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Mass media: Information Society
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Mass media: Information Society
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This section is concerned primarily with the notion of the 'information society', rather than with information technology as such. There are separate sections on technological determinism, the Internet and artificial intelligence.
There is a popular view that we now live in a society, or at least are rapidly entering into a form of society, that is radically different from any which preceded it. It's hard to imagine, though, that this is not an impression many have had since at least the late eighteenth century when the American, French and industrial revolutions had their impact. For that matter the Copernican, Galilean and Newtonian revolutions of earlier periods must have had a similar impact. Lest anyone object that it would have been only intellectuals and the powerful who were affected by such events, then I would say that my grandparents must surely have felt, with their experiences of the two world wars, rapidly changing moral standards in the twenties, mass unemployment in the thirties and so on, that they certainly did live in an unstable and rapidly changing world. Indeed, as Karl Marx pointed out, radical change is in the very nature of capitalism, under the influence of which 'all that is solid melts into air', or perhaps Bruce Sterling's words are more pertinent:
We live in the Information Age now, but there are people walking around in this city who have lived through the Aviation Age, the Radio Age, the Thousand-Year Reich, the Atomic Age, the Space Age, the New Age, the Aquarian Age, not to mention the sexual revolution and the epoch of New Soviet Man. And trust me, a lot of these geezers and geezerettes are going to outlive the Information Age as well.
Amongst the experts in the field, there are those who would support the view that we are living in a society of a wholly unprecedented type, whilst others would maintain there is little that is radically different, except perhaps for the technology. Equally, there are those who celebrate the new technologies and there are those who are highly suspicious of them. In what follows I do not intend to come down on one side or the other, if for no other reason than that I have no expert knowledge myself; rather, my intention is to try to set out some of the arguments from each side.
Commonly, the supposedly new form of society is referred to as a post-industrial society or an information society. The claim that we are living in a 'post-industrial society' is associated with Professor Daniel Bell (1973), who cited in favour of his claim figures showing that in 1947 over half the US workforce was employed in goods-producing sectors and just under a half in the service sector. By 1980, he predicted, the share of the workforce employed in the manufacturing sector would fall to 32%. This prediction has certainly been borne out by developments in all developed industrial nations. In Glasgow, for example, one of the new 'post-industrial' cities, employment in the service sector now accounts for 84% of jobs, up from 60% in the eighties (source: The Observer Feb. 11 2001). In fact, taken over a longer period, the most striking change in employment patterns has been a shift from the agricultural to the service sector and the decline of employment in the manufacturing sector is a more recent phenomenon. Recent though it may be, that collapse of employment in manufacturing has been remarkably swift and dramatic, as illustrated in the graphics below:
Like all statistics, the figures are inevitably difficult to interpret. Would the carpenter who builds the new computer desks in my college be counted as employed in the secondary or tertiary sector? Has the college's accountant, who previously worked for a mining company, transferred from the primary sector to the tertiary? Theorists of the information society often look back to Fritz Machlup's 1962 book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, in which he claimed that the 'knowledge industry' represented 29% of the US gross national product. But what are we to make of a definition of this supposed knowledge industry that includes the distribution of typewriters and stationery? In any case, the figures for the growth of the knowledge industry show (when converted into current dollar values) hardly any change at all over the period 1958 (28.6%) to 1980 (34.3%) (Rubin and Taylor (1986) quoted in Webster (1995). Furthermore, as Manuel Castells points out(1989), the notion of post-industrial society is a purely negative one, referring to the fact that manufacturing is no longer at the centre of the economy, in itself a questionable claim. Castells points out that the rise in importance of services cannot be directly correlated with the decline of manufacturing, since the rise in service jobs has been as the result of transfers from the agricultural sector, as well as of the entry into the labour market of new kinds of workers, especially women, who filled 85% of the new service jobs created between 1975 and 1985. In fact, Castells argues that the division of the economy into primary, secondary and tertiary sectors is simplistic and misleading, the so-called 'service sector' being composed of such a wide diversity of types of jobs that it is meaningless to lump them all together into a single 'sector'. He concludes that:
... there is not a service sector .... A substantial part of employment in services, particularly in social services and personal services, is in fact a way of absorbing the surplus population generated by increased productivity in agriculture and industry, in a society that still requires salaried work to survive, even if we could achieve greater collective output with less collective work.
