1913: Henry Ford and the Assembly Line

Realizing that he'd need to lower costs Henry Ford (Ford Motor Company) was inspired to create a more efficient way to produce his cars. Looking at other industries he and his team found four principles, which furthered their goal: interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor, and reducing wasted effort.

The use of interchangeable parts meant making the individual pieces of the car the same every time. Therefore the machines had to be improved, but once they were adjusted, they could be operated by a low-skilled laborer. To reduce the time workers spent moving around Ford refined the flow of work in the manner that as one task was finished another began, with minimum time spent in set-up. Furthermore he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the legendary Model T in 84 distinct steps. Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific management" was consulted to do time and motion studies to determine the exact speed at which the work should proceed and the exact motions workers should use to accomplish their tasks.

Putting all those findings together in 1913 Ford installed the first moving assembly line that was ever used for large-scale manufacturing. His cars could then be produced at a record-breaking rate, which meant that he could lower the price, but still make a good profit by selling more cars. For the first time work processes were largely automated by machinery.

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Highlights on the Way to a Global Commercial Media Oligopoly: 1990s

-1994

Viacom multimedia and industrial corporation takes control of Paramount Communications for US$ 9.6 billion, as well as Blockbuster Entertainment, a huge video store chain, for US$ 8.4. billion.

1995

Entertainment giant Disney buys Capital Cities-ABC for US$ 19 billion.

The industrial and broadcasting company Westinghouse Corp. buys out CBS for US$ 5.4 billion.

In a US$ 7.2 billion deal, Time Warner acquires Turner Communications, owner of prime cable TV channels CNN, TBS and TNT and a major classic American film library.

1996

Westinghouse/CBS buys Infinity Broadcasting's large group of radio stations.

Murdoch and News Corp. acquire ten more TV stations and TV production studios with the US$ 2.5 billion purchase of New World Communications Group.

Viacom buys half of UPN-TV network, adding that to its other holdings, which include eleven TV stations, along with MTV, VH-1, and other cable TV channels and Paramount movie studios.

1997

Radio Groups Chancellor Media and Evergreen merge and are linked by ownership with Capstar Broadcasting; they also buy ten radio stations from Viacom. By mid-1997 Chancellor/Capstar controls no fewer than 325 radio stations around the United States.

Chancellor/Capstar's controlling ownership group, Hicks Muse Tate & Furst, buys the seventh largest radio group, SFX, adding another seventy-two radio stations, making a total of nearly four hundred stations controlled by this one source.

Westinghouse-CBS buys out American Radio Systems, the fourth largest radio chain in total audience, which gives Westinghouse-CBS over 170 radio stations with a total audience nearly equal to that of the Chancellor/Capstar group.

Giant European-based print and electronic publishing and data base corporations Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer merge.

1998

Bertelsmann buys the Random House-Alfred A. Knopf-Crown Publishing group of book publishers from Newhouse/Advance Publications, adding to its Bantam-Doubleday-Dell publishing group and giving Bertelsmann by far the largest English-language publishing operations.

1999

AOL, the worlds leading Internet service provider and Time Warner, the worlds leading classical media company merge in a US$ 243.3 billion deal.

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Hill & Knowlton

Although it is generally hard to distinguish between public relations and propaganda, Hill & Knowlton, the worlds leading PR agency, represents an extraordinary example for the manipulation of public opinion with public relations activities. Hill & Knowlton did not only lobby for countries, accused of the abuse of human rights, like China, Peru, Israel, Egypt and Indonesia, but also represented the repressive Duvalier regime in Haiti.

It furthermore played a central role in the Gulf War. On behalf of the Kuwaiti government it presented a 15-year-old girl to testify before Congress about human rights violations in a Kuwaiti hospital. The girl, later found out to be the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S., and its testimony then became the centerpiece of a finely tuned PR campaign orchestrated by Hill & Knowlton and co-ordinated with the White House on behalf of the government of Kuwait an the Citizens for a Free Kuwait group. Inflaming public opinion against Iraq and bringing the U.S. Congress in favor of war in the Gulf, this probably was one of the largest and most effective public relations campaigns in history.

Running campaigns against abortion for the Catholic Church and representing the Church of Scientology, large PR firms like Hill & Knowlton, scarcely hesitate to manipulate public and congressional opinion and government policy through media campaigns, congressional hearings, and lobbying, when necessary. Also co-operation with intelligence agencies seems to be not unknown to Hill & Knowlton.

Accused of pursuing potentially illegal proxy spying operation for intelligence agencies, Richard Cheney, head of Hill & Knowltons New York office, denied this allegations, but said that "... in such a large organization you never know if there's not some sneak operation going on." On the other hand former CIA official Robert T. Crowley acknowledged, that "Hill & Knowlton's overseas offices were perfect 'cover` for the ever-expanding CIA. Unlike other cover jobs, being a public relations specialist did not require technical training for CIA officers." Furthermore the CIA, Crowley admitted, used its Hill & Knowlton connections to "... put out press releases and make media contacts to further its positions. ... Hill & Knowlton employees at the small Washington office and elsewhere distributed this material through CIA assets working in the United States news media."

(Source: Carlisle, Johan: Public Relationships: Hill & Knowlton, Robert Gray, and the CIA. http://mediafilter.org/caq/)

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Who owns the Internet and who is in charge?

