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This chapter shows how internationalisation transformed the telecommunications market. Transnational technological and economic developments, especially digitalisation, began to revolutionise the sector from the mid-1960s. The US greatly altered its regulatory institutions, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s, affecting the overall world telecommunications market and also providing an example for other nations. Detailed EU regulation grew from the late 1980s to provide a comprehensive framework based on competition. The three sets of international forces were analogous to those in securities trading. They also put pressures on traditional institutions that closed national markets in European nations, such as public ownership, monopoly, and regulation by governments. Thus, telecommunications provides a second similar case to securities trading to examine the effects of different forms of internationalisation on domestic institutional reform.

This concluding chapter draws out the major lessons both for government and for the IT industry. For the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the Netherlands, United States, and Canada, it argues that new public management (NPM) is intellectually dead, an orthodoxy now played out and plagued by evidence of adverse by-product effects. NPM focused on disaggregation, competition, and incentivization changes. It also fragmented administrative institutions, dramatically increasing policy system institutional complexity, and somewhat reducing citizens' autonomous capacities to solve their own problems. NPM impaired government IT modernization by hollowing out public sector staffs and capabilities and bringing new contractually based risks and barriers into cross-government policy-making. An emerging post-NPM agenda has ‘digital era governance’ changes at its core, focusing on the reintegration of services, holistic and ‘joined-up’ approaches to policy-making, and the extensive digitalization of administrative operations.

Since World War II, the information sector in the United States has been evolving through three stages: the stages of limited media, multichannel media, and digital media. In the lengthy stage of limited media, major segments of the information sector were dominated by large firms. This stage of limited media, so different from the image of a past golden age of open media, prevailed into the early 1980s, when it changed quite rapidly, at least in the electronic realm. The third stage, that of digital media, is characterized by the emergence of computer communications as a mass medium and is exemplified by the Internet. The key to this stage is digitalization: the transformation of voice, text, video, and data information into binary on-off signals, and their move toward common platforms of transmission, storage, processing, and display. The overall trend of media concentration is the composite of three separate dynamics that overlay each other: the growth in economies of scale in information sector operations, the lowering of entry barriers, and digital convergence.

This introductory chapter discusses how digitalization transformed photojournalism. Digitalization refers to the way many domains of social life, including journalism and military operations, are “restructured around digital communication and media infrastructures.” Photojournalism was transformed not only by digital cameras, online distribution, and the digitization of analog archives, but also by the significant institutional and cultural changes that digitalization enabled. Another manifestation of digitalization was the change in the very nature of the “photojournalism community.” Amateur digital images such as the Abu Ghraib photos and cell-phone pictures of the 2005 London bombings, rather than the work of professional photojournalists, were the key images that shaped public opinion. Moreover, images in the press, from photographs to cartoons, were not just illustrative of current events but often also newsworthy themselves or even factors in causing events, thereby playing a critical and highly controversial part in political and military action.

This chapter traces the history of photographs on the move and the development of an international community whose business it is to broker the images that document the news. There are two important stories here: the well-known one about the rise of photojournalism, and the less-known one about the rise of distribution networks and changes in infrastructures of representation. This history of the business of image brokering focuses specifically on the significant restructuring of the industry as a result of digitalization—most importantly, the rise of the visual content provider. The chapter then analyzes the challenges of news images as a product line.

This conclusion looks at the landscape of photojournalism today. What happens to image brokering and photojournalism in the age of social media and increased digitalization? While there has been an increasing demand for imagery, the work of photojournalists and professional image brokers has been significantly devalued. The conclusion then examines visual worldmaking practices through four recent news events—the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, the January 2015 attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, World Press Photo's decision to revoke a prize in its 2015 Contemporary Issues category, and the earthquake in Nepal in April 2015. Only one thing about the future of journalism is clear: it must be visual.

The turn in what some have called the ‘digital moment’ and others have interpreted as the ‘digital dilemma’ has collapsed the distinctions between media producers and media consumers. Digitalisation, the movement of information by means of binary digits or ‘bits’, has meant that all forms of media can be easily manipulated, thereby undermining the ways in which copyright works both to promote creativity and to control copying. Digital media has the potential to collapse many of the distinctions that analogue media upheld and around which copyright has historically been formulated. This chapter examines why digital media have such far-reaching consequences for media rights and how governments and media industries have attempted to maintain regulation of the digital environment through new legislation and technological means. First, the chapter looks at exactly why digital media pose a threat. It then focuses on digital lives, digital rights management, the WIPO Copyright Treaty, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 and the Copyright Directive. It also discusses copyright issues involving DVDs and descrambling of content-scrambling systems.

An important consequence of the pervasive digitalization of artifacts is that artifacts become generative due to the unique materiality of digital technology. As result, digital artifacts evolve once created, often in ways that surprise even those who designed them. We are at the cusp of a new artificial world that is inundated with digital artifacts that are continuously evolving. As biology emerged as an evolutionary science of nature, we need a new discipline focusing on the evolution of digital artifacts. The chapter uses an empirical study as a way of sketching out what might emerge as an evolutionary science of the artificial. Through the example, the chapter demonstrates how the basic ideas of evolutionary biology can be used as a basis to study the evolution of digital artifacts.