(1989: 130)
Nevertheless, popular gurus like Alvin Toffler (1981) cite Machlup as the prophet of what Toffler refers to as the 'third wave', the first two being the invention of agriculture and industry.
Similarly Peter Drucker, who, long before computers arrived on every desktop, predicted that the major changes in society would be brought about by information, argues that
Knowledge has become the central, key resource that knows no geography. It underlies the most significant and unprecedented social phenomenon of this century. No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue-collar worker and no class has ever fallen as fast. All within less than a century.
Peter Drucker (1993)
Drucker points to the rapid decline in the steel-manufacturing workforce in the US, from 120,000 people in 1980 to a mere 20,000 now, producing the same tonnage. Agricultural workers have dwindled to a negligible number in most developed countries and blue collar workers, who actually represented the majority of all workers in 1950s Britain, are predicted by Drucker to fall to one eighth by the year 2000. According to Drucker, the largest single group will become what he refers to as knowledge workers, whose defining characteristic is the level of their formal education. Thus formal education, though not necessarily carried out in schools, will become the central concern in knowledge societies.
It is worth noting that such claims as we have just read about the effects of information technologies on employment patterns come from the USA and the statistics shown above are from the UK. One may take from some of these claims and from the statistics that the changes in employment patterns are fully determined by the introduction of new technologies, in other words that they are the inevitable and irresistible result of introducing information technology. However, Noam Chomsky quotes a study by Mishel and Bernstein which finds little, if any, impact of new technology on wage and employment structure. The changes that have occurred are primarily the results of 'a severe drop in the minimum wage and deunionisation, rapid expansion of low paid service jobs (80 percent of new jobs created were in the lowest paying service sector industries), and privatisation of the economy.' (1996 : 128). Such changes have been greatly influenced by the state and not left solely to the 'invisible hand' of the supposed 'free' market and such state intervention has, according to Chomsky, been consistently to the advantage of the 'minority of the opulent'. The two countries where there has been the greatest increase in wage disparities are the USA and the UK, the two countries which have moved fastest in the direction of deregulation of labour markets. Thus it is not technology which brings about greater unemployment, higher job insecurity and greater income disparity, but the deliberate policies of Reaganite and Thatcherite governments, which are determined to shift power from the masses to the privileged few. (study quoted: Mishel L & Bernstein J The State of Working America 1994-95 (M.E. Sharpe 1994)) Garnham argues that, far from seeing the predicted rise of a new class of information workers (more recently referred to as symbolic analysts), with the concomitant increase in flexible and liberating types of work and an accompanying demand for greater social and cultural autonomy, what we are in fact witnessing is Marx's predicted general proletarianization. In support of this thesis, Garnham quotes the following statistics:
Garnham (1997 : 63)
Garnham further points to the steady decline in UK weekly working hours from 57 hours in 1860 to a low in 1975, which, had it continued, would have lead to an average working week of 35 hours by now, whereas, in fact, over a quarter of the workforce work over 45 hours per week.
Some characteristics of the modern information society would include:
The industrial age, very much an age of atoms, gave us the concept of mass production, with the economies that come from manufacturing with uniform and repetitious methods in any one given space and time. The information age, the age of computers, showed us the same economies of scale, but with less regard for space and time. The manufacturing of bits could happen anywhere, at any time, and, for example, move among the stock markets of New York, London, and Tokyo as if they were three adjacent machine tools. Nevertheless, this freedom from the constraints of space still remains something of a myth so far. Castells points out, for example, that something as simple as the radial construction of the electrical grid in the USA can act as a brake on decentralization simply because areas outside major urban centres are more likely to suffer power cuts.
