the screen for the first time. It was a moment of
revolution! The screen was no longer the exclusive turf of the
television broadcasters.

Thanks to the joystick, as well as the subsequent introduction of the
VCR and camcorder, we were empowered to move the pixels ourselves. The
TV was no longer magical. Its functioning had become transparent. Just
as the remote control allowed viewers to deconstruct the content of
storytelling, the joystick allowed the audience to demystify the
technology through which these stories were being told.

Finally, the computer mouse and keyboard transformed a receive-only
monitor into a portal. Packaged programming was no longer any more
valuable, or valid, than the words we could type ourselves. The
addition of a modem turned the computer into a broadcast facility. We
were no longer dependent on the content of Rupert Murdoch or corporate
TV stations, but could create and disseminate our own content. The
internet revolution was a do-it-yourself revolution. We had
deconstructed the content of media's stories, demystified its modes of
transmission and learned to do it all for ourselves.

These three stages of development: deconstruction of content,
demystification of technology and finally do-it-yourself or
participatory authorship are the three steps through which a
programmed populace returns to autonomous thinking, action and
collective self-determination.

Chapter 2

The birth of the electronic community... and the backlash

New forms of community were emerging that stressed the actual
contributions of the participants, rather than whatever prepackaged
content they had in common. In many cases, these contributions took
the form not of ideas or text but technology itself.

The early interactive mediaspace was a gift economy (see Barbrook2).
People developed and shared new technologies with no expectation of
financial return. It was gratifying enough to see one's own email
program or bulletin board software spread to thousands of other users.
The technologies in use on the internet today, from browsers and POP
email programs to streaming video, were all developed by this
shareware community of software engineers. The University of Illinois
at Champagne Urbana, where Mozilla, the precursor to Netscape, was
first developed was a hotbed of new software development. So was
Cornell and MIT, as well as hundreds of more loosely organised hacker
groups around the world.

Invar