Right from the outset Wired’s founding rationale is that the technological revolution is yielding a social revolution. Hence, the main protagonist of the magazine is network technology itself, as well as the people and organizations intimately engaged with it. But Wired is not a magazine about technology but about society, only every topic is filtered through network technology. The stories are told through technology, but they are really about every conceivable facet of society. Later, other, more traditional publications, such as the New York Times and Newsweek, followed suit with their own technology sections. This shift from news stories that involve network technology to a weekly section devoted to (mostly digital) technology signifies the extent to which network technology entered as a subject—right next to the economy and politics—of everyday, generalized public discourse. “Network technology” has become a staple of our political discourse.
In fact, as Gary Wolf—an intimate witness to the formation of the magazine and a contributing editor—suggests, the roots of this digital discourse in the public sphere had sprouted before the inauguration of Wired; there was just a need for someone to crystallize the discourse and to consolidate its fragmentary voices into one harmonious sound. In that respect, the magazine sprouted unto a fertile ground. Recalling work on the pilot issue of the magazine, Wolf writes in Wired: A Romance (a biography of the magazine and its creators), “None of the articles or photographs were [sic] original . . . They were cribbed from every type of publication that touched on parts of the story [cofounders] Louis and Jane were trying to tell,” types of publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Week, and numerous others. “But,” Wolf continues, “the borrowed stories seemed bolder here than they have in their original publication. Bound together, they radiated a sense of fanatical self-assurance, as if united in expectation of technological wonders and tremendous social change. The fact that the stories were taken from mainstream sources strengthened rather than softened the effect, for the credits page offered evidence that the revolution Louis believed he was chronicling has already been widely noted only the context was new” (Wolf 2003, 47). Wired then was serving as a reverse prism: unifying the variety of representations of an emerging digital discourse in the public sphere into a coherent, cogent, and bright voice.
My argument is that Wired is representative of a much broader social phenomenon. At the same time, it has several unique characteristics that distinguish it from three other types of publications that also focus on technology and that makes it particularly suitable for studying contemporary technology discourse. The first type is trade magazines, such as PC World, PC Magazine, and InfoWorld, which are geared toward professionals in the field. These publications center more on the technical facet of information technology. Indeed there were some other professional publications (such as Mondo2000 and Signal) that also grew out of the epicenter of the high-tech industry (in and around San Francisco) that tried to capture the same technological and social revolution that Wired was after. However, while other technologically centered publications targeted specialized and professional audiences, Wired’s goal was “to broaden the definition of the digital vanguard to include hundreds of thousands of readers” (Wolf 2003, 49). In that respect, Wired thought the digital revolution to be a deep and populist social revolution brought about by individual users rather than by experts or hackers. Thus, Wired saw its goal in providing these individuals monthly updates on this emerging world—their world (Wolf 2003, 50).
Contemporary Technology Discourse
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