The term post-Fordism is also used to refer to the new information age. The term derives from Henry Ford's use of 'scientific management' in his car plants, a method of rationalization of all processes of management. The production process was broken down into its smallest component processes, each of which was performed by a single worker, who thus repeated the same series of actions within the same space throughout the working day, the rhythm of his work being determined by the speed of the production line. Ford offered his workers the then extraordinary sum of $5 per hour to put up with the alienating practices in his plants, $5 which was meant not only to stimulate production but also to stimulate consumption, hopefully of Ford cars. Post-Fordism is seen as having the following characteristics, in addition to those enumerated above:
a shift to the new "information technologies;" more flexible, decentralized forms of labour process and work organization; decline of the old manufacturing base and the growth of the "sunrise," computer-based industries; the hiving off or contracting out of functions and services; a greater emphasis on choice and product differentiation, on marketing, packaging, and design, on the "targeting" of consumers by lifestyle, taste and culture rather than by categories of social class; a decline in the proportion of the skilled, male, manual working class, the rise of the service and white-collar classes and the "feminization" of the work force; an economy dominated by the multinationals, with their new international division of labor and their greater autonomy from nation-state control; and the "globalization" of the new financial markets, linked by the communications revolution
Hall (1991b)
Perhaps the key word in that quotation, certainly for anyone who has been at the sharp end of modern employment practices, is flexibility, which is always enumerated as one of the defining characteristics of post-Fordism. Frank Webster (1995) suggests that the term covers the following three types of flexibility:
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no employee can look forward to a lifetime of employment any more and certainly not necessarily in the same profession; we are, to use the current clichés, in a learning society in which lifetime training and multi-skilling are the norm; wages are flexible, since local pay bargaining has been forced on most employees; in Great Britain, since wages councils were disbanded and unions neutered, the only inflexibility left seems to be that employees' pay always moves downwards and bosses' pay always upwards;
time flexibility is widespread - employees
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information networks tend to break down the hierarchical and inflexible structures of Fordist organization. For example, computerized stock control which automatically places orders with suppliers when stocks are low, makes it unnecessary for manufacturers or supermarkets to carry large supplies of stock, thus saving on warehousing, the employment costs of warehousemen and the costs of unsold stock. Instead, just-in-time (JIT) methods are used whereby the supplier constantly tops up a minimal amount of stock held by the manufacturer or supermarket. Where manufacturing is concerned, modern computerized methods of production make it possible for suppliers economically to produce relatively small runs of products to meet their customers' needs. Without the information technology, JIT methods would be impossible. |
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the new technologies make shorter production runs cost-effective, which means that products can be more 'individualized' than the 'mass' consumption products of the past, allowing consumers greater flexibility in their 'lifestyle choices'; again, Benetton is often quoted as an example here, its automated cash registers, feeding information back to headquarters allowing the company to adjust output to customer demand in around ten days only. The new flexibility of consumption has led advertising agencies to pay less attention to the socio-economic groups - social 'classes' - which were formerly seen as reasonably reliable predictors of behaviour and attitudes and more attention to lifestyles, as people break away from the conventional patterns which once characterized their belonging to a particular class, constructing differentiated lifestyles for themselves through the pattern of choices they make as consumers. (see the section on lifestyle analysis) |
Some theorists, as has been said above, have considered these developments to be radically new. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques in particular referred to post-Fordist times as 'new times'. It is interesting that the political left in Britain, in searching for an explanation of the Labour Party's repeated failure to defeat Thatcherism, ends up with a conceptualization of modern society which is not so far removed from the conservative theorizing of Daniel Bell.
