The second type of publication from which Wired needs to be distinguished is comprised of publications like Technology Review, Spectrum, Discover, Popular Science, and Scientific American, which are aimed at the general public. They usually present a discourse of fascination of, and even fetishization of, network technology, but, unlike Wired, they see their value mostly in bringing technological news to society and rarely venture into social, political, and cultural questions. Another advantage of Wired compared to this second group is the former’s concentration almost exclusively on network technology, rather than technology (and sometimes science) in general, and its integration within the economy and culture of Silicon Valley. To sum up, unlike those two types of publications, I see Wired not as a magazine about technology but rather as a magazine about the intersection of technology and society. It is oriented not toward a professional public and technical issues, but toward the general public and social issues. It is a current affairs magazine, just like The Economist, Time, and Newsweek, only it perceives technology (rather than politics or economics) to be the predominant axis of these affairs in contemporary society.
That leaves us with the task of differentiating Wired from weekly publications on current affairs (such as Time or The Economist) as well as daily newspapers, all of which now regularly feature a special section on technology. Here the distinction is much more subtle, and the choice of Wired rather than the other publications is mostly methodological. First, in terms of content, Wired’s discourse tends to be what we might call more “ideological.” The digital discourse, which is the hypothetical structure that this book seeks to capture, can be found in a more crystallized and pure form in Wired rather than in, say, the New York Times. Second, while Newsweek or Time are established magazines that have integrated a technology section into their older content, Wired is sui generis, that is, it was created precisely for the sake of registering and defining the digital discourse. It preceded some of those other publications by a few years in terms of a technologically centered reporting, and, in terms of social networks and geography, it has been located at the heart of the revolution on which it purports to report.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age