
This society was imagined as not only important within the scope of the
internet, but important in a national scope in that it could help Dutch citizens
connect. In this sense, the city was imagined as simultaneously a local (or city) and a
nationalist (or state) power play over online spaces. The intense rhetoric of
democracy in the city’s descriptions meant that access was a main priority; founders
hoped the eventual participants would “reflect the overall mixed profile of society,”
and so they made special efforts to ensure a diverse pool of citizens—in particular,
women, senior citizens, and minority groups—could connect.49 Beyond creating
universal access to this new organ of democracy, Stikker imagined the Digital City as
a means to introduce the internet to the Dutch. According to this vision, the Digital
City would, then, not only serve as a training ground for citizens, community
organizations, and businesses on how to use the internet, but it would also
contribute toward the development of online technologies. It would help prepare
the Dutch for coping with historic shifts afoot in the period, globalization in
particular.50 The Digital City was imagined as helping the Netherlands cope with
globalization by “look[ing] for new possibilities, new openings and new services.”
The city would help foster a European identity through a “national network of digital
cities” that could “also fulfill a role on a European level through the transfer of know‐
how and the creation of connections for co‐operation across national frontiers.”51 In
this vision, Dutch national identity and European continentalism were streamlined
10
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
into one technological future utopia, a kind of “Dutch virtual nation” with the
potential to eventually take on its American counterpart.
In some senses, Marleen Stikker’s rhetoric mirrored the democratic new
frontierism in the United States, but, ultimately, the Digital City was an oppositional
voice to those metaphors; the Digital City would deliver to the Dutch what the virtual
frontier had promised the Americans but failed to provide. Stikker argued the
internet was not a new space but a means of reconfiguring existing space. She
represents the Digital City as simultaneously material, local, and technological, not
abstract, global, and virtual reality.52 In an interview, Stikker stated that it was “just
like an ordinary city. Everything you’d come across in ordinary life, we get here too.”
She noted that, through the “Central Station,” users could access the internet and
thereby “patronize a digital cafe, browse through a digital kiosk, enter the digital
house of culture and the arts, or pay a visit to a digital sex‐shop, complete with a
digital darkroom in the back.”53 The Digital City was, then, imagined as being in direct
opposition to the internet as it was culturally constructed and regulated in the United
States; for example, Stikker described the city as the manifestation of the American
false promise of the internet when she said, “All those ideas you had heard so often
from the United States about the new information society, tele‐democracy,
electronic citizenship, suddenly became a reality on DDS.” Unlike in the virtual
frontier, in the Digital City, citizens could have freedom; speaking about the founders,
Stikker said, “We are no moralists.” Of course, she followed that statement by
moralizing, saying she, like the German authorities taking on CompuServe later that
year, would “not tolerate neo‐fascist clubs or child pornography.”54 In the Dutch
rendering of the internet, “democracy” meant governmental transparency and not
complete unfettered rights to produce and/or consume online content.
In the United States, corporations like America Online explicitly capitalized on
national identity in their corporation’s names, not only linking internet identity to
national identity but also constructing internet space as corporate and not
necessarily public.55 Policy scholar Steven Miller credited American Online’s success
as one of the “pioneers in commercializing cyberspace” with this “easy‐to‐use
graphic interface.”56 AOL publicized itself as a service provider for people unfamiliar
and/or uncomfortable with computers and networking.57 Publicized as “Your
Gateway to the Internet,” America Online provided its clients as early as 1993 with a
proprietary software called AOL 1.0 for Windows or AOL 2.0 for Mac. This software
offered a point‐and‐click graphical user interface (GUI) when most providers at the
time still used command lines.58 This software “portal” claimed to “provide
everything a user needs to navigate the Web”—search engines, links, email services,
games, shopping pages, chat rooms. As media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan writes, this
browser was imagined using the same utopian rhetoric that imagined individual
liberation online: “the commercialized World Wide Web—America Online—would be
the operative medium of cultural evolution.”59 AOL’s browser was the first of its kind
and remained the most successful until Yahoo! and Netscape gained popularity in
11
Self-Colonizing eEurope
1994. AOL 1.0 was an American gateway to the global space of the internet, but this
gateway was not necessarily a repository of information about the United States, did
not serve as a governmental arm, and was accessible only to those who paid the AOL
fees.
Thus, in Europe—especially in France, Germany, and the Netherlands—visions
of the internet as a global, virtual frontier or as an inevitability did not dominate;
instead, European policymakers, news media, popular culture, and internet users
imagined the internet in material and local terms, as a technological choice or a public
service. As both a driver and product of this discursive rendering, European socialist
policies in the early to mid‐1990s regulated the internet as if it were a public utility,
prioritizing national corporations, protecting citizens’ privacy, and projecting local
identity and community onto online spaces.
The Integrationist Turn: Configuring and Connecting eEurope
These materialist and localist cultural imaginings were produced in part by the
European Union’s status as a still fairly recent collection of disparate and sovereign
nations. The story of the European Union is a story of increasing European or
continental power and decreasing national power in the interest of global economic
competition.60 Throughout this history, but especially in the 1990s, Europe shifted its
economic policy from the statist models outlined above to more free‐market policies;
that is to say, beginning in the 1950s and increasingly in the 1990s, EU policies
superseded those of member states and became increasingly similar to U.S.
policies.61 With this shift, the meanings and purposes of media in Europe were
reimagined; the post‐World War II notion that the state should regulate media to
ensure a “healthy” nationalism—unlike that displayed by National Socialists (Nazis)
in Germany—shifted to a notion that media would and should supplant nationalism
with “Europeanism.” In other words, media became imagined as a major part of the
cultural web binding EU member states together. Thus, by the late 1990s, the
importance of national beliefs, cultures, values, and historical experiences diminished
among EU member states as transnational governmental bodies superseded statist
models for regulating and producing media, including the internet.62
State control of media organizations, including those regulating the internet,
has been one major point of contention as nations within the European Union have
struggled to retain their national identities while simultaneously producing a
“European” one. The issue of “integration”—the synchronization of member
states—has caused some strife as nation‐states resisted what they perceived as a
loss of sovereign power in the face of supranational EU law. Under the principle of
“supremacy,” EU law trumps national laws if there is a conflict between them,
deliberately weakening the nation‐state in the interest of establishing continental
consistency between legal systems and policies.63 Despite such long‐term attempts
at integration, EU media policy in the 1990s remained one location where conflict
12
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
arose, in particular between “dominant actors” like France, Germany, and the United
Kingdom.64 The European Union’s transnational legal system disrupted the notion in
Europe that national territorial space and “politico‐communicative space” were
mutually productive, or the notion that national media, national territory, and state
government necessarily all worked together to produce national identity. This
assumption historically underwrote public policy’s financial support for national
media corporations.65 In other words, the introduction of a transnational political
structure began to dismantle the assumption that states should focus their financial
efforts on supporting media designed to reinforce national boundaries. Thus,
regulating the internet was not only a question of how to control and manage the
media itself but was also a place where tensions within the European Union were
being worked out.
