The print version of this essay appears in The Political
Economy of Information, Vincent Mosko and Janet Wasko, eds.
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988): 45-75. It is used
here with the permission of the authors.
There are some who still fondly imagine that knowledge, casting the clear light of awareness, inspires and contains goodness within itself.
--Dora Russell, The Religion of the Machine Age
How are scholars interested in communications to make sense of the
sea- changes currently taking place there consequent on the arrival
of cable, satellite, and other computer-communications technologies?
Not unexpectedly, the established paradigms have been drawn upon.
Thus Nicholas Garnham, approaching from a perspective of political
economy, raised many important points about the historical
transformation and the growth of new media/information markets.
Emphasizing the strategies of transnational corporations, the current
crisis and recession as the contexts within which the new media
technologies are being born, the industrialization of culture, and
the colonization of leisure, Garnham's approach is conceptually
familiar. To the fore is a stress on the economic underpinnings of
recent developments and the significance of market principles for
shaping the "communications revolution." The function of new
technologies is "to develop the market for so- called information
goods and services as a new growth sector" that expresses both "the
needs of the corporate sector for enhanced communications facilities
and the increasingly desperate national search for a share of the
international market in high technology products." At the core of
analysis and explanation of developments is "the expansion of price
and profit" (Garnham, 1983, pp. 11, 14). To Garnham, the economic
factor is primary, and it is evidently shaping and indeed intruding
deep into the culture and polity.
Perhaps predictably, Garnham's account was soon criticized by someone
unsympathetic to his economic reductionism. Ian Connell (1983),
insisting on the relative autonomy of the cultural, lays stress on
the ideological dimensions and possibilities of the "communications
revolution." Starting from the principle that communications are
essentially matters of interpretation and that there are limits to
the ability of economic forces to shape consciousness, Connell
regards Garnham's analysis as an "irrelevance." He is prepared to
forego Garnham's structural account, deal "with the potential of
things as they are and as they will soon become," and to welcome the
potential diversity of programming heralded by new technologies.
Taking as given the new technologies and the economic influences
bearing upon them, Connell's interest is at an altogether different
level, the sphere of consumption, of responses and attitudes toward
programs, rather than the sphere of production.
This is an altogether familiar terrain--the ideological versus the
political- economic perspective. It is one that we contend is
conceptually and empirically inadequate to appreciate present
developments. Therefore, this chapter is an attempt at once to
criticize and go beyond the presently dominant paradigms by which
communications are theorized and at the same time to draw attention
to important dimensions of the "communications revolution" that are
overlooked by both political economy and textual accounts.
It should be admitted that we are not agnostic as regards the two
approaches. We are skeptical about the relevance of Connell's
ideological focus on the media to an analysis of the upheavals that
we are now experiencing. Indeed, we find naive his faith that the
expansion of productive forces (the new technologies) by corporate
capital is in some way aloof from social values yet able to proclaim
an era that will celebrate the values of abundance and diversity. To
some extent, then, this article is intended as a defense and support
of Garnham's analysis and argument. Like him, we believe that the
"communications revolution" can best be theoretically understood from
the perspective of political economy. But having said this, we do not
want entirely to align ourselves with Garnham's position. At the
heart of our differences with him is the question of what actually
constitutes a political economy of the media. For all its value,
Garnham's approach comes, in our view, close to being a purely
economic analysis of the new technologies. Although it identifies
much in the dynamics of the process whereby the "information
revolution" is being manufactured, it does not in fact constitute a
political economy. Garnham's interpretation does not fully
explain the transformation we are currently witnessing, and his
argument should be pushed further. In the following discussion we
seek to sketch some of the elements that are absent in Garnham's
analysis in an attempt to offer a more adequate political economy of
the new information and communications technologies.
Our hope is that doing this will make it possible to move the
argument beyond what has become a sterile debate within, especially,
British media studies: the standoff between the advocates of
textual/ideological analysis, on the one hand, and the camp of
political economy, on the other. Thus Connell's critique of
Garnham--which extends his earlier criticism of the work of Graham
Murdock and Peter Golding (Connell, 1978)--grows out of, and
reinforces, this theoretical schism. The same polarization is
insistently present in Carl Gardner's criticism of Garnham's
"reliance on a grossly overdetermining economic analysis"; Garnham,
it is suggested, is guilty of "privileging the moment of production
and the commercial intentions of the producers." Against this is
counterposed a "politics of representation," a consideration of
"struggles around meaning" (Gardner, 1984, p. 45). Thus we have two
distinct theoretical approaches and emphases glaring at each other
across the chasm of the base/superstructure divide (Robins and
Webster, 1979; 1987b). Each undoubtedly has its own important
insights and truths, and each identifies real weaknesses in the other
"school." In our view, however, this theoretical rift has become an
obstruction to theoretical bearings. Is there really only a choice
between economic analysis(ownership, control) and the "politics of
representation"? We believe that both a narrowly economic perspective
and a reliance upon ideological/textual analysis fail to bring out
some of the most salient aspects of the communications
"revolution."
How, then, can we move the debate on? First, and most generally, it
is necessary to reject the idea that the current transformation is
simply an economic/technological process, that it is
simply a struggle to establish new products and markets in the
face of recession. Our approach suggests, against this, that the
upheaval we are undergoing is very much a social and political
matter: that is to say, the "communications revolution" represents a
profound restructuring of social, political, and cultural
relationships in the face of a crisis that is very much more than an
economic recession. Second, and more particularly, we believe that
this approach allows us to identify significant patterns of social
change that are inaccessible to textual/ideological theory andto
economic analysis in terms of price and profit. There is an important
social space that is invisible to any simple base/superstructure
conceptions of society, a space hardly explored in British media
theory. There is a sphere in which capital seeks to influence, not
ideas or profits, but the very rhythms, patterns, pace, texture, and
disciplines of everyday life. Within our wider focus upon power
relations in society, this represents--to use Foucault's term--the
terrain upon which operate the "systems of micro-power." For us, the
"communicationsrevolution" is socially significant insofar as it
represents a recomposition of the microstructures--and of the
experiences--of everyday life. And crucially important here is a
consideration of how technologies invest and inform the patterns of
culture, of the whole way of life.
In the following discussion we seek to explore some aspects of this
approach to the new media/information industries. The analysis is by
no means exhaustive; it remains a sketch of some of the crucial
issues that are neglected in the articles of Garnham, Connell, and
Gardner--issues that center upon the relations between information,
technology, and everyday life.
