This excellent article at Ctheory traces the emergence and development of the Real Time Interface medium, with an emphasis on how the goals of “Total Spectrum Dominance” and a “Global Information Grid” have driven the development of the medium by militaries. It also discusses how this development is related to the development of mass media, and automation, and how it is all intertwined. The first radar screens at the end of WWII are the precursors modern real-time computer monitoring systems and information sharing systems. All of these military systems are oriented around predicting, seeing, and controlling (through the panopticon effect).

‚Äö√Ñ√∫…the real time interface has replaced the
interval that once constituted and organized the history and
geography of human societies. Problems of spatial distance have been
supplanted with problems of the time remaining. One could say,
then, that operational media is motored by the need for an
instantaneity of action, where time delays, spatial distances, and
“middlemen” are reduced through computational systems that facilitate
the sharing of human and machinic functions. One can see the
emergence of “unmanned” vehicles in this light, especially those that
are armed: they are constructs that are shaped, in system and in
material form, by the drive to collapse the distance between sensor,
analyst, and shooter, through various systemic adjustments and
relocations.

A new form of agency emerges within this coordination and command
network, spanning spatial distance and merging information from
multiple sources. A combinatory field of perception arises within a
distributed field of shared functions.”

Of course, the “smartmob” phenomenon also demonstrates how grassroots movements have emerged and begun to use these technologies in decentralized ways. The difference in the structure of these two cultural uses of the mediums is also reflected in the competing paradigms of ”Open” vs “Controlled and/or Owned”.