INFORMATION X TECHNOLOGY X SOCIETY

INFORMATION X TECHNOLOGY X SOCIETY

COMMUNICATIONS 2312

Agenda

(Marx)Manuel CastellsHerbert SchillerJurgen HabermasAnthony Giddens

Marx: Dialectical materialism• Inherits from Hegel – the dialectic:

thesis/antithesis/synthesis….It is a robust tool for analysis except for

• (through Feuerbach) transcendent themes of Hegelian thinking: a tendency to see progress where progress is not

• The tendency of ideologies to a convenient “transcendent” – to use ideas of a beyond, to maintain structures of dominance.

• Robust analysis must then use the dialectic to concentrate on interrogations. Interrogations question the ways in which “cultural mythologies becomes convenient” to those in power (power being the combination of cultural and economic ascendency and dominance (conferred by capital): Smith’s protestant thesis: Capital + religion works so well: In Marx’s time it is religious culture that has the means of dominating cultural symbolism

• Materialism: Focus on the material: the stuff of life – especially the stuff that seems to be easily ignored by those in power

ELLUL’s Dialectical materialism• Inherits from Marx – the dialectic: thesis/antithesis/synthesis….It is a robust tool for

analysis. Materialism concentrates on that which is not dominated by cultural mythology; that experience which is, and which as ignored, benefits the dominant system and its uses of capital

• In Ellul’s time this was technology itself as a phenomenon, • Technology is a complicated social structure that grew upon/from industry, as its

grandchild, as more complicated DNA strand of capital value: Marx analyzed the means of production and reproduction of dominant systems by looking at the relationships of value in capital between ownership (property) and labor. Ellul looks for the way in which this is complicated in modernism as technology is value/is social/is the two intertwined.

• In Technological Society: Where technological optimism pervades as a cultural mythology through architectures of efficiency: Ellul juxtaposes against this mythology and the tendency to sell hope in efficiency and machine,

• He backs out, pulls out to view the social and technological from afar and sees that technology is still encased in a natural,

• In fact, his detailed and relentless portrait so attentive to this organistic (monstrous) structure, reveals that we are in technology.

• We were actually inside the belly of leviathan, its tissues and neurologic: The nuclear reactors in Japan for example give way to natural form, they appear to overcome it, but rather as they decompose in nature, the social decompose alongside it but into pain as it is not machine.

McLuhan

• Writing at the same time as Ellul (1960’s and 70’s) is exploring the relationships between media and the senses; media as organism extensions, as extensions of neurological form, as human neurological network turned inside out and then complicated by the presence of other humans and their structures, media as the ‘outering’ of a human neurological circuitry. In this exploration: He anticipates the digital era: its neurology, its fluidity, its thermal tendencies.

Biology: and other studies• (1960’s on)• Are hard at work decoding DNA, and benefiting from

re-conceptualizing science as communication• Barbara McClintock contributes to the study of DNA,

by thinking of corn as communicative, as communicating in collective architectures

• Cybernetics, engineering, computational sciences also benefits from thinking of cells, of communicative cells

• Thus the idea of networks, of a means in which collective and its architectures, are confronting the individualistic, still, machine object of science

• Complexity Theory/Relativity Theory: the relational nature of time, matter and the layers of interaction of matter in the world

Image for the theorists to follow

• Frank Gerhy’s architecture

Image for the theorists to follow

• Frank Gerhy’s architecture: Architecture as organism, as responsive to environs, as in reciprocal relations with both the physical and social ground around it, transforming this while also honoring it: this is the idea of the network as a social flow which organizes and directs but is also agile and fluid to the structures around it: in relationship; energized by relationship:

Manuel Castells

• Born in 1942, he comes of age in Spain, as part of anti-fascist student movement.

• Experiences the complexity of fascism, with in European culture that is not communist, and situates Marxist thought as a way of creating resistance

• Sees student resistance in the form of networks• Bulwarked by schools of thought coming of age in regards to

complexity, and the situated contexts of learning (Russian thinking, Vygostsky, Bahktin, Kristeva: all of these situate the environs and information in reciprocal relations)

• Influenced by Marx, Ellul, McLuhan, and by Frankfurt School (Critical theory)

• But also by the study of complex forms in other areas, cybernetics etc.

