Stephen Kline: The New Cyber-City

Stephen Kline is a professor and director of media analysis at Simon Fraser University. He also runs a research department at the media analysis lab at Simon Fraser. Kline graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he studied media analysis. It only seems reasonable that with all of this knowledge he has accumulated throughout schooling and his research, he would write a book about it. This particular article by Kline and two others was taken out of the book “Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, which was released in 2003 and published by Mcgill Queen's University Press. 

Stephen Kline’s article “The new cyber-city: The interactive game industry in the new millennium” discusses the virtual gaming industry; how it began, competition that arose, and how it began to integrate into society. One of Kline’s arguments that stood out to me was that the gaming industry wasn't a quiet, discrete sector like it was in the beginning. Now, the circuits, technological, cultural, and promotional have intertwined and vital networks are seen as the critical zone for profit and growth. Because of this profit and growth that formed, gaming industry began to blow up into an entirely different world.

While reading the article, I noticed that Kline mentioned “Post-Fordism” a lot, which can be seen as the digital artisanship, based on a multitude of small enterprises, organizing production as high-technology craft-work and forming vibrant community networks of efficient but human-scale businesses. In other words, it's the idea that modern industrial production has begun to moved away from mass production in huge factories and towards specialized markets based on small flexible manufacturing units. The article also went into how the gaming market is one that has larger effects on the world than just serving as an entertainment outlet. Like stated earlier, as the industry grew, the profit continued to flow in. I also thought that this article provided a well-thought narration of the production of the gaming-industry that usually isn't known to many.

Searching around a bit, I found that other books published by Kline had to deal with marketing through advertising. This didn't surprise me too much just because he has so much background on the digital aspect of the world.