168 | Mass Media and Historical Change
the ‘Z3’, was developed in 1941 by the Berlin inventor Konrad Zuse without
any support or recognition from the military. On the other hand, the British
inventor Alan Turing used the programmable logic controller ‘Colossus’ to
decode German ciphers. In 1946 the American ‘ENIAC’ was also an offspring
of military research and is considered the first fully electronic all-purpose
computer. One must also put into perspective the often-heard assumption
that the Internet or its precursor, the American ARPA (Advanced Research
Project Agency) net of 1969, was built up by the U.S. Defense Department to
ensure an indestructible system of network communication in the event of a
nuclear attack. In actual fact, recent studies have shown that it was developed
as an academic communication network to enable the ‘sharing of knowledge’
among the costly computers of four universities. Nonetheless the ARPA was
established and financed as a branch of the Pentagon after the ‘Sputnik Shock’
of 1957 (Hafner and Lyon 1998: 16).
Moreover, this involvement with military and space research explains the
dominant role the United States played in this process. Also, the fact that
private computers experienced their first breakthrough in the 1980s with
games is open to equally disparate interpretations. On the one hand games
call up associations with military simulations, but on the other hand the fact
that so many games were put on the market refers to the commercial logic of
media, since adolescents had recently been discovered as a consumer group.
Comparatively little research has been done on the significance of admin-
istration, trade and stock markets for the progress of the digital revolution,
although these had played a central role in every previous media revolution
(for the United States: Cortada 2006). Postal services, newspapers, telegraphy
and even radio initially created communication techniques that could trans-
mit economic data rapidly. By the same token, commercial and ideological
interests were often driving forces of dissemination. Since the Internet was not
opened for commercial use until the 1990s, market logic seems to have played
only a minor role initially, although the United Kingdom intended to use the
Internet more for commercial transactions from the very beginning. Future
socio-economical studies should analyse the consequences of computer-sup-
ported data processing and communication in more detail, starting with the
1970s and 1980s. This research should focus on the changes wrought up by
large-scale data processing on work processes, self-scrutiny and control, and
consequently on people’s self-concepts and actions.
As this book has repeatedly demonstrated, technical inventions played
a lesser role in determining the manner of media utilisation than did users’
needs and their cultural, social and political leanings. This is why book print-
ing had different effects in Asia and Europe, and societal appropriation of film
and radio differed as well. Likewise, text messages, email and social networks
were able to assert themselves in the digital communication media in a manner