• By study of urban forms

• Comes of age during the age of student resistance to ‘un-agile’ modernist forms:

• 1968: Student Riots through out the world transform culture: this student resistance and its network structure, in encounter with the fascism of Spain and the rigid bureaucratic structures of post war Europe (and US) is very successful in altering the modernist terrain

Manuel Castells

• Comes of age as these varied nuanced studies of machine and organism are beginning to percolate through culture

• As postmodernism is beginning to take hold of both architecture and philosophy

• As the idea of network is beginning to percolate in technological culture

• As the world is beginning to feel the effects of satellite technologies and more nuanced developments of communications technologies

• AS internet is constructed and comes of age; his thinking in this area becomes mature: 1996 his key work: Trilogy: Information Age: arrives on the scene just as we are trying to comprehend this thing called the internet, and as the cell phone arrives (and also grows to intersect with networks)

• His thinking is ripe when we need it: internationally adept.

Manuel Castells

• Following, Ellul (who explores the phenomena of a technological society: and its complicated mix of machine and organism.)

• Ellul, argues that technology forms the new/ the way in which the industrial complex studied by Marx – has generated, given birth to a new order/organism of complex value structures intertwined with technology at all points…

• Castells becomes convinced that the DNA of this technological society is information and that its structure is networks. That information is the new “value” –such that this complexly interfaced into the value that capital as a technology itself establishes: this transforms the simple equations Marx drew between labor and ownership into more complex structures of value, structures which (as Ellul argued) follow both mechanistic and organistic paths, which also create spaces, topologies and flows.

• He comes to this through the study of urbanity and geography.• Through the study of vibrant cities and their urban networks and also the study of

stagnant cities, including those who populate North America. The relationship of urban spaces to green spaces: information for him thus has a organistic capacity

• Castells dialectical materialism thus often works by establishing poles, tensions which play along the edges of human form, environs and technological forms, paying special attention to the relationship between information as a unit of value amidst the flow of network structures that create spaces for human/information/capital synthesis. He is early in this, well positioned to anticipate the internet.

Manuel Castells: dialectical materialism

• From Elizabeth Losh’s Virtualpolitik: “Manuel Castells argues the despite rapid amelioration of some inequalities in participation in electronic communities, the “digital divide” is being reinscribed along several axes. In particular, he notes that there is a divide between the interacting and the interacted in which the former “select their multidimensional circuits of communication and the latter are provided with a number of prepackaged choices.” p. 65, Losh.

Manuel Castells: Sample

Manuel Castells’ Dialectic: Sample

interacted

interacting

Manuel Castells’ Dialectical Materialism: Sample

interacted-select from multidimensional circuits

interacting: select from prepackaged choices

Manuel Castells’ Dialectical Materialism: Sample

interacted-select from multidimensional circuits

interacting: select from prepackaged choices

The future: Prepackaged choices dominate except for an elite, this elite is vulnerable to information (code), dependent on decoders (hacker culture);System is the message?

Manuel Castells’ Dialectical Materialism: Sample 2

Flows of power

Power of flows


Flows of power: Hierarchy, industrialism, owner-worker; value through ownership, as regulated through nation state complex

Power of flows: flow overrides hierarchies, finds permeable boundaries and enlarges these through flow; erodes hierarchies' and boundaries, merges everything into flow


Flows of power: Hierarchy, industrialism, owner-worker; value through ownership, as regulated through nation state complex

Power of flows: flow overrides hierarchies, finds permeable boundaries and enlarges these through flow; erodes hierarchies' and boundaries, merges everything into flow

Structures that don’t work with flow have mixed results: modernist forms are like dams that give rigidity and can give way (nation-state); when they give way it is disastrous; need new agile forms


time: modernist time; clocks as part of civic space; past important (memorial); history, ritual & time rhythms; distance affects communication, intimacy: wars over time

timeless time: the permanent present; instantcommunication technologies, intimacy without distance; instant wars

Structures that bleed; blurring time spaces together; it pays to emphasize youthful ripeness (this brings generations together oddly, blurs boundaries between; intimacy becomes timeless; generationally confused; clocks absent from civic space; efforts to erase evidence of aging; past = pastiche of homogenized nostalgic forms which function as (fake?) memory- forms that blend to this press toward the present survive; wars forged on images which distort intimacies. Freedom from time? Is this freedom an illusion?


individual/social and collective identity

network?: “how are identities made when traditions are torn apart?” p.109 text.

nation-state/globalization: the nation that was the source of collective identity problematizes the individual in order to meet global demands (example labor in China)

"The illusion we can live on a wonderful, shrinking planet, and ignore the 40 percent of the population hardly surviving with less than two dollars a day, is simply self-denial. Epidemics, wars, terrorism and moral outrage will reach us in our protected world.” Gerstner interview with Castells, 1999


labor was patriarchal: hierarchical work structures

feminized; versatile; flexible work structures

Patriarchal structures were rigid, inequitable, unresponsive to network social order-but provided some security for those it legitimated; monumental new work order is responsive, creative, environmentally and socially responsive; yet leaves the mark of vulnerability-individual is sacrificed to the flow; network use. New work order is deciduous.