The present mutation of the culture industries cannot be
understood in isolation. We can only develop an adequate political
economy if we situate these industries within a wider social and
historical context. We seek, therefore, to understand the more
momentous changes that are now reverberating through society by
reinstating the concept of totality (cf. Jay, 1984) as essential to
grasp their significance, scale, and meaning, and we situate these
changes within the historical trajectory of the search for capital
accumulation and obstacles placed in the way of this endeavor.
The first thing that ought to be emphasized is that the
transformation of broadcasting and the mass media is just part of a
far wider restructuring of society and social relations, one that has
been occasioned by the strategic exploitation of microelectronics
(and, to some extent, other new technologies) as an economic and
political escape route out of the present crisis. We are witnessing
not just the convergence of various new media/information
technologies (video, cable, satellite, videotex, personal computers),
but also, and more importantly, the convergence and integration of
broader, and hitherto discrete, sectors of the electronics industry
(particularly data processing and telecommunications). Along with
this comes a collision of the interests of corporations operating
till now in relatively safe and separate areas (IBM, AT&T, Xerox,
RCA, Exxon, etc.). We are talking, then, not simply of sizeable
tremors in the media landscape, but, in fact, of a more fundamental
restructuring and recomposition of the industrial landscape and,
consequently, of the existing pattern of capital accumulation--a
transformation that has been described by sociologists like Daniel
Bell in terms of the emergence of a new social era, that of
"postindustrial society" (see Webster and Robins, 1986, and Robins
and Webster, 1987a). What we must be aware of is the fact that the
new microelectronics/information technologies are changing not just
entertainment and leisure pursuits but, potentially, all
spheres of society: work (robotics, office technology); political
management; policing and military activities (electronic warfare);
communication; consumption (electronic funds transfer, retailing
technology). If the combined, though disaggregated, forces of
multinational corporations and political interests succeed in the
systematic introduction of these new technologies--from robotics and
data banks to cable television and personal computers--and,
particularly, in laying an integrated national electronic grid (the
"wired society"), then social life will be transformed in almost all
aspects. And two key areas may be highlighted as being of particular
political significance: the reconfiguration of the relation between
work and leisure (the so-called leisure revolution) and the
exploitation of data banks and surveillance technology for control
purposes.
The strategic development of microelectronics and information
technology will, then, have reverberations throughout the social
structures of advanced capitalist societies. The real meaning and
significance of this can be more fully grasped if we situate the
present upheaval and restructuring in its historical context. But in
terms of what kind of history? The history of "technological
revolutions"? The economic history of "long waves" in capitalist
growth (as theorized by Kondratieff and Schumpeter)? Neither of
these, in fact. For the purposes of our political economy we want to
draw upon the work of Jean-Paul de Gaudemar (1979), who periodizes
capitalist development in terms of the ways in which capital uses
labor power and "mobilizes" populations for the production of surplus
value. Gaudemar refers to the early 19th century as the period of
"absolute mobilization." At this time the traditional way of life of
rural populations is systematically undermined in order to create a
docile and disciplined factory workforce. This process involves
disciplinary efforts, both within the factory and across the fabric
of everyday life: on the one hand, the division of labor, waged
employment, time-thrift, and the discipline of the "factory-prison";
on the other hand, the undermining of traditional culture (fairs,
sports, etc.), the control of social space, and the moralization of
the workforce through religion and schooling.
During the course of the 19th century, absolute mobilization is
replaced by "relative mobilization." In this process the earlier form
of "external" discipline and control--the "policing" of workers--is
replaced by an internal factory discipline in which technology now
plays a central role and in which control coincides with the goal of
productivity and surplus-value extraction: the machine as dual
instrument of control and of increased productivity. This line of
development finds its apotheosis in the early 20th century with the
scientific management of Frederick Winslow Taylor and, particularly,
the automated assembly line of Henry Ford. In the Fordist factory the
worker is divested of particularity and skill and subordinated to the
logic of the machine. In the words of a contemporary American
sociologist, "the task of the worker requires simply speed,
dexterity, alertness and nervous endurance to carry the 'robot'
through dull, monotonous, fatiguing, relentlessly automatic
operations" (Dunn, 1929, p. 62). The Fordist plant becomes an
integrated and automated complex, a megamachine that paces and
disciplines the workforce. Control is then truly structural. The
time-clock and the assembly line prevail. Relations of power,
subsumed into the functioning of technology, become automatic and
invisible.
Fordism represents, then, the culmination of relative mobilization as
a regimen within the factory. But (as with absolute mobilization)
relative mobilization, particularly in its Fordist apotheosis,
entails more than control over the immediate process of production:
it necessitates a restructuring of the relation between factory and
the outside world, and, consequently, an extensive recodification of
the microstructures of everyday life. In this sense, "Fordism"
designates not just a "revolution" in the factory, but also the
creation of "a whole way of life." And it is this latter aspect that
concerns us particularly for the purposes of our present
argument.
What, then, are the components of Fordism as a social system? Four
broad and interrelated areas may be identified in what must be a
rather cursory overview. First, Fordism entails the progressive
intrusion into the sphere of reproduction--leisure, the family, and
everyday life--by capitalist social
relations.[1] This has
occurred largely through the growth of consumerism as a way of
life, for where there is mass production there must necessarily
be mass consumption. As John Alt has argued, "the early social
context where social relations and consciousness were largely
mediated by the conditions of working class experience has been
largely superseded by a socially-private existence mediated by
consumerism" (Alt, 1976, pp. 68-69).
Where there once existed a relative independence (pig-rearing,
smallholdings, weaving and sewing, etc.), there now exists a thorough
dependence upon capitalistically produced and marketed commodities
(Trachtenberg, 1982). The reproduction of social life is fuelled by
the products of capitalist factories--not only its material
reproduction, but also, and increasingly, its psychic
reproduction.