Hall and Jacques are hopeful about post-Fordism, in which they see the
proliferation of the sites of antagonism and resistance, and the appearance of new subjects, new social movements, new collective identities - an enlarged sphere for the operation of politics, and new constituencies for change
Hall and Jacques (1989): 17
I have referred above to the vertical disintegration of modern companies, downsizing, the tendency to buy in (or 'outsource') services and products, from cleaning and catering through to accountancy and the production of major components. Also, rather than carrying large inventories of components, manufacturers have moved to 'just-in-time delivery', which saves them the expense of managing a large amount of stock and enables them to be more flexible, shifting much of the risk of fluctuations in demand to their suppliers. Jeremy Rifkin (2000) has noted how widespread this trend has become in what he has christened the 'age of access', in which the fundamental basis of capitalism, the market, the buying and exchanging of goods is beginning to disintegrate, markets being replaced by networks and ownership by access. As individual consumers, most of us are already familiar with this to an extent - we hire TVs, video recorders and video tapes, telephone answering services and so on, rather than owning the actual machinery. The hire of other domestic appliances - washing machines, tumble driers, cookers - is becoming more common. Especially amongst the urban young, home ownership is giving way to renting, car ownership to car hire, as they shed the inconveniences and encumbrances of ownership, so as to remain flexible and mobile, responsive to the labour market's demands. As users of software we have never owned the products we use, merely a licence, though it continues to feel as if we own them. As Net delivery progresses towards broadband, it seems increasingly unlikely that we will do no more than rent the software as and when we need to use it, downloading appropriate bits of it across the Net from Application Service Providers, amongst whom Microsoft clearly intends, in part via its .Net project, to become a major player. Microsoft in fact is one of the best examples of this new propertyless capitalism. In November 1996 IBM owned $16.6 billion in plants, equipment and property and its market capitalization was $70.7 billion. At the same time Microsoft's market capitalization was $85.5 billion, but the value of its fixed assets was a mere $930 million (Rifkin (2000 : 50)). Rifkin also similarly compares General Motors and Chrysler, the former holding a vast amount of physical assets, but looking like a liability in the modern economy, whereas the latter, which has divested itself of much of its property to become more of a design studio than a car manufacturer, turns in very healthy profits.
That term 'design studio' is key. In a current TV commercial for Renault's 'Picasso' car, robots are seen playfully sketching out Picasso-like designs in black paint on a white car to the background song 'Je ne veux pas travailler'. When the company's logo appears in the last screen it is sub-titled 'Renault - créateur d'automobiles'. 'Creator', you'll note, not 'manufacturer' or 'producer', 'créateur' even, the cachet of the French name, like a perfume, a fashion accessory, a stylish dress or the latest restaurant. Rifkin comments that
In the new network economy what is really being bought and sold are ideas and images. The physical embodiment of these ideas and images becomes increasingly secondary to the economic process. If the industrial marketplace was characterized by the exchange of things, the network economy is characterized by access to concepts, carried inside physical forms.
Rifkin (2000 : 47)
- the realization, then, of Negroponte's prediction of the ascendancy of bits over atoms, of Baudrillard's 'aesthetic hallucination of reality'.
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buy into the lifestyle; even customize your own shoe (as long as you don't want the word 'sweatshop' on it) |
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let them tell you how socially responsible they are |
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then read the alternative version |
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just screw it |
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gap = crap |
Nike is often quoted as the example of this new economy. As Naomi Klein emphasizes (Klein 2000 : 50ff), whatever else, Nike may be, it is not a manufacturer of sports shoes. The company is almost non-existent, the very epitome of a virtual company. Its shoes are made by a network of mainly anonymous South-East Asian sweatshops, while headquarters specializes in design and the cultivation of the brand. Even large chunks of its marketing and advertising are outsourced. What it sells is a mythologized lifestyle, initially based around the use of Michael Jordan as the embodiment of that myth, flying through the air in suspended animation, buoyed up by Nike's hi-tech shoes. These TV spots, says Klein, were 'the first rock videos about sports', turning Michael Jordan, as he himself has said, into 'a dream'. Nike's shops are not just retail outlets. They are even called Nike Town.
Each one is a shrine, a place set apart for the faithful, a mausoleum. The Manhattan Nike Town on East Fifty-seventh Street is more than a fancy store fitted with the requisite brushed chrome and blond wood, it is a temple where the swoosh is worshipped as both art and heroic symbol. The swoosh is equated with sports at every turn: in reverent glass display cases depicting 'The definition of an athlete'; in the inspirational quotes about about 'Courage', 'Honor', 'Victory' and 'Teamwork' inlaid in the floorboards; and in the building's dedication 'to all athletes and their dreams'.
(Klein 2000 : 56)
The actual Vietnamese producers of Nike's shoes, girls as young as 13 working a sixty-hour week, would, of course, have little time or energy for such aspirations, nor the money ever to buy Nike sportswear, earning as they do between $1.60 and $2.25 per day. In the new weightless economy, Nike doesn't make shoes, Gap doesn't make clothes, MacDonalds don't make burgers.