Although the European Union successfully integrated its markets early in its
history, integrating its culture has proven a more difficult task, a task that was
mapped onto European imaginings of the internet.66 Although European nations
shared a common history—Roman and Greek roots, Middle Age feudalist economies,
and involvement in both world wars (but on different sides)—national identities
within each member state often stressed differences rather than these shared
elements.67 In addition, language differences, a hurdle not present in the same way in
the United States, slowed or prevented cultural integration.68 European Union
policymakers in the 1990s turned their attention to creating a common culture
shared by member states in part by passing initiatives focused on the production of
multilingual websites. The economic and policy infrastructures previously used had
focused on building national culture through broadcasting; these policies were
shifted toward building European culture on the internet. The focus was “simply
extended from one political level to another, without any serious consideration of
what might be involved in moving from a national community defined by the
boundaries of a single state to an international community defined by integrationist
political economics.”69
Internet use rose in Europe in the 1990s at the same time as European
initiatives emerged to deregulate media corporations by reconfiguring media toward
the continental level. But while television signals were standardized, and therefore
easily transmittable and receivable across national boundaries—and indeed already
transmitted and received across neighboring countries’ boundaries even before
unification policies were enacted—the internet was a different story. Because the
internet developed independently and differently in various European countries, it
was not standardized; this posed technological challenges to EU media integration
and, beginning in the 1970s, European nations battled with each other and with the
United States over who would set the protocol, or the system computers use to
communicate with each other. Development in the United Kingdom was the earliest,
most pervasive, and most similar to that in the United States.70 In contrast to the
British, the Germans and the French did not take this route and instead their strong
13
Self-Colonizing eEurope
governmental involvement created national research networks—Bildschirmtext in
Germany and Minitel in France—which prevented the nongovernmental involvement
that occurred in the United Kingdom and United States; this governmental control
slowed the internet’s development in those countries.71 This slow growth reinforced
the assumption that the internet was an English‐speaking space.
This assumption is visible in the content on Germany’s main government
website which, even as late as 1996, looked like a tourism site aimed at English and
French speakers.72 The site was made up of a plain white background with a
photomontage centered on the screen. The photos in the montage pictured the
Brandenburg Gate—the former dividing line between East and West Berlin and the
site of John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech—and the office
building of the Bundeskanzler, or German Chancellor. The title text on the site read
“Die Bundesregierung Informiert,” or “The Federal Government Informs.” The only
other text on the site was in the form of links to “Facts about Germany” and
“Allemagne—Faits et Réalités” (or “Germany—Facts and Realities”). These links led
the user to pages that detailed the reconstruction of Berlin after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, featured “Pictures of the Month,” and contained information and images of
popular travel sites in Germany. On the entire website, the only information designed
explicitly for Germans was on the far left, in a separate window from the main page,
which contained a link to press releases. In contrast, the White House website did not
contain any tourist information or images and instead was simply a searchable
database for press releases with a gray background.73
In hopes of integrating these disparate, state‐operated and ‐subsidized
“internets,” European policymakers launched the eEurope 2005 project in December
1999.74 According to the EU initiative document, this project was intended to ensure
that adoption of the internet was ultimately “cohesive, not divisive. Integrating, not
fragmenting. An opportunity not a threat.” The project hoped to bring “the benefits
of the Information Society to the reach of all Europeans” by providing financial
incentives to private corporations willing to invest in internet infrastructure that
would provide access to more individuals.75 As this policy illustrates, the European
Union recognized the internet as both American‐dominated and corporate, and
reconfigured their policy structures to address this recognition. The text of this
project argued that the European Union was losing to the United States in
cyberspace. For example, the eEurope initiative reported, “Experience in the United
States shows that new technologies can drive growth and create jobs. Internet‐
related companies alone today account for 2.3 million direct jobs—not counting the
considerable indirect employment effects—up from 1.6 million in 1998. The uptake of
digital technologies, in the context of flexible labour and capital markets and reduced
regulatory impediments to competition, have led to productivity growth and paved
the way for the lasting, strong, and non‐inflationary economic growth in the United
States” (4). In addition to U.S. economic growth produced by internet industries, the
eEurope 2005 text also cited higher internet adoption rates as one reason why the
14
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
U.S. was gaining ground in online spaces and markets. By 1999, the U.S. internet
penetration rate was seven times higher than the European Union’s and over eight
times higher than Japan’s; “early competition” and American dominance of the
telecommunications industry were cited as the reasons for its high penetration
rate.76 U.S. corporations were major threats to European media firms in general
because U.S. companies provided cheaper and more complete content.77
The eEurope project demonstrates that in the late 1990s, European
policymakers felt that, in order for the European Union to compete in media spheres,
it would have to adopt U.S.‐like policies. These policies would no longer subsidize
European corporations but would instead dismantle those protections to promote
competition, entrepreneurialism, and innovation. Paradoxically, creating a more
liberal market initially required heavy government involvement and rigorous
regulation.78 This regulation would help force member states to integrate or
“harmonize” their media policies, which were characterized in EU studies as “a
patchwork of inconsistency,” which tended to distort and fragment the market,
prevented European corporations from profiting from the “internal market” within
Europe, and prohibited the concentration of venture capital required to gain market
dominance over emerging technologies.79 This suggested that statist policies
designed to deliberately hamper competition in favor of national media corporations,
as well as localist projects like the Digital City, contributed to Europe’s lagging status
in internet development; instead, the European Union resolved that Europe should
work to produce the internet as global and not local, and should curb its domestic
protectionism in favor of a more capitalist, liberal global‐market policy.
The eEurope project helped produce the internet as a European space, or a
public place in which disparate European citizens could interact; the “e”
metaphorically replaced the nation in that “e” not only stood for “electronic” but
also ultimately for “Europe” in the symbolic trumping of continental identity and
governmental structures over national ones. This project called for member states to
“promote network security and broadband and to promote eGovernment,
eBusiness, eHealth and eLearning” by supporting greater competition.80 Although
the project did not generate funds for investment in computer technology, it did
provide a policy framework to redirect existing expenditures toward investment in
connectivity. The project moved to upgrade European telecommunications
infrastructure; create financial incentives from the EU or on the national level to
adopt internet technology, especially broadband; remove “regulatory obstacles to
the development of new services”; and create government incentives for corporate
investment in information technology. Two years later, an EU study deemed it a
success in that penetration rates had increased in the years following the policy’s
enactment, prices for connection had decreased, and computer‐education programs
had increased.81
But the eEurope policy shift retained its Europeanness in that its “key
objectives” were presented in egalitarian terms: to connect every citizen, to create a
15
Self-Colonizing eEurope
“digitally literate” Europe, to ensure the process is “socially inclusive” and fosters
“social cohesion.”82 Universal access and social cohesion were clearly stated
priorities, suggesting that the public utility model of previous policies remained in the
eEurope policy. The eEurope 2005 project hoped this market liberalization would
increase internet adoption rates by creating the information society, a term first
coined in 1994 that framed policy debates about the internet thereafter.83 Through
this metaphor, the internet was reimagined as not a national but a continental public
space that could help diverse peoples overcome language, spatial, and cultural
barriers to form a collective identity. This society was conceptualized through policy
as a distinctly European space, or one “based on its cultural heritage and linguistic
diversity,” that Europeans could universally access.84 The internet was not only
imagined as simultaneously a powerful vehicle in the global marketplace but was also
seen as a tool for the construction of a continental cultural identity.85 Although
policymakers imagined the eEurope project as in some part a socialist project, they
did not acknowledge the problematic nature of using capitalist engines that require
inequality to equalize diverse citizens; they did not problematize the tension
between notions of collective identity, corporate identity, and national identity.