A second characteristic aspect of Fordism has been the increasing
state intervention in the management of society. There has
been a tendency toward "a more directly political control over the
production and reproduction of daily life, extending methods of
factory discipline into the state's management of the social
totality" (Levidow and Young, 1981, p. 5). Under the conditions of
Fordist production--an intricate and technologically mediated
division of labor, the integration of conditions of production and
reproduction/consumption, the erosion of traditional forms of social
integration--society becomes more complexly interrelated and
interdependent and also increasingly susceptible to fragmentation and
disintegration. In order to ensure the conditions of social
integration and cohesion, state management and regulation become
indispensable. And this intervention, as Joachim Hirsch has
suggested, may take two distinct forms: the state as "both the
materially supporting 'caretaker of existence' and the controlling,
repressive 'surveillance state'." On the one hand, the state
undertakes "bureaucratically organized regulation" in order to
guarantee not only the conditions of material production (e.g.,
economic planning, fiscal policies, scientific research and
development), but also those of social reproduction (welfare, social
policy). On the other hand, it becomes increasingly implicated in
those surveillance and intelligence activities appropriate to what
Hirsch calls the "security-state" (Hirsch, 1981, pp. 83, 82, 87).
The third and fourth aspects of Fordism are related and involve the
attempted capitalist annexation of time and space
respectively. Fordism extends and deepens that process through
which capital has sought to impose its rhythm and tempo upon time and
time-consciousness. The period of relative mobilization has been
characterized by "a gradual separation of work time from personal
time . . . in which, paradoxically, work time and "leisure" time
[have] gradually become more alike" (Thrift, 1981, p. 64).
The times of production and reproduction have become increasingly
continuous--an integrated time subject to a calculating and external
time-discipline. Time is segmented and compartmentalized according to
the different tasks of production/reproduction, divided and
subdivided to be used as productively, intensively, and deeply as
possible. As Foucault has suggested in another context, "power is
articulated directly onto time; it assures its control and guarantees
its use" (Foucault, 1979, p. 160). And, like time, so too have space
and spatial relations been colonized by capital. For, to quote
Foucault again, "discipline proceeds from the distribution of
individuals in space" (ibid., p. 141). Under Fordism this has
primarily entailed the centralization of social structures in order
to ensure monopolization and the efficient functioning of power: the
concentration and centralization of productive units, of
communications systems, of bureaucratic organizations, of urban
structures, and so on. Complementing this is the increasing
privatization and marginalization of everyday life, symbolized in the
serial mobility of the private car and the isolation of
televiewing.
Our argument, then, is that Fordism puts social life under the dual
regimen of productivity and discipline. The reign of capital, which
began as a revolution in the "manner of production," has become a
revolution in the "manner of living" (Granou, 1974). Now, it may
appear that the account we have given so far is somewhat
functionalist and determinist in the way it presents the unrelenting
domination of capital over social life. But let us be clear that we
are describing a tendency. Let us emphasize that mobilization
invokes countermobilizaton: the attempt to discipline populations is
the struggle to contain and unify an always potentially disruptive
and unstable "selfmobilization." Indeed, the present crisis, we would
argue, is the consequence of a struggle between the forces of
mobilization and counter-mobilization. Characterized by Garnham as
essentially an economic matter, it is in fact a crisis of, and a
challenge to, Fordism as a way of life. Although Fordism (supported
by Keynesian economic strategies) produced a period of economic
prosperity and comparative social detente, it also produced other,
less desirable, consequences ("side-effects"): ecological pollution,
the overexploitation of natural resources, the threat of nuclear
annihilation, and so on. In the face of these threats, opposition has
been mobilized by diverse social movements (socialists and trade
unionists; ecologists; the women's movement; blacks; antiwar
campaigners; health campaigners; etc.). Through the current crisis
capital struggles to absorb and defuse these movements of protest. So
evident now is the devastation wrought by the Fordist "revolution"
that it has become necessary to restructure the mode of accumulation
and the way of life. And the "information revolution" promises to do
exactly this. It offers the possibility of assimilating demands
related to the quality of life as the motor of a new phase of
accumulation; the new information technologies promise to meet and
satisfy the clamor for more freedom, democracy, leisure,
decentralization, and individual creativity. According to one
observer, "the revolution in telematics is a great human
revolution, something capable of transforming all our lives as
workers, consumers, citizens and individuals" (Butler, 1981, p. 4).
That, at least, is the sales-pitch: the reality, as we shall indicate
in a moment, is somewhat different.
This long preamble brings us to the crux of our argument. We are now
in a position to draw together the threads of our discussion--to
assess what is likely to be the real direction of the current
restructuring process and the real impact of the new technologies.
Thus far we have sketched out a historical context within which to
situate these technologies. It is, however, a contextualization that
is informed by a particular theoretical and conceptual emphasis: it
is through the concept of "mobilization" that we can explore the
historical impact of capital--especially through the exploitation of
technology--upon the way of life. And it is this theoretical emphasis
that allows us to critically examine the probable consequences of
information technologies and to ask what the "great human revolution"
really adds up to. Our argument is that the so-called information
revolution in fact represents a significant new stage in the strategy
of relative mobilization-- one in which technological domination
becomes extensively and systematically used in spheres far beyond the
workplace. This "revolution" is both an intensification and, in
important ways, a reconfiguration of Fordism as a way of life.
Against Garnham's economic emphasis and Connell's stress on ideology
and signifying practices, we want to suggest that this seismic shift
is important insofar as it represents a restructuring and
reorganization of relations of power. What we feel is lacking in most
accounts of the new information/ communications technologies is
consideration of the ways in which they will articulate and express
power relations. Particularly important for us is the question of
what Foucault calls the "microphysics of power": the ways in which
information technologies will provide the filaments through which
power and control will invade the social body as a whole; the extent
to which integrated cable systems, particularly, will assist and
support the "capillary functioning of power" (Foucault). Our concern
is with the new technologies as cultural and political forces, ones
that will shape and inform the microstructures of everyday life.
We can concretize this argument by looking at some of the ways in
which social and cultural processes will be transformed by the new
technologies; in so doing, we can bring out the nature and
significance of those changes that have a bearing on the present
recomposition of the media /communications industries. As we have
already indicated, information technologies will have a profound
impact on work and leisure, and, particularly, on their
interrelation. It is clear that, in the "information society," the
deskilling of much work will continue under various forms of
automation (Shaiken, 1984; Wilkinson, 1983). Moreover, this tendency
will extend increasingly to jobs in the service sector, with
accelerating office automation and the Taylorization of much
intellectual labor. The force of these developments will be felt
perhaps most acutely by women workers; whether they work in the
factory, the office, or the home, the quality of their daily lives is
likely to deteriorate (Huws, 1982, 1984).
Beyond the intensification of work discipline, however, there is
another issue that is of more consequence for the present discussion.