Increasingly, it is the control of ideas that counts, whether the design of a pair of sports shoes, the copyright in Java or the human genetic code. Once computer code is developed, its actual distribution costs are negligible, so negligible that it might just as well be given away. When Red Hat floated, the stock market immediately valued it at billions of dollars. How can a company which has only ever given its operating system away be worth anything at all? How can Sony make a profit if it sells its Playstations at less than their production cost? The answer, of course, is in the intended benefits of locking the customer into a particular system, namely getting the customer to pay for the support, the upgrades, the games. Further, in a network society, there is the hoped-for 'network effect'. There's not much point in being the only person in the world with a telephone, probably not even a lot of point in being one of just a few thousand with a telephone, but once the network reaches a particular critical mass, then there is exponential development. If the customer has your phone, you make money, so there's a distinct advantage to giving them the phone for nothing in the first place.
The aim is to establish, if possible, a permanent relationship with the customer. Rifkin (98ff) explains how businesses are gradually letting go of the idea of selling a product to as many customers as possible and replacing it by the idea of selling as many products and services as possible to a single customer, each customer having a given 'lifetime value' (LTV). 'The key,' he writes, is to find the appropriate mechanism to hold on to a customer for life.' The calculation of a lifetime value is increasingly facilitated by the electronic economy. The barcodes on products enable the supermarkets to build up profiles of a range of different consumer types, as do payments by credit card. Store cards and loyalty cards also hand over vital information, which allow stores to correlate purchases with a range of data supplied by the customer when originally applying for the card. Apart from allowing them to mailshot customers by social class, income level, typical purchases or whatever, it also allows them to large subgroups of customers appropriately. Boots, for example, discovered via their loyalty cards that customers who bought nappies, baby foods and the like would also often hand in films for developing. So now Boots stores have the baby section and the photography section in close proximity so as to tempt the proud parents to whom it might not have occurred to use Boots' developing service. Similarly, it may be that 'cookies' in an Internet browser's cache may also be inspected by marketing companies and it is also reported that some Internet users may have unwittingly downloaded spyware which reports on their surfing habits.
As Rifkin points out, though this may all be felt as convenient by the customer, what we are witnessing is a shift from the commodification of goods and services to the
commodification of human relationships [....] By shifting from discrete market transactions that are limited in time and space to commodification of relationships that extend open-endedly over time, the new commercial sphere assures that more and more of daily life is held hostage to the bottom line
(97)
'Age of access' though this may be, unsurprisingly somebody owns something, even if the property is intangible intellectual property. In the networked society how much more lucrative it would be if you owned not only the property to which customers want access, but also the network through which they gained access to it. And so we see the giant media corporations jostling for control, not only of the 'bits', but also of the pipes through which the bits are squirted. Disney buys Infoseek, At Home Network buys Excite, AOL and Time-Warner merge in the struggle to become the dominant gatekeepers. (This is discussed more fully under the section on the Internet, as well as that on media ownership in the UK)
Although, however, all of the above are characteristic of modern society it is by no means clear that they represent a significant break with previous capitalist practice using older technologies. More appropriate, it seems to me, is Castell's on 'the emergence of a new mode of development, which I will cal the "informational mode", in historical interaction with the restructuring of the capitalist mode of production.' (1989) One of the most peculiar (to me at least) claims made by those who proclaim the death of Fordism is that the new times allow more space for the development of small and innovative organizations, which are more flexible and responsive than the major corporations. Excellent examples can of course readily be found in the computer industry, where major companies developed from bright young people's businesses run from the back of a garage, where Microsoft, Apple and the other innovators shook the mighty IBM to its foundations. That may be so, though I am not convinced that it is any more so now than in Fordist regimes. In any case one only has to consider Microsoft's present development to see that it is currently obeying the obvious capitalist imperative of maximizing market share and eliminating any competition. The post-Fordist era from the eighties onward may have seen the rapid creation of many more small companies, but it has, in Britain at least, been a time of unprecedented levels of bankruptcies. By any account, it is the TNCs which are pre-eminent. Webster (1995) argues that the supposed post-industrial information society does not represent a break with former societies, rather it represents an intensification of the tendencies which have always been inherent in industrialism. As Kumar observes:
so far at least [the information society] is a society designed, as of old, by and for the few: the rich and powerful classes, nations and regions of the world .... Its objectives and effects are strictly defined by the traditional goals of the political and economic elites: to increase the power of the state, both as against its own citizens and against other states; and to boost the productivity and profits of capitalist enterprises, largely by creating an integrated global market.
