Can high quality be provided economically for all transmissions on the Internet? Current work assumes that it cannot, and concentrates on providing differentiated service levels. However, an examination of patterns of use and economics of data networks suggests that providing enough bandwidth for uniformly high quality transmission may be practical. If this turns out not to be possible, only the simplest schemes that require minimal involvement by end users and network administrators are likely to be accepted. On the other hand, there are substantial inefficiencies in the current data networks, inefficiencies that can be alleviated even without complicated pricing or network engineering systems.

A synthesis of the literature suggests that the key characteristics for classifying online communities are: (i)their attributes, (ii) supporting software, (iii) their relationship to physical communities, and (iv) the sociological concept of boundedness. A classification schema based on these four characteristics is presented in this paper. Examples of each type of community are discussed. These classification schema have important implications for the design and management of online communities. Computer networks, such as the Internet, have begun to connect people around the world. In the past, access to computer-mediated communication was mostly limited to employees in the government, military, or university research communities (King, Grinter, and Pickering, 1997), and to work-related tasks (Greif, 1988). As more diverse groups of people gain access to computer networks, a new type of communication group, known as an online community, has begun to emerge. What is an online community (also called a virtual community or an electronic community)? Although there is an increasing amount of research being done on online

In the late twentieth century, with modernity having lost its innocence, and its transparency having yielded to an unsettling opaqueness, a search for alternative categories of life has begun. The defining moments are no longer the dichotomies of time and space, past and future, near and far, but only the present and here. As Foucault (1979) noted, we are busy constructing the history of the present, freezing time into a new set of practices and discourses, and unburdening ourselves from the weight of history and the uneasy anticipation of the future. What we are creating is a world where we can lose ourselves and escape into the world of the hyperreal (or hype and real) manipulated by the ideologies and the technologies of the digital. In this phantasmagoric world, in trying to relinquish the vestiges of modernism, we are preparing to enter a futuristic world replete, however, with the symbolism of the distant past. Paradoxically, we seem to be seeking a reassurance that our physicality is still intact (if not real), and that we can, touch, feel, see and smell the various (artificial?) life forms that spin around us. It is as if we are moving in a gigantic circulating machine where both fission and fusion, fact and fiction are caught in a vertiginous web. No doubt, all of this seems to have inspired the sci-fi writer, Gibson (1984) to characterize what was previously thought of as

This study examines whether the Internet offers artists a unique freedom from commodity status and the traditional art institutions, and how and why this freedom calls for us to re-assess our understanding of art and its social role. Areas of investigation include modernist and postmodernist understanding of avant-garde and capitalist society, with a major focus on dialogue between members of the net community itself, critics, artists, journalists and others who have first hand experiences with the new technologies.

: Electronic commerce is widely expected to promote "friction-free" capitalism, with consumerssending software agents to scour the Net for the best deals. Many distribution chains will indeed be simplified and costs substantially reduced. However, we are also likely to see the creation of artificial barriers in electronic commerce, designed by sellers to extract more value from consumers. Frequent flyer mileage plans and the bundling of software into suites are just two examples of the marketing schemes that are likely to proliferate. It appears that there will be much less a la carte selling of individual items than is commonly expected, and more subscription plans. Therefore many current development plans should be redirected. Electronic commerce is likely to be even more exasperating to consumers than current airline pricing, and will be even further removed from the common conception of a "just price." As a result, there are likely to be more attempts to introduce governmen...

Cyberspace, the Internet and the Information 'revolution'. This thesis attempts to get behind the hype and examine the reality of the events surrounding and shaping cyberspace today. It first moves to undermine the notion of a spontaneous technologically lead 'revolution' driven in part by unplanned 'convergence' and faceless 'market forces'. It does this throughout by emphasising strategic action taken with regard to the Internet, focusing especially on government and corporate 'agendas', such as the US Global Framework for Electronic Commerce. Rather than accepting 'market forces' as an object capable of action, as does the bulk of work in this area, this paper argues that it is the market itself which is being created - a task which can only be undertaken by real people, real corporations, and real people. It is a process which is making major political decisions.

Introduction: Making the (cyber)world safe for capitalism Cyberspace, the new frontier: bringing you the future live to air. It seems that sometime in the early 1990s a new place was born. The Internet, Cyberspace, the World Wide Web, the Net. A virtual place, contained in code, maintained by constantly communicating computers which give the impression of place.

The emergence of the knowledge society seems a main feature of developed economies at the start of the 21 st century. There is no question that new information technologies (NIT)represent a source of wealth for a society taken as a whole. The question of the impact of these technologies on distribution

Schumpeterian “waves of creative destruction ” are periodic bursts of innovative activity that threaten to overwhelm entrenched firms and established businesses. What factors make such a wave more likely to arise, or to arise earlier or later? What makes a wave more severe for an incumbent firm? We argue that any framework for answering these questions must examine the interplay between strategic interaction in markets and the endogenous development of organizational capability. We illustrate our argument by focusing on two important historical cases: IBM’s response to the PC and Microsoft’s to the Internet. In both cases we highlight the ways in which the intersection between a firm’s market position and its organizational assets lead incumbents and entrants to respond quite differently to potential “waves”. We also explore the ways in which the incumbent firms in both cases suffered from ‘organizational diseconomies of scope ” – so that the realignment of organizational capabilities to serve both an existing market and a new market were costly and time-consuming. In both cases we suggest that explanations that focus only on market-based or only on organizational explanations are incomplete. 1