Here we are referring to the prospect that, as a consequence of
rising technological unemployment, the whole relationship between
work and leisure may be transformed, and along with it the quality of
our everyday lives. André Gorz has argued that "salaried work
will by the end of the century have ceased to be the main
occupation"; in the "microelectronics revolution," he suggests,
"economy of time (of work, of personnel) is the primary objective"
(Gorz, 1983, pp. 216, 212).
Gorz pushes the argument further: "In the context of the current
crisis and technological revolution it is absolutely impossible to
restore full employment by quantitative economic growth. The
alternative rather lies in a different way of managing the abolition
of work: instead of a society based on mass unemployment, a society
can be built in which time has been freed" (Gorz, 1982, p. 3). The
choice, he explains, is "either a socially controlled,
emancipatory abolition of work or its oppressive, antisocial
abolition" (ibid., p. 8). Gorz confronts the question of how, in a
world of disappearing (waged) work and expanding "leisure" time, we
shall use the time that has been "liberated." In the "postindustrial
society," what will be the content, the experience, the quality, of
our everyday lives? We have doubts about Gorz's optimistic faith in
our ability to appropriate information technologies for socialist
goals (Webster and Robins, 1986, Ch. 4), but we agree with him when
he says that the socialist use of time should be defined by our
ability to "relearn to apply ourselves to what we do, not because we
are paid to do it, but for the leisure of creating, of giving,
learning, of establishing non-market and nonhierarchic, practical and
affective relations with others" (Gorz, 1983, p. 216).
This objective is important in the face of what capital has in store
for us. For what it enthusiastically and ideologically dubs the
"leisure revolution" will be quite another matter. If capital has its
way, the likelihood is that the realm of "leisure" and "free" time
will be further subsumed under the regime of consumerism; the trends
apparent in Fordist society will expand and deepen. The more (or
less) affluent redundancy of enforced leisure will be serviced from
the factories of the culture industry; commodified entertainment and
services will be pumped into the individual household in a steady,
metered flow. And the tendency will be towards increasingly
privatized and passive recreation and consumption. In this consumer
Cockaigne, an increasing number of social functions and activities
will be mediated by the domestic television console: not just
entertainment, but also information services, financial and
purchasing transactions, communication, remote working, medical and
educational services. Through the television console, and it alone,
we shall gain access to what has been called the "network
marketplace." In order to become socially and culturally
enfranchised, the individual household must necessarily become
heavily capitalized, investing in the essential video,
communications, videotex, and computing technologies. Technologies
will proliferate in the homes to mediate the work of consumption and
reproduction, to facilitate the increasingly demanding and complex
experience of everyday living. As one enthusiast puts it, "for many
consumers, the daily business of living has become sufficiently
complex, costly, and labor intensive that some machine assistance is
not only feasible but necessary." The answer, she believes, is that
"the family's information, record keeping, and communications needs
must be responded to electronically through the new technologies of
the 1980s" (Jones, 1983, p. 152). Another, more critical, commentator
cuts through this bunkum when he suggests that this process is,
rather, subordinating the domestic sphere to "the productivist
criteria of profitability, speed and conformity to the norm." Through
the "information revolution" capital invades the very cracks and
pores of social life: "the industrialization, through home computers,
of physical and psychical care and hygiene, children's education,
cooking or sexual technique is precisely designed to generate
capitalist profits from activities still left to individual fantasy"
(Gorz, 1982, p. 84).
These are forms through which the reach of capital is extended
throughout society. And fundamental, now, to these strategies is the
exploitation of information technologies. Crucial here is the way in
which these technologies can, potentially, extend and deepen
capital's hold on temporal and spatial relations. What the
"information revolution" means, in the case of time, is the
acceleration of that process, which we have already outlined, whereby
the sphere of "leisure" and reproduction becomes better subject to
time-discipline. Increasingly, "leisure" will become amenable to
arrangement by capital, which can now access the consumer via
electronic/ information consoles capable of penetrating the deepest
recesses of the home, the most private and inaccessible spheres to
date, offering entertainment, purchases, news, education, and much
more round the clock--and priced, metered, and monitored by corporate
suppliers. In these ways "free" time becomes increasingly
subordinated to the "labor" of consumption.
The great virtue, however, of the new technologies lies in their
capacity to transcend the limitations of Fordist time-discipline.
For, under Fordism, with its rigid division of the day into work time
and reproduction time, there develops both a constraining
inflexibility in the exploitation of time and also a limitation on
the depth and intensity of (productive) time use. With the
combination of work, leisure, and consumption functions in the
domestic information terminal, however, the rigid distinction between
production (work time) and reproduction ("free" time) may be eroded.
Domestic cable networks facilitate the restructuring of patterns of
time use on a more flexible and individual basis; they provide the
technological means to break the times of working, consumption, and
recreation into "pellets" of any duration, which may then be arranged
in complex, individualized configurations and shifted to any part of
the day or night. The objective is, of course, to intensify and
de-rigidify the exploitation of both labor power and "consumption
power."
Related to the annexation of time is the colonization of geographic
and social space. The impetus of Fordism as a social system was based
upon control through the centralization and concentration of spatial
structures and relations. The most insistent claim from the
architects and ideologues of the "information society" is that the
new technologies can halt this centralizing tendency and inaugurate a
new era of decentralization. Thus the influential Nora Report argues
that information technology "allows the decentralization of even the
autonomy of basic units," such that we can expect the passage "from
an industrial, organic society to a polymorphous information
society," one that is composed of "innumerable mobile groups" (Nora
and Minc, 1980, pp. 126-27). It is, indeed, the case that
decentralization is on the agenda. This is apparent in the new
"demassified" media (cable, video, citizens' band radio, videotex)
that are now undermining those patterns of centralization,
synchronization, and standardization characteristic of the mass
media. These new media, it is suggested, provide tailor-made
communication and recreation, promoting thereby greater diversity,
choice, and freedom. In the sphere of production, too, there are
signs of disillusionment with massive (Fordist) corporations and
bureaucracies, and of a growing aspiration toward small, federated
enterprises. The new communications technologies are the key to the
disseminated factory and enterprise, for they allow productive (and
bureaucratic) structures to become fragmented and dispersed--on both
a national and international scale--without losing the ability to
oversee and coordinate activities. As one technoenthusiast has
commented, "the multinational can now use its communications network
to coordinate the activities of decentralized units." This, he
suggests, means that "the organization can have responsiveness and
control": "decentralised activities can be coordinated as if they
were centralized" (Keen, 1981, pp. 149, 141). Flexibility has been
gained in production and administration without the loss of
control.