Kumar(1995)
Thus, such commentators as Kumar and Webster characterize the 'information revolution' as the rational extension and intensification of capitalist practice, rather than as the development of a totally new kind of society. However, I should add that many commentators in this vein, whilst asserting that there is nothing essentially new in the sociological and philosophical basis of infocapitalism, nevertheless recognize that it is that very intensification which will bring about changes in social life. Robins and Webster (1988), for example, argue that the new technologies, far from offering the utopian opportunities of greater consumer choice, direct radical democracy, the structuring of one's own worktime, the reconstruction of the public sphere and all the other benefits proclaimed by their enthusiasts, in fact further the penetration of Fordism into every aspect of our lives. Decentralization, they point out, makes no significant difference to the fundamental structures of power, as long as it can be co-ordinated as if it were centralized. Tele-cottages do not offer the idyll of working from home, rather they represent the extension of the workplace into our homes and families. Castells quotes the example of the People's Republic of China, where teenage girls from high school key in data records from Californian law firms. The girls, who do not understand a single word of what they are entering, are paid $15 per month for their 'training'. There is little reason to suppose that 'teleworking' in developed countries will turn out to be significantly different. Corporations' interest in the development of 'teleworking' is that it will enable them to control clerical work, which since the early seventies has become increasingly unionised. Most teleworkers so far, apart from professionals, are women, who accept the requirement of increased productivity for lower pay in exchange for the 'privilege' of being able to work from home (which also saves employers the cost of office space, heating, canteens etc.). Ironically, many women, who consider it advantageous to be able to stay at home and look after the household, find that they have to hire childminders so that they can get on with their work in peace. Even where professionals are concerned, it is hard to see that the ability to access the corporate network from home and thus continue working during 'leisure' time is a significant advantage in terms of quality of life. For Robins and Webster, post-Fordism is simply not happening, rather we are witnessing the 'extension and reconfiguration of Fordism', which extends scientific management into every corner of our everyday lives. The new corporate culture, with its 'Total Quality Management' and jargon of 'empowerment','collective responsibility', 'the team', even 'the family', is a totalizing culture. Empowerment and collective responsibility, the formal procedures of 'consultation' imply an openness to criticism, but employees who speak in team meetings are expected to observe the limits of the permitted corporate discourse, which may be transgressed only on pain of being cast out of the team, unemployment threatening from all sides, with the result that team meetings and consultation become a mere empty ritual. Democratically elected governments are running scared of the TNCs, who are answerable to no one but their shareholders. The 'company town' has been replaced by the 'company country'. The whole fabric of the modern capitalist society is permeated by the new corporate culture. The company comes to replace family life as workers vie with one another to spend 70, 80, 90 hours a week at work, to ensure that their cars are seen in the company car park on Saturdays and Sundays and then to make sure the company logs connexions from them when they do finally go home. Social events increasingly become company events: ten-pin bowling, visits to the gym, celebrating the company's anniversary, events at which everyone feels obliged to be present. In her study of the new corporate culture at 'Haephestus Corporation', Catherine Casey succinctly sums up the all-pervasiveness of the new corporate culture, which produces 'designer employees':
Haephestus Corporation typifies the culture of the new corporation. It is the new corporate workplace, the simulation of the caring, purposeful, related family of nostalgic, pre-industrial myth. It provides a simulated community that is manufactured for a vital function of production. It is the reification of the displaced hope and desire of a diminishing, increasingly colonized self - a self that in its emptying is re-filled and re-stored with a replica of religious virtuosity and, for the more pathologically troubled self, the comfort of a resurgent primary narcissism. The new Haephestus employee becomes somebody in his association with the reified company and through performance of his team-family work role. The employee also finds gratification in a sense of giving, a devotion to an entity greater than herself and her ordinary, narcissistic, anxiety-ridden life. In believing that Haephestus will reward them for such selfless effort in cooperative teamwork and company devotion, employees find the comfort of the echo of an old calling, and the semblance of community service.