The information society metaphor stands in marked contrast to the dominant
“information superhighway” metaphor used by the U.S. government and to the
“net” or “web” metaphors used by internet providers and news media.86 A society
connotes a community organized around a center, like a town marketplace; a
superhighway connotes mobility, suggesting departure from a central location; and a
net or a web suggests either a decentralized organization or a “trapped” collective.
Europe’s conceptualizations of the internet may have been reactive to those in the
United States; its different conceptualizations were in part due to its historically
socialist skepticism of American consumerism and to its reaction to notions of
American economic and cultural imperialism. This means that Europe attempted to
bring the internet in line with other kinds of state‐controlled and ‐regulated media in
hopes of keeping American culture outside European national borders. In short,
European policymakers adopted U.S. policies regulating the internet in an attempt to
build a continental identity and economy capable of competing with U.S. cultural and
financial power, but at the same time retain its attention to access and equality.
Although the eEurope 2005 project saw the internet as an economic engine,
the project also saw the internet as a means to fix already existing and previously
unsolvable problems in the physical world, meaning it focused on the internet’s
potential to solve internal social justice problems as well as incongruities among EU
member states. This massive internet‐expansion proposal identified the internet as a
key to Europe’s success, expansion, and future through utopian and egalitarian
rhetoric. The project aimed to “stimulate the development of services, applications
and contents,” while “providing access for everyone in order to combat social
exclusion, whether it is due to particular needs, a disability, age or illness.”87 In
European visions, the newness and separateness of the internet provided a new
16
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
sphere through which previously disadvantaged people might rise in social and
economic stature. In a sense, this egalitarianism was positioned in news media as
combating what was imagined as a form of American greed. The American rush to
and successes in capitalizing on the internet were described as capitalist selfishness
and wastefulness. For example, one article in Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung, titled
“The Gold Rush in Cyberspace,” opened by describing four founders of Netscape in
the following terms: “Passersby couldn’t believe their own eyes: Four young men in
front of a nondescript office building in California’s Mountain View were washing
their cars with champagne.”88
Thus, media corporation deregulation did not mean that the European Union
entirely relinquished its protectionism; on the contrary, it remained (and remains)
more protectionist than the U.S. government. This protectionism worked to maintain
a distinct Euro‐space online, just as the Digital City maintained a particularly Dutch
cultural and governmental space online, but on a continental scale. The
protectionism was also designed to protect European corporations in the face of
globalization, or what they saw as U.S. economic imperialism. The EU’s policies
meant that its media regulation remained “part of an umbrella regulatory framework
for communication” aimed at the “correction of the trade imbalance with the United
States.” Through policies like the eEurope 2005 project, the “communications
industry has been portrayed by the European Union as a panacea solution to the
long‐term loss of jobs in manufacturing industries, as domestic companies move
offshore.”89 Like the European Union itself, the creation of a distinctly European
space online was imagined as an antidote or a protection against globalization, a
“shield against wider global forces.”90 Thus, although the eEurope project did
diminish the power of the state, the state remained important in digitizing Europe.
Through the project, the state was still responsible for its citizens’ privacy and
individual security online.
In sum, the adoption of the eEurope 2005 project—and the adoption of
American‐style unsubsidized corporations and hands‐off government over European‐
style statist traditions—suggested that the internet, as an American virtual nation,
became a transatlantic cultural carrier of capitalism and democracy. However, even
though Europe employed similar political systems in its approach to the internet, it
retained its alternate value structures; it aimed to use free‐market capitalism to
create its own distinctly European space online. In other words, the European Union
reconfigured its policies to be more American but aimed to use that reconfiguration
in order to achieve its previous goals. At the same time as policymakers were
reimagining national and continental identity, they were also reimagining the
internet. Rather than an extension of the state, the internet became reconceived as
its own sovereign or semi‐sovereign place, organized and controlled by corporations
and not states. Instead of the state attempting to control corporate content, as
Germany did in its attack on CompuServe newsgroups, the corporate powers became
17
Self-Colonizing eEurope
the sources of user protection and, in a sense, citizenship, ultimately making the
corporate‐user relationships similar to state‐citizen relations.91
Complex Cultural Flows and Bridging the Digital Divide
As this article has illustrated, producing the internet as a public utility—a policy
impulse that focuses on accessibility to the public as a whole—has been a policy goal
in Europe since the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, universal access was not on
the forefront of the policy agenda in the United States until the mid‐1990s; instead
U.S. policymakers focused more on colonizing online spaces and working to ensure
American corporations dominated the internet, and worried less about whether all
American citizens had access. They assumed (in keeping with Reaganomics models)
that technology would eventually spread or “trickle down” to the citizenry. But in the
late 1990s, this focus on corporate access began to shift. Policymakers began instead
(or in addition) to focus on the “digital divide,” or the gap between those with and
without internet access.92 The focus emerged in the wake of a flurry of governmental
studies in the late 1990s that detailed the factors determining what was called
“information disadvantage”; these factors included income, race, education, age,
and region.93 Although U.S. census data revealed that computer and internet use had
increased in the 1990s, it also revealed that particular groups had increased more
than others.94 These reports discussed internet access as necessary for cultural
citizenship, mirroring terms used in the eEurope initiative to describe the
“information society.” For example, one report issued in 1999 by the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration of the U.S. Department of
Commerce, titled Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide, stated that “no
one should be left behind as our nation advances into the 21st century, where having
access to computers and the Internet may be key to becoming a successful member
of society.”95 In addition, the Clinton administration began to discuss computer and
networking skills as “basic skills” and as “increasingly important for full participation
in America’s economic, political and social life.”96 Thus, beginning in the late 1990s,
U.S. governmental institutions represented fixing the digital divide as important for
U.S. democratic ideals as well as for its economy.