Decentralized activities can be coordinated as if they were
centralized. This is the important insight. Centralization and
decentralization do not represent alternative paradigms of social
organization. Rather than representing the road to freedom and
democracy, decentralization refines and streamlines the effective
exercises of power. First, it should be stressed that the
disseminated electronic "cottage industry" or "electronic home" will
in fact be embedded within a social structure increasingly subject to
the centralizing and managerial tendencies of bureaucratically
organized regulation. Large-scale systems for the coordination of
national statistical data will promote social modeling, policy
making, and management; and centralized mechanisms of administration
and regulation will be reinforced by the formation of integrated
intelligence systems handling, for example, welfare, social security,
or tax data. A further, and crucial, area of centralization is to be
found in the formation of police and military information systems. A
second point to be made--and to be made emphatically--is that
decentralization complements and reinforces such overarching
tendencies toward centralization. Decentralization, dissemination,
fragmentation, individualization, privatization, isolation,
marginalization--these are the modalities through which power will
flow through civil society in the "information age." Decentralization
of the spaces of production and consumption/ reproduction:
mobilization and, simultaneously, immobilization.
Our argument, then, is that the "communications revolution" is taking
place within a much broader restructuring of social life, one that
can be seen--historically and theoretically--as both the extension
and the reconfiguration of Fordism. As such, this "revolution" marks
a significant extension of relative or technological mobilization to
spheres of life beyond the workplace. Through information
technologies, with their wide-ranging applications, social life opens
up to more effective colonization; the rhythm and social space of
everyday life become, potentially, subject to a more certain and
effective codification according to the prevailing relations of
power. It is this possible mobilization of the time, distribution,
and manner of everyday life that constitutes, in our view, an
important political and theoretical space between economic analysis
(Garnham), on the one hand, and ideological/textual analysis
(Connell), on the other. (See Robins, 1983, Robins and Webster,
1983a.)
We want now to extend the argument by focusing upon one crucial
dimension of the new communications technologies that is usually
ignored by media analysts. It is a perspective that allows us to
assess the real power and political implications of information
technologies, particularly in their impact upon the fine grain of
daily life. We are referring here to the intelligence and
surveillance capacities of these technologies--an area more familiar,
perhaps, to investigative journalists and civil libertarians.
We approach this discussion, to which we have already briefly
alluded, by way of a further historical detour. At the end of the
18th century, Jeremy Bentham outlined his plans for an institutional
architecture of control. What Bentham devised was a general
mechanism--applicable to prisons, asylums, schools, factories--for
the automatic and uninterrupted functioning of institutional power
and control. This mechanism, the Panopticon, is a building of
circular structure with a series of individual cells built around a
central "well"; at the center is an inspection tower from which each
of the cells could be observed and monitored. A calculated
illumination of the cells, along with the darkening and masking of
the central tower, endows the "inspective force" with "the unbounded
faculty of seeing without being seen" (Bentham, 1843, p. 80). The
essence of the Panopticon, Bentham suggests, consists in "the
centrality of the inspector's situation, combined with the well-known
and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen."
What is of importance, he argues, is "that for the greatest
proportion of time possible, each man should actually be under
inspection"; but it is also desirable "that the persons to be
inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection," for
"the greater chance there is, of a given person's being at a given
time actually under inspection, the more strong will be the
persuasion--the more intense, if I may say so, the feeling,
he has of his being so" (ibid., p. 44). The inspector is
apparently omnipresent and omniscient, while the inmates, cut off
from the view of each other, are reduced to the status of "solitary
and sequestered individuals." The inmate is marginalized, monitored,
and, ultimately, self-monitoring: "indulged with perfect liberty
within the space allotted to him, in what worse way could he vent his
rage, than by beating his head against the walls?" (ibid., p.
47).
Jeremy Bentham considered the Panopticon to be an architectural
paradigm capable of generalization. This insight has been developed
most fully by Michel Foucault in his historical and philosophical
exploration of forms and relations of power. For Foucault, the
Panopticon, as a mechanism and edifice for channeling the flow of
power, amounts to a major landmark in the history of the human mind.
Historically, it represents a bulwark against the mobile disorder of
the swarming crowd, against forbidden circulations and "dangerous
mixtures." The Panopticon is a form of mobilization--and here
Foucault's work intersects with that of Gaudemar--the production of
an architecture of control and supervision, eliminating confusion
through the elaboration of a permanent grid of power. What Bentham
did was to crystallize a sea-change in the social economy of power:
his contribution was part of a wider "effort to adjust the mechanisms
of power that frame the everyday lives of individuals; an adaptation
and a refinement of the machinery that assumes responsibility for and
places under surveillance their everyday behaviour, their identity,
their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures; another policy
for that multiplicity of bodies and forces that constitutes a
population" (Foucault, 1979, pp. 77-78).
This policy, according to Foucault, was implemented through the
creation of spaces that are at once architectural, functional, and
hierarchical. The Panopticon contains "so many cages, so many small
theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and
constantly visible" (ibid.; p. 200): "the crowd, a compact mass, a
locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a
collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of
separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it
is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised;
from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed
solitude" (ibid.; p. 201). Within the Panoptic machine, the
individual "is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of
information, never a subject in communication." The inmate is
subjected to "a state of conscious and permanent visibility that
assures the automatic functioning of power" (ibid.). So insidious are
the relations of power that the individual becomes self-monitoring:
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance. (Ibid., pp. 202-3)
The Panopticon, then, is a machine that ensures the infinitesimal
distribution of power, one that turns the monitored individual into a
visible, knowable, and vulnerable object. It is a
generalizable "type of location of bodies in space, of distribution
of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical
organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of
definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power"
(ibid.: p. 205). According to Foucault, the Panoptic machine, "at
once surveillance and isolation and transparency" (ibid.: p. 249), is
an integrated system of surveillance/intelligence and
discipline/control.
We believe that Foucault is right in seeing Bentham's Panopticon as a
significant event in the history of the human mind. We want to
suggest that the new communication and information
technologies--particularly in the form of an integrated electronic
grid--permit a massive extension and transformation of that same
(relative, technological) mobilization to which Bentham's Panoptic
principle aspired. What these technologies support, in fact, is the
same dissemination of power and control, but freed from the
architectural constraints of Bentham's stone and brick prototype. On
the basis of the "information revolution," not just the prison or
factory, but the social totality, comes to function as the
hierarchical and disciplinary Panoptic machine.