The effect of automation on employment and jobs has engaged thoughtful computer scientists and economists since the earliest days of computing. Yet there have been concerns about the effects of technology on employment since ancient times, and notably during the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century by a group of workers known as the ‘Luddites’. Our first topic is the role of algorithms in enabling more efficient processing of job applicants and the selection of candidates to interview. This now includes the automatic filtering out of huge numbers of résumés that are never seen by human resource professionals. Next, we look at how technology is used in monitoring job performance, with the goal of encouraging or requiring enhanced performance. Oftentimes, these practices have the opposite effect, as it makes workers feel like ‘Big Brother’ is watching. Companies have long used contractors to provide flexibility in the availability of workers as well as to circumvent costs such as medical benefits and liabilities such as severance pay. This practice has recently changed dramatically: internet communication can now rapidly link seekers of services to providers of the services. This is typically called the gig economy or sharing economy, yet a better name is on-demand services. We shall then examine areas where automation threatens to replace human workers with machines. Fear is rampant, as typified by a 2017 New York Times article, ‘Will Robots Take Our Children’s Jobs?’ Between 2014 and 2016, future prospects were analysed in five scholarly books. We examine the phenomenon of unemployment by looking at specific areas: agriculture, manufacturing, service industries, and the professions. We highlight how new robotic technology, incorporating sensing, reasoning, and manipulating abilities, is enabling significant automation. Of particular importance is the extent to which new machine learning systems are enabling the automation of thinking and reasoning, which were previously considered infeasible for machines. Arguably the most interesting, challenging, and risky application is that of automatic diagnosis of disease, and, more speculatively, robot doctors.

This chapter focuses on the alternatives to choice as a mechanism through intermediaries and provision. It notes that attitudes to choice vary very considerably between individuals. It analyses whether choice overwhelms or empowers consumers. It examines the benefits of consumer protection and the complications and advantages brought by provision. It examines the effect of increased choice through digitalisation of information, and the use of the internet to provide distribution and access.

Globalization and digitalization—the opening of economies across the globe and the advent and spread of the digital medium, respectively—have made the world smaller today. Although this new world has had positive implications for entrepreneurs and pioneer entrepreneurs, it has had negative impacts for incumbents in the creative industries. This chapter addresses the question of whether rules governing the structure and functioning of creative industries are relevant in the current context. Although globalization has typically generated market creation opportunities for pioneer producers and pioneer intermediaries, digitalization has not significantly affected the creation of new categories but has instead provided a new medium for commentary as well as commerce. Understanding how these developments affect creators, producers, and intermediaries suggests that the “old” rules, being foundational, are still applicable and should be followed by firms, creators, and consumers desirous of living in a civil society capable of rejuvenation and change.

The notion of property is at the core of our culture, but the bond between the form and function of property has been under constant negotiation, especially regarding the “intellectual” and non-material property of a digitised age. This chapter deals with copyright regulation meeting the societal changes associated with digitalisation. It does so through reinterpreting Karl Renner’s classical texts on form vs. function in the light of contemporary cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors and embodiment. Legal norms only appear to be unchanged; the contemporary push for copyright as property is related to enduring historical claims along with de facto legal revisions in the concept of intellectual property (IP) faced with digitalisation. Of particular relevance here is what Renner described (in terms of property) as an “institution of domination and control”, and thus the increased measures for control that are added to a digital context in the name of copyright.

This chapter foregrounds two concepts that need to be central in discussions about the future of television in the UK: quality of life, and the value of culture. It makes four main claims: (i) television can contribute to quality of life in important ways, but we should not understand that contribution in terms of ‘consumer preferences’; (ii) television's contribution to quality of life should be thought of in terms of what it enables people to do or to be; (iii) television markets, if not well constructed and regulated, are unlikely to enhance cultural quality of life adequately, because high-quality television is a particular form of ‘merit good’ and is therefore likely to be underproduced; and (iv) digitalisation does not remove the fundamental problems surrounding cultural markets and quality of life — it makes a public service ‘common provider’ more important.

In this dialogue, Hal Abelson the acclaimed professor, scientist and distinguished member of MIT CSAIL, and co-chair of the MIT Council on Educational Technology (MITCET), firstly discusses the potential of the digital revolution and Internet. He talks about the reasons that led him to initiate Creative Commons (Abelson was also involved with the start up of MIT OpenCourseWare, Public Knowledge, the Free Software Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology). He then describes in detail the MIT model. On the one hand it is based on not making distinctions between teaching and research, and on the other it focuses on radical meritocracy, which gives rise to a culture of open exchange and openness. He moves on to explain details of the philosophy behind the prestigious MIT Course 6, which uses semiconductors to bring together the physical side of electrical engineering and the logic side of IT, thereby generating a range of innovative interactions. He finally talks about the foundations of leadership which MIT have laid and continue to maintain in education and innovation.

This chapter illustrates how the politics of overshooting apply outside of Nordic Europe by identifying two countries with cohesive, encompassing networks and high levels of economic volatility. Ireland differs from Nordic Europe in several respects, but it has suffering a strikingly similar set of abrupt policy reversals and dramatic boom-bust cycles. Tight-knit relationships also supported comprehensive reform and restructuring in Estonia. Dense, widely distributed ties facilitated rapid digitalization, but also increased the country's vulnerability to external shocks, including the 2007-2009 credit crunch and the emerging threat of cyberwarfare.