So here’s what happened. If you tell people you’re going to have this super-open, absolutely non-commercial, money-free thing, but it has to survive in this environment that’s based on money, where it has to make money, how does anybody square that circle? How does anybody do anything? And so companies like Google that came along, in my view were backed into a corner. There was exactly one business plan available to them, which was advertising.
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So, how do we make sense of new media? How can we guard against our temptation to assume, our implicit sense, even, that everything in our experience of today’s emerging digital media is brand new and unprecedented? And how do we do that while also appreciating the things that really are new or unique to our current cultural context and moment in history?