The Internet/Matrix still depends heavily on public infrastructure and there is no dedicated owner of the whole Internet/Matrix, but the networks it consists of are run and owned by corporations and institutions. Access to the Internet is usually provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) for a monthly fee. Each network is owned by someone and has a network operation center from where it is centrally controlled, but the Internet/Matrix is not owned by any single authority and has no network operation center of its own. No legal authority determines how and where networks can be connected together, this is something the managers of networks have to agree about. So there is no way to ever gain ultimate control of the Matrix/Internet.
The in some respects decentralized Matrix/Internet architecture and administration do not imply that there are no authorities for oversight and common standards for sustaining basic operations, for administration: There are authorities for IP number and domain name registrations, e.g.
Ever since the organizational structures for Internet administration have changed according to the needs to be addressed. Up to now, administration of the Internet is a collaborative undertaking of several loose cooperative bodies with no strict hierarchy of authority. These bodies make decisions on common guidelines, as communication protocols, e.g., cooperatively, so that compatibility of software is guaranteed. But they have no binding legal authority, nor can they enforce the standards they have agreed upon, nor are they wholly representative for the community of Internet users. The Internet has no official governing body or organization; most parts are still administered by volunteers.
Amazingly, there seems to be an unspoken and uncodified consent of what is allowed and what is forbidden on the Internet that is widely accepted. Codifications, as the so-called Netiquette, are due to individual efforts and mostly just expressively stating the prevailing consent. Violations of accepted standards are fiercely rejected, as reactions to misbehavior in mailing lists and newsgroups prove daily.
Sometimes violations not already subject to law become part of governmental regulations, as it was the case with spamming, the unsolicited sending of advertising mail messages. But engineers proved to be quicker and developed software against spamming. So, in some respects, the Internet is self-regulating, indeed.
For a detailed report on Internet governance, click here.

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Writing

Writing and calculating came into being at about the same time. The first pictographs carved into clay tablets are used for administrative purposes. As an instrument for the administrative bodies of early empires, who began to rely on the collection, storage, processing and transmission of data, the skill of writing was restricted to a few. Being more or less separated tasks, writing and calculating converge in today's computers.

Letters are invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent, says Saint Augustine. The invention of writing made it possible to transmit and store information. No longer the ear predominates; face-to-face communication becomes more and more obsolete for administration and bureaucracy. Standardization and centralization become the constituents of high culture and vast empires as Sumer and China.

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International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC)

The ICPC aims at reducing the number of incidents of damages to submarine telecommunications cables by hazards.

The Committee also serves as a forum for the exchange of technical and legal information pertaining to submarine cable protection methods and programs and funds projects and programs, which are beneficial for the protection of submarine cables.

Membership is restricted to authorities (governmental administrations or commercial companies) owning or operating submarine telecommunications cables. As of May 1999, 67 members representing 38 nations were members.

http://www.iscpc.org

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Henry Ford

b. July 30, 1863, Wayne County, Michigan, U.S.
d. April 7, 1947, Dearborn, Michigan, U.S.

American industrialist who revolutionized factory production with his assembly-line methods. Celebrated as both a technological genius and a folk hero, Ford was the creative force behind an industry of unprecedented size and wealth that in only a few decades permanently changed the economic and social character of the United States. Once Ford realized the tremendous part he and his Model T automobile had played in bringing about this change, he wanted nothing more than to reverse it, or at least to recapture the rural values of his boyhood. Henry Ford, then, is an apt symbol of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial America.

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World Wide Web (WWW)

Probably the most significant Internet service, the World Wide Web is not the essence of the Internet, but a subset of it. It is constituted by documents that are linked together in a way you can switch from one document to another by simply clicking on the link connecting these documents. This is made possible by the Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the authoring language used in creating World Wide Web-based documents. These so-called hypertexts can combine text documents, graphics, videos, sounds, and Java applets, so making multimedia content possible.

Especially on the World Wide Web, documents are often retrieved by entering keywords into so-called search engines, sets of programs that fetch documents from as many servers as possible and index the stored information. (For regularly updated lists of the 100 most popular words that people are entering into search engines, click here). No search engine can retrieve all information on the whole World Wide Web; every search engine covers just a small part of it.

Among other things that is the reason why the World Wide Web is not simply a very huge database, as is sometimes said, because it lacks consistency. There is virtually almost infinite storage capacity on the Internet, that is true, a capacity, which might become an almost everlasting too, a prospect, which is sometimes consoling, but threatening too.

According to the Internet domain survey of the Internet Software Consortium the number of Internet host computers is growing rapidly. In October 1969 the first two computers were connected; this number grows to 376.000 in January 1991 and 72,398.092 in January 2000.

World Wide Web History Project, http://www.webhistory.org/home.html

http://www.searchwords.com/
http://www.islandnet.com/deathnet/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/21st/feature/199...
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Frederick Taylor

b. March 20, 1856, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.
d. March 21, 1915, Philadelphia

American inventor and engineer who is known as the father of scientific management. His system of industrial management has influenced the development of virtually every country. In 1881, he introduced time study at the Midvale plant. The profession of time study was founded on the success of this project, which also formed the basis of Taylor's subsequent theories of management science. Essentially, Taylor suggested that production efficiency in a shop or factory could be greatly enhanced by close observation of the individual worker and elimination of waste time and motion in his operation. Though the Taylor system provoked resentment and opposition from labor when carried to extremes, its value in rationalizing production was indisputable and its impact on the development of mass production techniques immense.

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File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

FTP enables the transfer of files (text, image, video, sound) to and from other remote computers connected to the Internet.

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