If we consider the loops and circuits and grids of what has been
called the "wired society" or "wired city" (Aldrich, 1982; Martin,
1978), we can see that a technological system is being constituted to
ensure the centralized, and furtive, inspection, observation,
surveillance, and documentation of activities on the circumference of
society as a whole. Cable television networks, for example, can
continuously monitor consumer preferences for programming material,
along with details of any financial or communicative transactions. We
have the now innumerable, and increasingly interlinked, networks of
bureaucratic and commercial data banks that accumulate and aggregate
information on the activities, transactions, needs, and desires of
individuals or social groups. And, of course, this is the age of the,
now mundane, surveillance camera, of telephone tapping, and of ever
more sophisticated and integrated police computer systems
(Manwaring-White,
1983).[2] This is the real
achievement of cable! The population becomes visible and
knowable to the different computerized "inspective forces."
Here, as Foucault suggests of the Panopticon, is "a machine for
dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is
totally seen, without ever seeing: in the central tower, one sees
everything without ever being seen" (Foucault, 1979, p. 202). The
individual becomes the object of surveillance, no longer the subject
of communication. And, like the Panopticon, the "wired society" too
is a "system of individualizing and permanent documentation" (ibid.,
p. 250): the observed and scrutinized individual, subjected to
continuous registration, becomes the object of knowledge (of files
and records). Seen and known. Overcoming spatial and temporal
constraints, the electronic grid fulfills the dream of an "infinitely
minute web of panoptic techniques" (ibid., p. 224).
We are not suggesting that there is, or will be, a single omniscient
and all-seeing "inspective force" in the "wired society." The nodal
points on the electronic grid will be multiple and differential.
There is, of course, the problem--a pressing political and civil
liberties issue--of increasingly centralized state and police
surveillance/intelligence activities, which, as David Leigh suggests,
represent "a very pure form of bureaucratic utopia: the official is
kept invisible, and the citizen is stripped naked" (Leigh, 1980, p.
218). This political and repressive use of the new information and
communications technologies must always be kept to the fore. But we
are also talking of more ordinary and routine surveillance
activities, undertaken from more diffuse and numerous power centers.
As opposed to the more active and calculative amassing of data by
control agencies, there exists also a more passive and mundane
gathering and collation, by bureaucratic and commercial
organizations, of what has been called "transactional information"
(Burnham, 1983) . For any electronically mediated
activity--cable viewing, electronic financial transactions,
telephoning, for example--spawns records that can yield up a harvest
of information about individuals or groups: their whereabouts and
movements; daily patterns of work and recreation; contacts friends,
associates; tastes, preferences, desires. Such information, when
accumulated and processed, becomes an invaluable asset to a plurality
of corporate and political interests. These different, but related,
tendencies point to the increasing importance of surveillance and
social monitoring. Joel Kovel has, in fact, argued that surveillance
is "a process inherently tied to the development of technology."
Surveillance, he suggests, originates in the labor process, where
there developed a need for "watching the producer and controlling
what was being done" (Kovel, 1983, p. 76). This phase in the
development of surveillance techniques, which found its apotheosis in
Taylor's scientific management and in the Fordist factory, has now
been superseded by more extensive and ambitious surveillance:
The same craft has been taken over by the state as its target shifts to the domestic population. what began with control of the worker and flourished into the technology of Scientific Management in the early years of the century, has turned to directly political ends. Computerised electronic surveillance has ushered in a whole new phase of domination. (Ibid., pp. 76-77)
Technologies, as they have actually existed, have been constituted
to watch and control, to control through watching. Information
technologies--actually existing information
technologies--extend this capacity. In them is perfected the ability
to mobilize and control through watching and monitoring: power
expresses itself as surveillance and panopticism, on the scale of the
social totality. The eye of power; the technology of knowledge and
control. The cabled electronic grid is a transparent structure in
which activities taking place at the periphery--remote working,
electronic banking, the consumption of entertainment or information,
tele-shopping, communication-- are visible to the electronic
"eye" of the central computer systems that manage the network(s). The
"technical" process of administrating the numerous electronic
transactions is simultaneously, and integrally, a process of
observation, recording, remembering, surveillance. The electronic
worker, consumer, or communicator is constantly scanned, and his or
her needs/preferences/ activities are delivered up as information to
the agencies and institutions at the heart of the network.
Decentralized, sequestered, privatized activities and lifestyles are
monitored from the diverse centers of power/ administration. In the
panoptic structure of the electronic grid, we find expressed that
pattern of centralization and decentralization--of concentrated power
and fragmented impotency--which, we have argued, is at the heart of
that emerging configuration of social relations referred to
ideologically as the "information society." The lives of those on the
periphery are subject to constant surveillance and
documentation--and, hence, control--from the central observatories of
the social Panopticon.
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon--as the prototype of a regimen of power
relations--is, then, a central figure for understanding the
modalities of power in the "information society." In the panoptic
machine--whether it is constructed of bricks and mortar, or
electronic cables--mobilization is achieved through the (serialized,
cellular) isolation of individuals, combined with the development for
surveillance and intelligence by centralized agencies. Again we would
stress that we are exploring terrain inaccessible to economic theory
(Garnham) or ideological analysis (Connell): we are concerned with
the implications of the new technologies for the deportment of
everyday life, for the way in which capital may come to better
discipline the very conduct, rhythms, and spaces of day-to-day
existence.
Another important, and neglected, aspect of the communications
revolution is of particular significance to those involved or
interested in the mass media. Many commentators now see the emerging
pattern of capital accumulation, the successor to Fordism, in terms
of the evolution of an information economy and an "information
society." Information is thought to be the key to a new phase of
economic growth. And, more ambitiously, freely flowing information is
held up as the means to achieve a future libertarian and
communicative democracy. Thus Tom Stonier argues that "in a
postindustrial society, a country's store of information is its
principal asset, its greatest source of wealth" (1983, p. 12)--"as
our knowledge expands the world gets wealthier" (ibid., p. 63). He
can then go on to suggest that "whereas material transactions can
lead to competition, information transactions are much more likely to
lead to cooperation--information is a resource which can be truly
shared" (ibid., pp. 18-19). And, more fantastically, "no dictator can
survive for any length of time in communicative society as the flows
of information can no longer be controlled from the centre" (ibid.,
p. 203). In the present context of social and economic crisis,
information offers itself as the principle of redemption (see
Williams, 1985).