Manuel Castells’ Dialectical Materialism: Sample 6 (Stratification)

linear structures of labor, communications, capital: information is matter of decoding and coding (and hierarchy, i.e. being trained to decode and recode) (information); class order (place in social order)

network structures of labor and communications;information is network affiliated; its is matter of hub, node, and navigation; alongside network priorities; visibility combined with capital: informational; those unable to be of use to network are (marginalized)

Capital is submissive to network; identity politics; network; media savvy; image managers;

Herbert Schiller (November 5, 1919 - January 29, 2000)

• Similar age group to Castells: post world war: Age of rigid form in reaction to perils of an early era: Influenced by the development and sophistication of broadcast technologies: television; satellite technologies: part of a group that confronts “the rigidity” while theorizing the new forms

• Influential especially on international communications: adapts Innis’/McLuhan/and other theorists to these sphere (along with Marxian themes)

image From Wikipedia


• Similar age group to Castells: post world war: Age of rigid form in reaction to perils of an early era: Influenced by the development and sophistication of broadcast technologies: television; satellite technologies: part of a group that confronts “the rigidity” while theorizing the new forms

• Influential especially on North American international communications: adapts Innis’ thinking to these sphere (along with Marxian themes)

image from Wikipedia


• “Some commentators may be enthused by the internet, the spread of new technologies, or simply the pleasures of soap opera, but for Herbert Schiller, who has died aged 80, the $100bn alliances between the likes of America On-line, Times Warner and EMI were of greater consequence. They symbolized a world of information dominated by consumerist values and commercial principles. Alongside Noam Chomsky, Schiller occupied a premier position as a critic of American media practice and policy. (obituary, by Webster in The Guardian, Londres, 18.02.2000.)


Herbert Schiller: Dialectical materialism: Hermeneutics of suspicion

• Look behind the dynamics of cultural myth(s) to assess who benefiting from it?

• What cultural myths dominate?• Who dominates them, directs

them, manages them• How does the dominant culture

benefit from these myths?• How do they contribute to the

formation of periphery and center (marginalization



• ‘Look behind’ the technologies of communications to see how they aggregate in relationships to dominance ?

• What cultural myths dominate, through these technologies?

• Who dominates these technologies, directs them, manages them?

• How does this dominant culture benefit from the technologies connected to exporting dominating cultural myths?

• How do they contribute to the formation of periphery and center (marginalization)?



• To summarise: What is called the “Information Society” is, in fact, the production, processing, and transmission of a very large amount of data about all sorts of matters….. Most of the data are produced to meet very specific needs of super-corporations, national goverment bureaucracies, and the military establishment of the advanced industrial state”…one must ask who benefits from this production?

• IT and enabling technologies make transnational companies possible

• Information networks link companies; but what interests are served by the links?



• globalization can be thought of as time-space compression (following Castells)

• IBM computer – architecture designed in the US, hard disk drive produced in Singapore, keyboard in Malaysia, memory chips in Japan/Taiwan/Korea, computer assembled in China

• Impact on the polity– Nation-state cannot solve

transnational problems, e.g. pollution, human trafficking

– Emergence of transnational political institutions, (from



• “One major debate concerns:– The spread of global [read

American] culture, e.g. Coke Cola, McDonald’s, Disneyland, Levi’s jeans, …

• Has “globalization” enriched or impoverished culture around the world?– Cultural imperialism/hegemony or

cultural plurality?”(materials from chuyw_global_culture_text.ppt (www.edb.gov.hk)



• “Cultural Imperialism: Late capitalism– Individuals find no meaning in

work, but depend on consumption to express and assert one’s identity

– Capitalism’s search for profit find new markets to conquer, transform culture into commodity [items of desire to be bought and sold]. Dominant corporations mostly from the US rely upon the global media to achieve the purpose”

– (materials from chuyw_global_culture_text.ppt (www.edb.gov.hk)



• “Destroy indigenous culture– Decline of tradition [e.g. sexual liberation

propagated by Hollywood movies and decline of the family]

– Distortion of local culture, e.g. the case of “ethnic tourism”

• Transnational Imperialism: it is not that the US set out to dominate world cultures with its take on McDonald’s, Coke and Mascara: But the effect is that the medias of selling and buying bleed across these boundaries and thus end up as ingredients for international relations for the countries connected; they do this outside of the controls of both countries; and situate “market” as elusive, slippery and beyond control. There is a way in which these “double dominate”

• (materials from chuyw_global_culture_text.ppt (www.edb.gov.hk)



• Information parity and disparity: challenging cultural imperialism on all fronts, demanding and creating a new world information order: in which agency over information and its relationship with culture is restored.