As an avenue to an idealized citizenship, the internet was increasingly
discussed as an educational requirement, making it a kind of public utility provided by
the state, and school access became, therefore, a primary focus of digital divide
debates.97 Indeed, a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, quoted by
the Clinton administration, showed that in 1998, only 39 percent of classrooms in
poor schools had internet connections, as compared to 74 percent in wealthy
schools.98 In the first mention of the “digital divide” in the New York Times in 1996, a
journalist detailed the stories of two students, John Dixon and Michael Giardina, who
lived in Silicon Valley. John, a “freckle‐faced fifth grader,” attended a school in “one
of the region’s poorest communities,” while Michael attended a “pricey and
18
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
prestigious” private elementary school. John had to “make do with the school’s six‐
year‐old IBM 386 PC,” described as “little more than electronic typewriters”; he
wished the school could afford better technology “so we could look up stuff on the
encyclopedia and see pictures.” In contrast, Michael had the “latest Apple Power
Macintosh” that he could use to “manage his own World Wide Web page.”99 In
response to these reports and to increasing news coverage of internet inequality, Bill
Clinton made universal access to the internet through educational institutions a
national goal. In 2000, Clinton, CEOs of U.S. internet provider corporations, members
of Congress, cabinet secretaries, and community leaders conducted a nationwide
tour—called “From Digital Divide to Digital Opportunity”—through which they
hoped to “focus national attention on initiatives aimed at overcoming the digital
divide.” In the same year, the Clinton administration released a “National Call to
Action to Close the Digital Divide,” which focused on connecting school children,
making home internet access “universal” by providing neighborhood access through
“community technology centers,” and “empower[ing] all citizens with IT skills.”100
I do not intend to argue that European focus on access caused a similar focus
in the United States. Instead, this focus in the United States coincided with a
generalized focus around the world on computing technology that accompanied the
turn of the century, as governments and corporations braced for what they viewed
as the impending Y2K disaster.101 Digital divide debates also extended to discussions
of global inequalities. In a foundational text, policy scholar Pippa Norris detailed this
phenomenon as a global concern, not just a domestic one. As she argues, the digital
divide was symptomatic of persistent economic inequality both domestically and
globally, meaning that historically disadvantaged groups in the United States and
around the world also did not have internet access.102
In conclusion, the internet’s web of signification differed in the United States
and in the European Union in the 1990s. In the United States, the internet was
imagined as an inevitability, as a new frontier that would usher the United States into
a new era of global economic dominance. In Europe, the internet was imagined
before the late 1990s as a technological choice and as a public utility that the state
should provide through its support of national telecommunications corporations.
Despite these differences, political imaginings of the internet in the two locations
increasingly dovetailed. While European policymakers increasingly imagined the
internet as a free market and a means for global economic power, American
policymakers increasingly imagined the internet as a requirement for competent
democratic citizenship; Europe was “Americanizing” its internet policies—increasing
competition by dispensing with state support for national telecommunications
corporations—while the United States was “Europeanizing” its policies—increasing
state support to bridge the digital divide.
19
Self-Colonizing eEurope
Notes
1
Halbe Miete, dir. Marc Ottiker (Düsseldorf: Filmstiftung Nordrhein‐Westfalen, 2002).
Although the mainstream film industry’s successes mirror one another in both the U.S. and
Europe—meaning mainly American films are blockbusters—this film is an example of a
locally produced German cultural artifact that received attention in German news media. See
“Und Keiner Kommt aus der Tiefe des Raumes,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 29,
2002; “Wer Nicht Alles auf der Berlinale Reporterin ist,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
February 12, 2002; Hanns‐Georg Rodek, “Achtung, Explosionsgefahr! Zwei wunderbare
deutsche Filme beim Festival in Hof und ein paar Gründe zur Hoffnung,” Die Welt, October
28, 2002; and Andreas Thomas, “Sympathisch sei Peter gar nicht angelegt: 1/2 Miete,”
Filmzentrale, http://www.filmzentrale.com/rezis/halbemieteat.htm (accessed October 30,
2008).
2
While The Matrix has people literally unplugging their bodies from the network, characters
must jack back in to regain power or control. They do not, for example, retreat to Zion and
remain off‐line. The great majority of examples show the main characters remaining engaged
in networking technologies: GoldenEye, dir. Martin Campbell (London: Eon Productions,
1995); Hackers, dir. Iain Softley (Century City, CA: United Artists, 1995); Johnny Mnemonic, dir.
Robert Longo (Culver City, CA: TriStar Pictures, 1995); The Lawnmower Man, dir. Brett
Leonard (London: Allied Vision, 1992); Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace, dir. Farhad
Mann (London: Allied Entertainments, 1996); The Matrix, dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry
Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999); The Matrix Reloaded, dir. Andy
Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2003); The Matrix
Revolutions, dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures,
2003); Minority Report, dir. Steven Spielberg (Century City, CA; Twentieth Century Fox Film,
2002); The Net, dir. Irwin Winkler (Culver City, CA; Columbia Pictures, 1995); Tomorrow Never
Dies, dir. Roger Spottiswoode (London: Eon Productions, 1997); and You’ve Got Mail, dir. Nora
Ephron (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1998). One anonymous reviewer of this
manuscript rightly observed that The Truman Show, dir. Peter Weir (Hollywood: Paramount
Pictures, 1998), is a notable exception in which the main character disengages from the
information society and mass media, although the film does not focus on the internet per se.
3
See Rob Burns, introduction to German Cultural Studies: An Introduction, ed. Rob Burns
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–8.
4
I write about these U.S. conceptualizations in more detail in my as‐yet unpublished
dissertation manuscript: Stephanie Ricker Schulte, “State Technology to State of Being: The
Making of the Internet in Global Popular Culture (1980–2000)” (PhD diss., George
Washington University, 2008).
5
Although the press was subject to less regulation than broadcasting media in terms of
content, the press was also heavily subsidized by European Union member states. See Alison
Harcourt, The European Union and the Regulation of Media Markets (New York: Manchester
University Press, 2005), 3.
20
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
6
See, for example, the 1996 Information Superhighway Law in France, the 1996 Interstate
Agreement on the Regulation of Broadcasting in Germany, the 1997 New Media Act in Italy,
the 1998 Law on Digital Television in Spain, and the 1996 Broadcasting Act in the United
Kingdom. For more on these regulations, see Harcourt, European Union, 161.
7
Although I agree with Hardt and Negri that free‐market capitalism is paradoxically
impossible without regulation from the state and wish to acknowledge the influence of
political and industry leaders enacted through international meetings such as those in Davos,
I do not intend to reinforce the conspiratorial tone expressed by Hardt and Negri, who write
that these meetings are the “nerve center of the global body politic.” Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin,
2004), 167.
8
“Imperial” involves networked power that works through supranational organizations and
other powers, while “imperialist” is an extension of state sovereignty over new territories.