Although we remain highly skeptical about this putative information
utopia, it nonetheless remains the case that a significant mutation
is taking place in the social economy of information/knowledge. We
have already indicated that the media industries, and, more
importantly, the whole of the electronics, telecommunications, and
dataprocessing industries, are undergoing a process of convergence
and integration. This upheaval should also be understood as a
transformation in the existing structures of information production
and circulation--as an important recomposition of the present social
ecology of information/knowledge. The way in which this is
significant particularly for an understanding of the current mass
media "revolution" is brought out in a recent report by the British
government's Information Technology Advisory Panel (ITAP). Here it is
argued that:
new technology is eroding many of the distinctions that have previously distinguished one form of information medium from another; publications, films and news services are now all becoming aspects of an expanding "tradeable information sector." (Information Technology Advisory Panel, 1983, p. 11)
And again:
There is now an expanding "tradeable information sector" which encompasses the supply of financial and business information, printing and publishing, on-line technical information, consultancies, etc. We consider that the entertainment industry and aspects of education and training services fall within this sector, since many of the same technological influences bear upon these activities as upon more obviously "information" activities." (Ibid., p. 7)
Circumstances, then, make it increasingly impossible and
irrelevant to treat the mass media in isolation: the culture
industries are increasingly becoming subsumed within a massive and
overarching information sector, of which they make up but one
constituent part.
According to the ITAP report, this emerging information megaindustry
divides into trading and nontrading components. The latter category
includes certain activities within the private sector (banking,
insurance), along with central and local government operations, and
(though ITAP does not mention these) military and policing
applications. The greatest component of the industry, however, is
involved in the trading of various kinds of information ("packaged,"
"semipackaged," transient, permanent, skilled judgment, education and
training, entertainment [ibid., pp. 1216]). As to the noncommercial
exploitation of information--the bureaucratic and control
applications--we have already touched upon this in our brief
discussion of surveillance. Bureaucratic social management and police
or military surveillance manifest themselves as the compulsive and
incessant gathering of what is called "intelligence." What Joachim
Hirsch refers to as the modern "security state" accumulates and
processes information for the purposes of regulation and control.
But if information is being marshaled in the political domain, it is
also circulating on an ever greater scale in the marketplace. Thus we
have a veritable explosion of new media commodities: video games,
videocassettes and discs, cable and satellite channels, personal
computers. And we also have the commodification of new areas of
information: "a much wider range of information has become profitable
because it can be flexibly processed, selectively rearranged, and
quickly transmitted and disseminated by a virtuoso new technology"
(Schiller and Schiller, 1982, p. 461). Thus scientific and
technological knowledge, demographic information, education, medical
care, public reports and statistical services, libraries, and much
more all become transformed into information commodities (Lumek,
1984; National Commission on Libraries and Information Science,
1982). Pushing in this same direction is state intervention that
seeks to transform what have hitherto been public resources into
commercial enterprises. The liberalization and privatization of
British Telecom, for example, is part of the strategy to open up the
information sphere to market forces. So too is the attempt to hive
off government information services to private organizations whenever
feasible, and when not, to introduce commercial criteria into the
government's own administration of information and statistical
services; according to the recent Rayner Report, all information
should be charged for at commercial rates. All of this is bound to
have serious social implications. We are likely to see an increasing
scarcity of information that is not considered to be commercially
viable. The available information will be differentially distributed:
"hard" (financial, commercial scientific) data for the wealthy
corporate sector; trivial data, through videotex and teletext
channels, for the domestic consumer. And, most important, the
principle of public knowledgeability, of the availability of
information resources as a public service--an ideal imperfectly
realized at the best of times--will be undermined (paralleling, of
course, the subversion of public service broadcasting [the British
Broadcasting Corporation], the decline of library services, and the
dismantling of communication publicly owned communication systems
[British Telecom]; see Robins and Webster, 1983b; 1985).
Can this amount to an "information revolution"? Does it put us on the
threshold of an "information society"? We think not. This political
and commercial annexation of information only appears to be a novel
occurrence (Robins and Webster, 1987a). The appropriation of
information/knowledge, in our view, has roots particularly in the
capitalist labor process. Marx described this phenomenon in terms of
the tendential separation of mental from manual labor, suggesting
that capital strives to monopolize the intellectual aspect of the
labor process in order to increase productivity and to ensure
control. It is a development that, again, finds it apotheosis in
Taylor's scientific management. With scientific management the
project of appropriating the skills and knowledge of workers becomes
systematic and compulsive. What Taylor realized was that it was to
their traditional skills and rule-of-thumb knowledge that his workers
owed their independence and resilience in the face of discipline and
control. On this basis he undertook
the deliberate gathering in on the part of those on the management's side of all the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen, and in the physical skill and knack of the workmen, which he [sic] has acquired through years of experience. The duty of gathering in of [sic] all this great mass of traditional knowledge and recording it, tabulating it, and, in many cases, finally reducing it to laws, rules, and even to mathematical formulae, is voluntarily assumed by the scientific managers. (Taylor, 1974, p. 40)
All "brainwork" Taylor aimed to concentrate in his centralized
"planning department." It is with machinery, however, that this
gathering in of skill and knowledge can become truly systematic. It
is through technology that we see "the separation of the intellectual
faculties of the production process from manual labour, and the
transformation of those faculties into powers exercised by capital
over labour" (K. Marx, 1976, p. 548). With Henry Ford's assembly line
this process reaches its historical culmination. Here the skills of
the worker are truly embodied in the machinery: control of the labor
process assumes the guise of objective necessity, and domination
expresses itself through the form of technological "rationality." In
the Fordist factory, as one contemporary observer noted, "automatic
machines show a transfer of thought, skill or intelligence from
person to machine" (Reitell, 1924, p. 41). In the subsequent history
of the labor process, this automatic and impersonal functioning of
power through the technological appropriation of knowledge/skill has
been intensified and extended, including the Taylorization and
mechanization, through information technologies, of certain forms of
intellectual labor.