(1995 : 189)
As she points out, however, 'the simulated community they serve does not reciprocate on a reliable basis'.
The new technologies have to be viewed within the context of the restructuring of capitalism, which they have certainly facilitated, but not caused. The essential characteristics of the restructuring of capitalism, according to Castells (1989: 23-27), are:
The following two charts are clear evidence of the rapidly widening gap between the rich and the poor in Great Britain:
For Arthur Kroker the new technologies, though they, coupled with other societal developments, may make traditional class divisions irrelevant, do also give rise to a new class, which he christens the virtual class, the cheerleaders for information technology, the 'prophet-hypesters' of the information age who proclaim 'adapt or you're toast', reminiscent of Alvin Toffler's warning that you either join the new global information age or 'prepare to become Cambodia'. In Kroker's view the 'cheerleaders' of the fin-de-siecle
technotopia:
practice a mixture of predatory capitalism and gung-ho technocratic rationalizations for laying waste to social concerns for employment, with insistent demands for "restructuring economies," "public policies of labor adjustment," and "deficit cutting," all aimed at maximal profitability. Against democratic discourse, the virtual class institutes anew the authoritarian mind, projecting its class interests onto cyberspace from which vantage point it crushes any and all dissent to the prevailing orthodoxies of technotopia. For the virtual class, politics is about absolute control over intellectual property by means of war-like strategies of communication, control, and command. Against social solidarity, the virtual class promotes a grisly form of raw social materialism, whereby social experience is reduced to its prosthetic after-effects: the body becomes a passive archive to be processed, entertained, and stockpiled by the seduction apertures of the virtual reality complex. And finally, against aesthetic creativity, the virtual class promotes the value of pattern-maintenance (of its own choosing), whereby human intelligence is reduced to a circulating medium of cybernetic exchange floating in the interfaces of the cultural animation machines.
Kroker (1994)
An essential part of the drive to domination by the virtual class is the domination of the Internet, clearing up the democratic sprawling chaos implicit in the term 'cyberspace', paving it over with the 'information superhighway', the better to control the Net:
Like its early bourgeois predecessors at the birth of capitalism, the virtual class christens the birth of technotopia by suppressing the potentially emancipatory relations of production released by the Internet in favor of the traditionally predatory force of production signified by the digital superhighway.
Kroker (1994)
My personal experience of these supposedly new times has been generally negative as is my take on other people's employment circumstances, so generally I accept Kroker's highly pessimistic view. The new technologies offer employers the possibility of total monitoring of their employees, thus removing any possibility there might have been in previous forms of employment for the development of critical judgement by the employee in carrying out her tasks. I suspect that interpersonal contact is to some extent replaced by contact with information technologies only, leading to isolation of employees from one another and displacement of any possible 'solidarity' in the workplace to activities outside work. Together with the deployment of new technologies to increase job insecurity and to depress wages to near-starvation levels in some cases, this ensures a constant supply of docile workers to increasingly rapacious employers.
I paint a bleak picture because that is my experience, but I should say for the sake of balance that there are those who are more optimistic, for example Zuboff (1988) who, according to Casey (1995 : 43), considers that the new information technologies will broaden the employee's opportunities to gain a sense of control over the work process, resulting in a humanizing of the structure of the workplace with 'empowered' and responsible employees. Casey summarizes this optimistic view thus:
As the range and quality of skills at each organizational level become similar, hierarchical distinctions become blurred. Authority becomes based upon appropriate fit between knowledge and responsibility rather than upon traditional organizational rank and status structures. The new flows of information between multiple users create opportunities for innovative methods of information sharing and exchange. Team work among broadly skilled and knowledgeable employees, less fettered by the constraints of traditional hierarchies and spheres of responsibility, engenders a heightened sense of empowerment, commitment and collective responsibility.