See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), xi–xvii. For more on what “Americanization” is, how it works, and why it is or is not
important, see Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca‐Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission
of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1994); Uta Poiger, Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American
Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and John Krige,
American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006).
9
Krige, American Hegemony, 5.
10
European Commission, “eEurope: An Information Society for All,” Communication on a
Commission Initiative for the Special European Council of Lisbon, March 23–24, 2000,
http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l24221.htm.
11
My language abilities (English, German, and some French) have limited my research
capabilities. In an attempt to include countries whose languages I do not speak or do not
speak well, I relied on either translations of news reports and policies, when available, or
public and/or technological structures (e.g., the Minitel and the Digital City) as cultural texts.
12
Wagnleitner, Coca‐Colonization, 2.
13
See Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global
Age, ed. Eli M. Noam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 214–15.
14
This same “universal service” policy in the U.S. in the early 1900s built AT&T into a
government‐supported “natural monopoly.” See Jonathan E. Nuechterlein and Philip J.
Weiser, Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 14.
15
Leslie Simon, NetPolicy.Com: Public Agenda for a Digital World (Washington, DC: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press, 2000), 159.
21
Self-Colonizing eEurope
16
See Jay G. Blumler, Television and the Public Interest: Vulnerable Values in West European
Broadcasting (London: Sage, 1992).
17
David Carlson, “The Online Timeline—The 1980s,” David Carlson’s Virtual World,
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/carlson/1980s.shtml (accessed January 3, 2008).
18
See Shlomo Maital, “The Global Telecommunications Picture: Is America Being
Outstripped? By France?” Brookings Review 10 (1992): 40–44. For more on the Minitel, see
Howard Rheingold, “Télématique and Messageries Roses: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities,”
in The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (New York:
HarperPerennial, 1994), 231–53.
19
In 1997, Al Gore credited private‐sector leadership for the explosive growth of the internet.
President William J. Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., “The Framework for Global
Electronic Commerce,” White House, July 1, 1997,
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/Commerce/.
20
Simon, NetPolicy.Com, 338.
21
See Philip Schlesinger, “Tensions in the Construction of European Media Policies,” in Media
and Globalization: Why the State Matters, ed. Nancy Morris and Silvio Waisbord (New York:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 95–115.
22
For more on pornography in postcards, see Lisa Z. Sigel, “Filth in the Wrong People’s
Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880–
1914,” Journal of Social History 33, no. 4 (2000): 859–85. For pornography in film, see Eric
Schaefer, “Gauging a Revolution: 16 mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature,” in
Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 370–400. For
pornography in general media, see Brian McNair, Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern
Culture (New York: Arnold, 1996).
23
Steven E. Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway
(Reading, MA: Addison‐Wesley, 1996), 243.
24
See Maital, “Global Telecommunications Picture,” 40–44; and Everett Rogers, “Diffusion
Networks,” in Networks in the Knowledge Economy, ed. Robert L. Cross, Andrew Parker, and
Lisa Sasson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 169–71.
25
Schlesinger, “Tensions in the Construction,” 109.
26
CompuServe was one of the main internet providers in the mid‐1990s before it was
purchased by AOL in 1998. In 1995, it provided internet access to over four million subscribers
in 140 countries. John Markoff, “On‐Line Service Blocks Access to Topics Called
Pornographic,” New York Times, December 29, 1995.
27
For a summary of this case, see Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?
Illusions of a Borderless World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 73–74. Also see
newspaper coverage such as Karen Kaplan, “Germany Forces Online Services to Censor
22
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
Internet,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1995; Ruth Walker, “Why Free‐Wheeling Internet
Hit Teutonic Wall over Porn,” Christian Science Monitor, January 4, 1996; Kara Swisher,
“Cyberporn Debate Goes International; Germany Pulls the Shade on CompuServe, Internet,”
Washington Post, January 1, 1996; and Jon Auerbach, “Fences in Cyberspace: Governments
Move to Limit Free Flow of the Internet,” Boston Globe, February 1, 1996.
28
Goldsmith and Wu, Who Controls the Internet, 73–74.
29
Paul Taylor, “Internet Groups Suspended over Pornography Fears,” Financial Times
(London), December 29, 1995.
30
Joel R. Reidenberg, “Governing Networks and Rule‐Making in Cyberspace,” in Borders in
Cyberspace: Information Policy and the Global Information Infrastructure, ed. Brian Kahin and
Charles Nesson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 97.
31
David R. Johnson and David G. Post, “The Rise of Law on the Global Network,” in Kahin and
Nesson, Borders in Cyberspace, 7–8.
32
Markoff, “On‐Line Service Blocks Access.”
33
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1994), 7.
34
See “Internet Wires the Planet for Computer Users,” St. Petersburg Times, May 23, 1993;
David Landis, “World Wide Web Helps Untangle Internet’s Labyrinth,” USA Today, August 3,
1994; Vic Sussman and Kenan Pollack, “Gold Rush in Cyberspace,” U.S. News and World
Report, November 13, 1995; John Markoff, “The Executive Computer; A Web of Networks, an
Abundance of Services,” New York Times, February 28, 1993; John Markoff, “A Free and
Simple Computer Link,” New York Times, December 8, 1993; Mary Lu Carnevale, “World Wide
Web,” Wall Street Journal, November 15, 1993; Bob Metcalfe, “On Surfing the Internet and
Other Kid’s Stuff,” InfoWorld, November 1, 1993, 67; Ed Krol, “Internet’s Web Is Doing Just
Fine, Thank You,” Network World, April 19, 1993, 31; and Robert O’Harrow Jr., “Computer‐
Friendly Homes Increasing; Electronic Bulletin Boards Provide Many Residents with Comfort,
Communication,” Washington Post, December 27, 1992.