Herbert Schiller: Dialectical materialism: The commoditization of information

• Information stratification: information poor and information rich:

• Access to information becomes a factor of wealth and income. The general public and the State are progressively excluded…the division inside society between information “haves” and information “have-nots ”deepens, just as it does between nations, making the less developed ones-which in the information age means the overwhelming majority –still more dependent on the few information generators, processors and transmitters (Schiller, as quoted in text, p. 147).



• Stratification: of corporations and technologies of communications

• As opposed to localized small enterprises, the emergence of huge corporations crossing national boundaries is connected also to the concentration of communications technologies connected to information, both of these become savvy in using the shell game of location as a kind of non location, as a means to disconnect from the consequences of place and its accountability structures; communications which does reach the public realm is structured around the doubled tasks of confusion and market, such that place is misaligned in the public sphere, and the costs of labor are hidden, often within the selling feature of what ever commoditization is at hand appears to contribute to the dream which is only available to many as image only.



• Schiller aimed his analysis of all communication structures, looking internationally. His analysis cross borders and include television, telephony, market advertisements, news and the more subtle and less investigated relationship between finance, reporting and market.



Jurgen Habermas: Born in 1929• Major life regret in his own and his

families participation in the rise of the Nazi party

• Very concerned to configure the means whereby public freedoms are compromised, lost, abandoned, obscured, secretly stolen, forthrightly stolen

• Very concerned to enable postmodern society to preserve democracy: not speculative and passive democracy (where being an audience, consumer is main action) but a participatory democracy where polity is active and information is useful for rational discourse in the public sphere

Jurgen Habermas: Vital polity• Traced the rise of the public sphere• The opening of the public commons

to rational and informed discourse• Had a surprisingly short life span,

during the enlightenment when literacy and communications technologies were at an equilibrium; where reason was valued as a means to create the civic, where commitment to creating support structures for vital information separate from the market and state evolved

• Where major mode of public communication was speech/text

Jurgen Habermas: Refeudalization• Today’s society is troubled by a tendency to return to feudalism• That is public affairs become occasions for the displays of the powers

that be, not true exchanges of information- but rather information used for the purposes of dominating interests.

• Though democracies have tried to battle monopoly, capitalism has now evolved to the point that the medias function is constantly being pulled into the orbit of gravity which is created by huge capitalist interests

• These interests which to look like they are invested in vital polity, but what they are really invested in is profit, they become remarkably good at dominating the informatics with images that are informational only in so much as they support their interests

• Example: Shopping Mall: looks and feels like a wonderfully free place; yet try to protest there, try to put up even one sign advertising an election, or an invitation to gather for exchange over public concerns: the mall is committed to maintaining “a neutrality” that does not distract from its true interests (shopping). This would not be so discouraging if other public spaces in many towns, had not disappeared in order to make room for malls

Jurgen Habermas: public sphere and information change

• The rise of Public Relations culture: the abandonment of the criteria of rationality which once shaped public argument. The idea of gathering information to make the best decision possible: is replaced. Not with a set of structures committed to enabling the public to gather accurate information for rational decision making; but rather with a set of structures designed to mold opinion (right down to poll gathering and reporting): This is a reiteration of propaganda

• The public sphere is something that is vital to democratic culture: it is sacred, in the sense, that to loose it is to lose democracy itself. It is more than protecting free speech; it is protecting the mechanism that support public access to robust information and to a robust processing of that information.

• The public sphere is that important space between commerce and its interests, and government and its interests. It imagines the citizen as agentive, and able to engage in rational acts, activities and discourse

• Webster’s example: the BBC and public library system: • Currently: In the US the public library system has been compromised,

and the public communication services are under severe cuts

Jurgen Habermas: participatory democracy

• Democracy has many definitions: and has evolved through these variations to a kind of passive citizenship, which is affiliated with consumption, channel or media choice.

• Television which was once a possible media of shared communal experience, is increasingly privatized with viewers watching programs tailored to their view- it is no longer a reliable encounter with “other” but increasingly only an encounter with the self.

• True of radio as well, and news sources.• These as well are increasingly permeated by structures, forms and

information that is available yes, but to serve hidden purposes and agendas (generally market purposes).