Casey (1995 : 44)
Hmmm.... nice idea, but in my experience the terminology used here is just management newspeak. As a teacher I am employed in what would presumably count as a 'knowledge organization', where one might especially expect to find these innovative methods of information sharing and exchange. In fact, the sense of innovation and creativity, the 'buzz' in the organization is considerably weaker than it was a few years ago. We may well now have the fabled (slightly) flatter management structure, but I haven't spoken to any manager other than my immediate line manager for longer than I can remember. As for the rôle technology plays in my students' education, with the arrival of the first desktop computers, back in the 1980s, I was genuinely excited by the creative and emancipatory potential I thought they offered. Now I am just helping to push young people through the training mill, as they copy-type pointless examination texts in their preparations to become the dependable foot-soldiers of capitalism. Monty Neill (1995) points to the irony of the development and use of computers in education. It is argued, he says, that US National Information Infrastructure will facilitate higher order thinking for more children, but, as he points out, if teachers had the time and resources, they could organize their classrooms for thinking skills and critical enquiry. If it is proposed that it is desirable that children should acquire thinking and organizational skills, then only because those skills are now in more demand by the capitalist economy. When workers were required to carry out the same repetitive tasks on the assembly line, behaviourism was the dominant paradigm in the psychology of learning; now that capitalism needs its workers to have more developed mental skills, that need is reflected in the shift to the cognitivist approach. There is of course a danger inherent in teaching people to think for themselves, just as there is in teaching them to read or write - it might get out of control. As Neill suggests, as long as progressive schooling remains within control, it is likely to yield yet higher profits, especially if, despite the 'thinking curriculum's reliance on cognitivism, discipline and motivation in schools and the workplace continue to rest on behaviourist foundations of performance-related pay, staff appraisal systems, tick-box learning aims and objectives and all the sorry grading into passes, merits and distinctions.
So what's new? Surely not the drive for control or the use of behaviourism. What is potentially new are the means of control, the computer itself and the target of control: thinking. On one level this is already quite visible in the use of the work tool to monitor the pace of work. In schools, however, the issue is more subtle. For example, the application of computers to real-world problems will teach students how to solve problems on terms amenable to the controllers of the system and will sort out those who are most willing and able to do so. The 'less able' will be funneled to less cognitively complex computer work to prepare them for the lower-skill jobs (or lack thereof), while the less willing will be driven out.
Neill (1995)
It should not be overlooked that this 'empowering' technology provides employers with the opportunity for more intense surveillance than ever before. Cash registers and wordprocessors monitor the keystrokes of their operators, e-mail communications and web acccess are routinely monitored and recorded, the 'efficiency' of dealing with enquiries, even the tone of voice, of telemarketers are recorded. It's also the case that computers allow, indeed, coupled with the potential for surveillance, virtually demand a greater intensity of work, which appears to be resulting in increased levels of stress and fatigue amongst employees, as well as repetitive strain injuries (RSI) and other cumulative trauma disorders (CTD) of possibly epidemic proportions with even school children already affected. From my possibly somewhat jaundiced viewpoint, computers seem to herald the dawn of a capitalist utopia, where the machine which disciplines the workers by threatening them with ever higher levels of deprofessionalization, de-skilling, proletarianization and - the ultimate weapon - unemployment, also provides the means of ever more ruthless exploitation of those who remain in work. And the technophiles who see us leaving the coalmines, the dark, satanic mills and smokestacks behind us as the vista of the clean, sunny, landscaped new networked workplaces opens up before us would do well to ask themselves if Silicon Valley itself is a desirable model, with its divorce rate, its frenetic work schedules and lack of organized labour, its drugs and sporadic violent crime, not to mention its toxic chemicals poisoning the groundwater. It is hard to imagine that anyone in the new, flexible Britain earning the minimum wage feels either Zuboff's 'empowerment' or 'commitment', nor is 'collective responsibility' particularly in evidence amongst the 'fat cats' of industry, who move from 'golden hello' to 'golden handshake', collecting sums beyond their employees' dreams. One day perhaps they'll find out what it means to have an 'empowered' workforce and to have to assume their share of 'collective responsibility'. I look forward to it.
technological determinism
Baudrillard
the Internet
regulation of the Internet
pornography on the Internet
artificial intelligence
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