35
For examples of extension‐focused news reports, see “Gnaedige Frau, Darf Ich Ihnen
Meinen Cyber Zeigen?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 10, 1997; Michael Mertes, “Das
Netz als Globales Dorf oder Metropolis,” Welt am Sonntag, April 19, 1998; “Publizieren im
Cyberspace,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 22, 1994; “Bibliotheken im Cyberspace:
Grenzen der Digitalisierung,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 25, 1996;
“Unterwegs nach Suburbia,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 22, 1996; “Kaufhaus
von Morgen; plus Computer E‐Commerce Globale Shopping‐Center sind Nur einen Mausklick
vom Kunden Entfernt. Firmen Erhoffen sich vom Handel über Datennetze Fette Gewinne,”
Stern, March 19, 1998, 137; Martin Hill, “Cyberspace Echoes to World’s Call for Peace,” Belfast
Telegraph, February 20, 1996; Nick Clayton, “Solicitors Set Up Shop in Cyberspace,” Scotsman
(Edinburgh), February 18, 1998; Andrew Bibby, “A Phoenix Rises and Heads for Cyberspace,”
Independent (London), February 13, 1995; Helen Jones, “Now You Can Surf the Net for a Job;
23
Self-Colonizing eEurope
Cyberspace Now Offers Thousands of Opportunities,” Independent (London), April 18, 1996;
and Gary Buchanan, “Simple, Low‐Cost Ways to Make the Right Connections,” Herald
(Glasgow), January 26, 1998. For examples of amputation‐focused news reports, see
“Cyberspace und der Amerikanische Traum,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, August 26,
1995; “Der Kopf Schrumpft,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 9, 1995; “Die
verfluechtigte Materie,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 4, 1995; “Datenautobahn
als Eckpfeiler der Amerikanischen Technikpolitik,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 25,
1994; “Mit zehn Gigabyte,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 9, 1995; “Schnaeppchen
aus dem Internet,” Focus Magazin, July 29, 1996, 132–36; “Klassenkampf im Cybersp@ce,”
Focus Magazin, October 7, 1996, 286–87; “Toedlicher Mausklick,” Focus Magazin, September
25, 1995, 192–94; “Per Fahrrad auf die Datenautobahn,” Focus Magazin, December 11, 1995,
142; Walter Dreher, “Gesellschaft: Ein Volk auf dem Ego‐Trip,” Focus Magazin, July 31, 1995,
52–60; Marion Meiners, “Datennetze: Anarchie in Digitalien,” Focus Magazin, July 1, 1996,
134–35.
36
“Internet—das Netz der Netze? Chaotische Strukturen und zunehmende kommerzielle
Angebote Immer schneller webt die Spinne ihr Netz um die Welt. Noch lassen sich auf der
Datenautobahn nur begrenzt Geschaefte machen / Probleme mit Datensicherheit und
Tempo,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, July 18, 1995.
37
Jeanne Rubner, “Das Web ist das Ziel: Internet, Internat; Muessen Wirklich Alle Ans Netz?”
Sueddeutsche Zeitung, December 17, 1997, translation mine.
38
For more on American technological determinism, see Howard P. Segal, Technological
Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Raymond
Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken, 1975); and Rudi Volti,
Society and Technological Change, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).
39
See Christos J. P. Moschovitis, Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler, and Theresa M. Senft, History of
the Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present (Oxford: ABC‐CLIO, 1999), 76–80.
40
David Gauntlett attributes the coinage of term internet in 1974 to Bob Khan, one of the
scientists who invented internet technology while working for the Department of Defense.
This date refers specifically to the term, but Gauntlett traces the first talk about the concept
of an internet protocol (or network of networks that would link variously connected
computers, including those time‐sharing and connected to private intranet systems) back to
1962. See David Gauntlett, “Web Studies: What’s New,” in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media
Studies for the Digital Age, ed. David Gauntlett and Ross Horsley, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004), 3–23. Available online as Gauntlett, “Introduction to the New
Edition,” New Media Studies, http://www.newmediastudies.com/intro2004.htm (accessed
July 10, 2007).
41
“Timeline of Computer History: Networking,” Computer History Museum,
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?category=net (accessed June 5, 2008).
42
Andrew D. Murray, The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the Online Environment (New
York: Routledge‐Cavendish, 2007), 35.
24
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
43
To view an archived version from December 1996, see “De Digitale Stad,” Internet Archive
Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/19961219173901/http://www2.dds.nl/
(accessed March 5, 2008). The earliest archived version in the Internet Archive Wayback
Machine is from 1996.
44
“The Digital City Foundation,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
http://web.archive.org/web/19970618155059/www.dds.nl/dds/info/english/dds‐engl.html
(accessed March 5, 2008).
45
Carl Malamud, A World’s Fair for the Global Village (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 37–38.
46
“The Digital City (Amsterdam),” Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
http://web.archive.org/web/19970618013045/www.dds.nl/dds/info/english/ (accessed March
5, 2008).
47
“Digital City Foundation.”
48
Shuschen Tan, “An Interview with Marleen Stikker,” trans. Patrice Riemens, CTheory,
February 8, 1995, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=65. Originally published in Dutch in
Trouw (Amsterdam), January 7, 1995.
49
“Digital City Foundation.”
50
The goal stated that “globalisation and automation put employment, and thereby the
social cohesion of a society, under pressure” (ibid.).
51
Ibid.
52
This representation was also present in German newspapers. One article compares
cybercafes in 1995 to Vienna cafes in 1895, ultimately deciding people engage in similar
activities. “Postkarten per Internet. Im Kaffeehaus des 21. Jahrhunderts,” Sueddeutsche
Zeitung, July 19, 1995.
53
Tan, “Interview with Marleen Stikker.”
54
Ibid.
55
Employees of AOL’s previous incarnation “Quantum” thought the name was “a bit hokey”
and “too patriotically red, white, and blue.” Kara Swisher, AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill
Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions in the War for the Web (New York: Times
Business/Random House, 1998), 55.
56
Miller, Civilizing Cyberspace, 172.
57
Moschovitis et al., History of the Internet, 183.
58
AOL was sued in 2000 because of this software; the lawsuit alleged that AOL 5.0 prevented
users from accessing internet sites and browsers. AOL settled for fifteen million dollars
without admitting guilt. See the notice posted on “AOL 5.0 Litigation,” Garden City Group,
March 27, 2002, http://www.gardencitygroup.com/cases/fullcase/35.
25
Self-Colonizing eEurope
59
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is
Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 150.
60
For more on the history and evolution of European identity, see David Levy, “Regulating
Digital Broadcasting in Europe: The Limits of Policy Convergence,” West European Politics 20,
no. 4 (1997): 24–42; Michael Moran and Tony Prosser, Privatization and Regulatory Change in
Europe (Buckingham, PA: Open University Press, 1994); Ralf Rogowski and Charles Turner,
The Shape of the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Anand Menon
and Martin Schain, Comparative Federalism: The European Union and the United States in
Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Michelle Egan, Constructing
a European Market: Standards, Regulation, and Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001); Jeremy Richardson, ed. European Union: Power and Policy‐making, 2nd ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2001); and Harcourt, European Union.
61
This similarity was demonstrated even in the union’s name. The Maastricht Treaty of
1993—which created the European Union’s current legal framework—changed the official
name from the “European Community” to the “European Union,” signifying a more “united
states” model. European Community, “Maastricht Treaty on European Union,” signed in
Maastricht, the Netherlands, February 7, 1992, Eur. OJ C224/1 (August 31, 1992). See George A.
Bermann, Roger J. Goebel, William J. Davey, and Eleanor M. Fox, Cases and Materials on
European Community Law (St. Paul, MN: West, 1995), 14–19.
62
Harcourt, European Union, 161, citing Levy, “Regulating Digital Broadcasting”; and Moran
and Prosser, Privatization and Regulatory Change.
63
Christopher Watson and Tom Wheatdon, Telecommunications: The EU Law (Bembridge, Isle
of Wight: Palladian Law, 1999), xiii.