• Media which irrigates public discourse has been permeated at all levels by commerce

• Commerce does not want to full imagine public agency: it wants to imagine purchase. It’s address and rhetorical imagination is not aimed at a multidimensional citizen unless this citizen is connected to commerce. Pale democracy. Pale civic.

Jurgen Habermas: the assault on the public sphere

• • Mechanisms of assault on the public sphere (p.177 in text)

– Reduction in public commitments to public sphere (funding reductions)– Commercialization of services (i.e. library fines should support libraries)– Arguments that now the “public sphere” is well off enough to support its own

information gathering efforts– Arguments that these “public resources” should be neutral (like shopping malls)

that their keepers should have a neutrality (that often strangely enough seems to mimic that “neutrality” of market and commercialization of services)

– As market structures dominate ideologies of “well run” – the public becomes trained to demand imitations of “corporatized” services, while at the same time not engaging in the funding it would take to provide such “well” run services. These debates often tend to hold organizations whose funding is constantly cut and constantly disordered through public reprioritization to standards of organization and accountability that they are not able or willing to fund.

– This is also true in terms of services and items provided are, expected to “keep with times, while funding around training, technological updates, and books becomes contested. This contestability occurs also in regards to sources that are checked out a lot (the latest video game) versus those that support robust information

Jurgen Habermas: the assault on the public sphere

•

• Mechanisms of assault on the public sphere (p.195 in text)– Webster links Habermas’s work to Neil Postman’s: to

include the ways in which infotainment seems to degrade or saturate the public interest, creating addictions and financial support structures for “non information”

– often at the expense of robust information

Anthony Giddens (1938)• Globalization is not primarily economic. It's not solely driven by the global

marketplace. It's actually about what we're doing now. • The driving force of the new globalization is the communications revolution. • And if you want to put a technological fix on it, the turning point would be

would be the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first time when there was an effective communications satellite sent up above the earth that made possible instantaneous communication from one part of the world to another. To me, that changed more or less the whole of late 20th century history.

• Take the example of the decline of the Soviet Union. This was very much related to the fact that the Soviet Union couldn't compete in the new kind of society and the new kind of economy which a hooked-up global electronic world creates. The Soviet Union was pretty competitive in the old industrial economy, but wasn't able to compete in the new globalized weightless economy, nor were its politics appropriate to it, because in an era of high communications soft power tends to replace hard power. The kind of authoritarian top-down power, which the Soviet Union represented par excellence, becomes largely dysfunctional for effective management or effective politics. You are talking about big packages of changes here in which key things are continuing the transformation of communication. edge interview

Lord Anthony Giddens• Well, you're talking about a marriage

here of communication and computers. For example, you couldn't have 24-hour financial markets without that marriage of global satellite technology and computerization, which is one of the key convergences of the time. But as we know, there are new convergences happening between communication, computation, and biology, and that looks like the next kind of process of technological transformation. Edge interview, page 3

Anthony Giddens (Structuration)• “the theory of structuration, which is the

understanding of the relationship between individuals and the conditions around them. We should view life in society as a series of ongoing activities and practices that people carry on, but which at the same time reproduce larger institutions.”

• Anthony Giddens describing his theory• http://www.speakersassociates.com/Lord%20Anthony%20Giddens:858.html

Anthony Giddens (Third Way)• “Third Way'. The Third Way represents the

renewal of social democracy in a world where the views of the old left have become obsolete, while those of the new right are inadequate and contradictory. A new social democratic agenda is emerging that is integrated, robust and wide-ranging, which can also rekindle political idealism.”


Anthony Giddens (Reflexivity)• The Third Way represents the renewal of social

democracy in a world where communications technologies are now available that enable a reflexivity: a means for us to reflect in ways that we have not previously been able. While these can become distracting, these technologies also have the capacity to reflect ourselves back to ourselves and thus also become mirrors for improvement.


Anthony Giddens (Reflexivity)• Such reflexivity must admit that many current “nations”- have not been

created in optimal conditions• That war has been more of a bedfellow to the creation of social order

than we like to admit• That defense is part of this social order, yet war does also destroy social

orders: this tension and its pains need full acknowledgement• That information becomes appropriated to wars, to official and

unofficial wars• That surveillance is part of culture, and yet it problematizes culture• That human rights have become increasingly universalized through

global technologies while simultaneously being challenged by them• That we linger in the tensions created by right and left with no easy

solution, certainly with no solution that can pick one over the other as voting technology inscribes: the portrayal of consumption as solution to the cultural gap between left and right is thus logically flawed.

• We need to admit these tension, rather than use them for battles that will get us nowhere.

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INFORMATION X TECHNOLOGY X SOCIETY