64
Harcourt, European Union, 3. Also see David A. Levy, Europe’s Digital Revolution:
Broadcasting Regulation, the EU and the Nation State (New York: Routledge, 1999).
65
Schlesinger, “Tensions in the Construction,” 95.
66
The union was originally created to establish a single market for coal and steel. See
Harcourt, European Union, 6.
67
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 37–46.
68
The U.S. is not linguistically homogenous, but cultural inclusion presumes English‐language
ability. For more on languages and the EU, see Rogowski and Turner, Shape of the New
Europe, 37.
69
Schlesinger, “Tensions in the Construction,” 103–4.
70
See Peter T. Kirstein, “Early Experiences with the ARPANET and INTERNET in the UK,”
University College London Department of Computer Science Networks Research Group, July
28, 1998, http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/kirstein‐arpanet.pdf.
26
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
71
Ibid. Eventually, the Deutsche Bundespost, the postal service of West Germany, contracted
with British Telecom to begin Germany’s Bildschirmtext (or “screen text”), which became
functional in the early 1980s. See Emanuele Giovannetti, Mitsuhiro Kagami, and Masatsugu
Tsuji, eds. The Internet Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 126.
72
“Die Bundesregierung,” Presse und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung,
http://www.bundesregierung.de/Webs/Breg/DE/Homepage/home.html. To view an archived
version from October 1996, see “Die Bundesregierung informiert,” Internet Archive Wayback
Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/19961019114748/http://www.bundesregierung.de/
(accessed September 17, 2007).
73
The White House website featured a box where users could search press releases. See the
archived version from December 1996 at “Search White House Press Releases, Radio
Addresses, Photos and Web Pages,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
http://web.archive.org/web/19961227062541/http://www3.whitehouse.gov/ (accessed April
23, 2008).
74
In the same year, the EU launched a seven‐year program designed to promote European
collective culture. For more on the history of the internet in Europe, see Lawrence G.
Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” Proceedings of the IEEE 66, no. 1 (1978),
http://www.packet.cc/files/ev‐packet‐sw.html.
75
European Commission, “eEurope,” 2.
76
In 1999, the U.S. had 25 internet hosts per 1,000 inhabitants, compared to 5 in the UK, 4 in
Japan, 3 in Germany, and 3 in France. Giovannetti et al., Internet Revolution, 126–27.
77
U.S. firms provided “whole programming packages including scheduling and space for the
insertion of commercial breaks.” Harcourt, European Union, 211.
78
Giovannetti et al., Internet Revolution, 136.
79
The publication of the “White Papers” in the 1990s marked the European Community’s
focus on new technology. See Martin Bangemann et al., High‐Level Group on the Information
Society, “Europe and the Global Information Society: Bangemann Report Recommendations
to the European Council,” European Commission, May 1994,
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/servlets/Doc?id=18174. For more on the “harmonization directives,”
see Harcourt, European Union, 11–15.
80
Council of the European Union, “Council Resolution on the Implementation of the eEurope
2005 Action Plan,” January 28, 2003, 4,
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/2005/doc/all_about/benchmarking/resoluti
on.doc.
81
European Commission, “eEurope Benchmarking Report,” Communication from the
Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the Economic and Social Committee
and the Committee of the Regions, May 2, 2002,
27
Self-Colonizing eEurope
http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/eeurope/2002/news_library/new_documents/bench
marking/benchmarkin_en.pdf. EU household internet penetration increased from 18% in
March 2000 to 28% in October 2000 to 36% in June 2001 and to 38% in December 2001 (4).
Average costs decreased “continuously and substantially” between 1999 and 2001 (6). In
May 2001, 80% of EU schools were online (10).
82
European Commission, “eEurope,” 2. Also cited in Giovannetti et al., Internet Revolution,
124–42.
83
The Bangemann Report was the origin of the term. Bangemann et al., “Europe and the
Global Information Society.”
84
European Commission, “eEurope,” 4.
85
As Anderson has noted, media are intricately involved in the formation of national identity.
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37–46.
86
The information superhighway metaphor is also used in Europe; for example, the internet
is called the “Datenautobahn” (or the “data‐highway”) in Germany. However, German and
British papers began using the term in the early 1990s originally only in reports about U.S.
information superhighway policies. For example, see “Datenautobahn als Eckpfeiler”; “Ein
Hochgeschwindigkeitsnetz fuer Daten als Milliardengeschaeft,” Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, September 17, 1993; “Time to Join the Super‐highway,” Sunday Times (London),
October 17, 1993; Susana Antunes, “U.S. Phone Giants Line Up for Global ‘Superhighway’
Race: The Telecommunications Industry Is Going through Major Changes,” Evening Standard
(London), October 15, 1993; Bailey Morris, “In Washington: Crossed Wires on Telecoms,”
Independent (London), August 15, 1993; Lauren Chambliss, “Superhighway to a Revolution:
American View,” Evening Standard (London), April 22, 1993; and Mark Tran, “American
Notebook: Clinton Aims to Act as Catalyst for Information Superhighway,” Guardian
(Manchester), April 13, 1993.
87
European Commission, “The eEurope 2005 Action Plan: An Information Society for
Everyone,” Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament,
the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions, May 28, 2002,
http://europa.eu/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l24226.htm.
88
“Der Goldrausch im Cyberspace,” Sueddeutsche Zeitung, November 11, 1995, translation
mine. Also see “Internet—das Netz der Netze?”
89
Harcourt, European Union, 9.
90
Harcourt, European Union, 3, citing Levy, Europe’s Digital Revolution, which argues
technology is a driver; and Peter J. Humphreys, Mass Media and Media Policy in Western
Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), which argues its limitations.
91
According to Joel Reidenberg, “in effect, network users become stakeholders in
transnational political and economic communities.” Reidenberg, “Governing Networks,” 98.
28
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
92
President William J. Clinton and Vice President Albert Gore, Jr., “Remarks by the President
and the Vice President to the People of Knoxville on Internet for Schools” (speech, Knoxville
Auditorium Coliseum, Knoxville, TN, October 10, 1996).
93
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the
Department of Commerce, and the Assistant Secretary of Commerce and technology advisor
to the Clinton administration conducted a series of NTIA surveys in 1995, 1998, 1999, and
2000. See National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), U.S.
Department of Commerce, Falling Through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide, July 8, 1999,
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fttn99/contents.html. Specifics on these surveys are
available in the section titled “Methodology.”
94
A report from the U.S. Department of Commerce, based on December 1998 census data,
revealed that “better educated Americans [are] more likely to be connected,” “the gap
between high‐ and low‐income [and urban and rural] Americans [is] increasing,” and “whites
[are] more likely to be connected than African‐Americans or Hispanics.” U.S. Office of the
Press Secretary, “The Clinton‐Gore Administration: A National Call to Action to Close the
Digital Divide,” White House, April 4, 2000,
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/New/html/20000404.html.
95
NTIA, “Falling Through the Net,” in Part III, entitled “Challenges Ahead.”
96
Press Secretary, “The Clinton‐Gore Administration.”
97
See John Schwartz, “U.S. Cites Race Gap in Use of Internet; Clinton Bemoans ‘Digital
Divide,’” Washington Post, July 9, 1999; Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Initiatives Outlined for ‘Digital
Divide,’” Washington Post, December 10, 1999; Marc Lacey, “Clinton Enlists Top‐Grade Help
for Plan to Increase Computer Use,” New York Times, February 3, 2000; Martha Woodall,
“Technology’s Have‐Nots, From 2 Views: President Clinton Called for More Internet Access,
While at Penn Came Talk of Places Where Phones are Foreign,” Philadelphia Inquirer,
December 10, 1999; Marc Lacey, “Clinton to Seek U.S. Subsidies to Help the Poor Get Online,”
New York Times, January 22, 2000; Steve Lohr, “A Nation Ponders Its Growing Digital Divide,”
New York Times, October 21, 1996; Tamara Henry, “Schools, Libraries in Line to Be Online with
Help of $2 Billion, All in USA Expected to Be Linked to Net by 2000,” USA Today, March 1,
1999; Sylvia Moreno, “President Aims to Leap the ‘Digital Divide’; In Visit to SE School, Clinton
Vows to Close the Gap Between the High‐Tech Haves and Have‐Nots,” Washington Post,
February 3, 2000; Jeff Biggers, “Computers for All? Many Can’t Use Them,” USA Today,
January 27, 2000; and Gary Andrew Poole, “A New Gulf in American Education, the Digital
Divide,” New York Times, January 29, 1996.
98
Press Secretary, “The Clinton‐Gore Administration.”
99
Poole, “New Gulf in American Education.”
100
Press Secretary, “The Clinton‐Gore Administration.”
29
Self-Colonizing eEurope
101
By “Y2K,” I mean the anticipated computer meltdowns when 1999 turned to 2000 because
many computer programs were written using two‐digit year codes (e.g., 99 for 1999). For
more on how the government imagined this scenario playing out, see Michael Powell, C.
Michael Armstrong, and Marsha J. MacBride, Y2K Communications Sector Report (prepared by
the Federal Communications Commission in conjunction with the Network Reliability &
Interoperability Council, Washington, DC, March 30, 1999). Available online at
http://www.wutc.wa.gov/webdocs.nsf/b8da29aede8fdd67882571430005a9c1/c1cf57ff131085
ca88256744007e1440/$FILE/Y2kcsr.pdf.
102
Pippa Norris, Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet
Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 233.
Selected Bibliography
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.
Bermann, George A., Roger J. Goebel, William J. Davey, and Eleanor M. Fox. Cases and
Materials on European Community Law. St. Paul, MN: West, 1995.
Blumler, Jay G. Television and the Public Interest: Vulnerable Values in West European
Broadcasting. London: Sage, 1992.
Burns, Rob, ed. German Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Cross, Robert L., Andrew Parker, and Lisa Sasson, eds. Networks in the Knowledge Economy.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Egan, Michelle. Constructing a European Market: Standards, Regulation, and Governance.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gauntlett, David, and Ross Horsley, eds. Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital
Age. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Giovannetti, Emanuele, Mitsuhiro Kagami, and Masatsugu Tsuji, eds. The Internet Revolution:
A Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Goldsmith, Jack, and Tim Wu. Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Harcourt, Alison. The European Union and the Regulation of Media Markets. New York:
Manchester University Press, 2005.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Humphreys, Peter J. Mass Media and Media Policy in Western Europe. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1996.
30
Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS) 1.1
Kahin, Brian, and Charles Nesson. Borders in Cyberspace: Information Policy and the Global
Information Infrastructure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Krige, John. American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Levy, David A. Europe’s Digital Revolution: Broadcasting Regulation, the EU and the Nation
State. New York: Routledge, 1999.
———. “Regulating Digital Broadcasting in Europe: The Limits of Policy Convergence.” West
European Politics 20, no. 4 (1997): 24–42.
Malamud, Carl. A World’s Fair for the Global Village. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1994.
McNair, Brian. Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture. New York: Arnold, 1996.
Menon, Anand, and Martin Schain. Comparative Federalism: The European Union and the
United States in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Miller, Steven E. Civilizing Cyberspace: Policy, Power, and the Information Superhighway.
Reading, MA: Addison‐Wesley, 1996.
Moran, Michael, and Tony Prosser. Privatization and Regulatory Change in Europe.
Buckingham, PA: Open University Press, 1994.
Morris, Nancy, and Silvio Waisbord, eds. Media and Globalization: Why the State Matters. New
York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.
Moschovitis, Christos J. P., Hilary Poole, Tami Schuyler, and Theresa M. Senft. History of the
Internet: A Chronology, 1843 to the Present. Oxford: ABC‐CLIO, 1999.
Murray, Andrew D. The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the Online Environment. New
York: Routledge‐Cavendish, 2007.
Norris, Pippa. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet
Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Nuechterlein, Jonathan E., and Philip J. Weiser. Digital Crossroads: American
Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
Poiger, Uta. Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided
Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Pool, Ithiel de Sola. Technologies without Boundaries: On Telecommunications in a Global Age.
Ed. Eli M. Noam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New
York: HarperPerennial, 1994.
Richardson, Jeremy, ed. European Union: Power and Policy‐making. 2nd ed. New York:
Routledge, 2001.
31
Self-Colonizing eEurope
Rogowski, Ralf, and Charles Turner. The Shape of the New Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006.
Schaefer, Eric. “Gauging a Revolution: 16 mm Film and the Rise of the Pornographic Feature.”
In Porn Studies, ed. Linda Williams, 370–400. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004.
Schulte, Stephanie Ricker. “State Technology to State of Being: The Making of the Internet in
Global Popular Culture (1980–2000).” PhD diss., George Washington University, 2008.
Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985.
Sigel, Lisa Z. “Filth in the Wrong People’s Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of
Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880–1914.” Journal of Social History
33, no. 4 (2000): 859–85.
Simon, Leslie. NetPolicy.Com: Public Agenda for a Digital World. Washington, DC: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press, 2000.
Swisher, Kara. AOL.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads, and Made Millions
in the War for the Web. New York: Times Business/Random House, 1998.
Tan, Shuschen. “An Interview with Marleen Stikker.” Trans. Patrice Riemens. CTheory,
February 8, 1995, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=65.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is
Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Volti, Rudi. Society and Technological Change. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992.
Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca‐Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United
States in Austria after the Second World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1994.
Watson, Christopher, and Tom Wheatdon. Telecommunications: The EU Law. Bembridge, Isle
of Wight: Palladian Law, 1999.
Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975.
32