Our argument is that this gathering in of
skill/knowledge/information, hitherto most apparent in the capitalist
labor process, is now entering a new and more pervasive stage. What
we are seeing is the progressive collection, centralization, and
concentration of knowledge on a wide social scale, and, thereby, the
establishment of what we would call Social Taylorism (Webster and
Robins, 1986, ch. 11). In an intensive consumer society, as we
suggested earlier, needs--material and psychic--are met by
commodities. As Ivan Illich suggests, the "professionally engineered
commodity" replaces the "culturally shaped use-value," and we see the
substitution of "standardized packages for almost everything people
formerly did or made on their own" (Illich, 1978, p. 24). The
corollary and consequence of this consumerization is a tendential
depletion of social skills, knowledge, self-sufficiency. Jeremy
Seabrook has written perceptively of the "plundering of people, the
shedding of skills, the loss of human resource" and of "the process
of wrenching away from working class people needs and satisfactions
they had learned to answer for each other, and selling them back, in
another form, as commodities" (Seabrook, 1982, pp. 179, 105). We are
talking of a process of social deskilling, the depredation of
knowledge and skills, which are then sold back in the form of
commodities--or, alternatively, professionally administered through
bureaucratic agencies and organizations.
It is just this appropriation and concentration of social knowledge
and skill that the new information technologies are designed to
promote. They underpin a more extensive, efficient, and systematic
colonization of social knowledge. Potentially all social functions
are to be incorporated and metamorphosed into information
commodities: education, entertainment, health care, communication,
and so on. According to Mary Gardiner Jones, whom we quoted earlier,
we can look forward to
a flexible, multipurpose information and communication system [which] could encompass not only information, education and entertainment services but also a series of remote control applications to adjust home temperatures and energy use, setting off alarms at a variety of types of intrusion, fires and other hazards, and handling recordkeeping, accounting, and bill-paying. (Jones, 1981, p. 36)
In the new information industries, social knowledge and resources
will be annexed and alienated. The mass of traditional knowledge, in
Taylor's terms, will be recorded, tabulated, and reduced to laws,
rules, and mathematical formulae. Through data banks and information
services we shall have to buy the information necessary to function
in a complex industrial society, or be deprived of it if we are too
poor. With the new information technologies, previously dispersed and
inaccessible, information/knowledge can become processed and
possessed. We shall see the "migration of information from the home
to the organisation," and much of this information, until recently,
"would not have been collected at all, but would instead have been
stashed away in our homes" (Burnham, 1983, pp. 12, 11).
More than this, people themselves will increasingly be relegated to
the status of data; their actions and transactions will be recorded
as digits and ciphers by the ubiquitous and always watching
information machines. Already credit agencies, finance houses, and
large retailers are constructing databases on customers and potential
customers, categorizing them, analyzing them, scrutinizing their
movements, that they might be used to the optimum benefit of the
corporation. In advanced capitalist societies online links give
instant access to buying patterns, demographic traits, balances
outstanding, and other characteristics. The Direct Mail Sales Bureau
advises business to build and access these resources. Introducing the
concept of "Precision Management," it observes that "vast sums are
being invested by farsighted marketers to create complex data bases
which contain a vast array of information about our various target
markets. Thus armed, we can speak to people about that which is
relevant [what is saleable] and ignore that which is not relevant
[the poor] to their [sic] needs and interests" (advertisement,
Financial Times, 16 October 1985). The size and scale of these
databases can be awesome. For example, in Britain Infolink, the
biggest agency of its kind in the United Kingdom, boasts an
information bank that includes the entire electoral register of 42
million voters, whom it can review at a rate of 48,000 transactions
an hour (Wiltshire, 1986). Increasingly, people are objects of
surveillance: objects of knowledge and information.
It is worth adding that, although this surveillance has been
developed chiefly as an extension of market endeavors, capital has
not been entirely responsible for its spread. The growth of the
modern state, integrally connected as it is with the rise of
corporate capitalism, has contributed independently and massively to
the maximization of surveillance. Anthony Giddens (1985) has recently
reminded us of the importance of nationalism, citizenship, war, and
the preparation for war as key factors stimulating heightened
surveillance (and its converse, control of information
dissemination). Inexorably the state has amassed files, increasingly
computerized and interlinked, on health, taxation, social security,
employment, education, vehicle ownership, housing, crime, and
intelligence. In the present period, when the state has noticeably
raised its coercive profile in response to social unrest and in order
to facilitate the necessary restructuring to regain competitiveness,
Giddens' warning of the risks of totalitarianism inherent in states
that so intensively scrutinize and manipulate their people deserves
close heed (cf. Campbell, 1986; G. Marx, 1985).
As Bentham's Panopticon expresses the social relations of
surveillance and control, another figure expresses the social
relations of generalized Taylorism. We are referring to H. G. Wells's
conception of the World Brain or World Encyclopaedia--the dream of an
unlimited, concentrated, and accessible reservoir of knowledge.
According to Wells,
an immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge and suggestion that--systematically ordered and generally disseminated--would probably . . . suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but that knowledge is still dispersed, unorganised, impotent . . . (1938, p. 47)
The knowledge systems of the world must therefore be concentrated
in the World Brain, in the creation of "a new world organ for the
collection, indexing, summarising and release of knowledge" (ibid.,
p. 59). Wells ponders "the creation of an efficient index to
all human knowledge, ideas and achievements . . . the
creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind"
(ibid., p. 60); "the whole human memory," he believes, "can be, and
probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every
individual" (ibid., p. 61). For Wells, "the time is ripe for a very
extensive revision and modernisation of the intellectual organization
of the world"--(ibid., p. 26): "this synthesis of knowledge is the
necessary beginning to the new world" (ibid., p. 64). The world "has
to pull its mind together" (ibid.) through this new kind of "mental
clearing house," the World Brain (ibid., p. 49).
Nowadays the figure of the World Brain is not an ideological mirage
to be mocked and peremptorily dismissed. Like Jeremy Bentham's
Panopticon it is a utopian proposal, but one that should be taken
seriously. The World Brain is an intellectual "invention" with
considerable social and political resonance. It is one that tunes
well with the aspirations of police and surveillance agencies; with
business corporations like Telerate, Datastream, Reuters, or the now
defunct International Reporting Information Systems (IRIS), which
sought "to gather in, sort and increase in value by sophisticated
analysis the vast amount of information floating around the world"
(Saint Jorre, 1983); and with the purveyors of videotex information,
who realize that this "can be seen as a system in which the basic
structuring imposed on the information according to amount of detail
and place in the subject hierarchy . . . makes the Wellsian dream
practicable" (Fedida and Malik, 1979, pp. 166-67). The World Brain
anticipates what we can now see as an emerging new regime of
information production, circulation, consumption, and control; as a
new economy and politics of knowledge.
Wells, of course, sees this "new encyclopaedism" as an entirely
benevolent phenomenon. His is the Fabian ideal of knowledge as a
social resource knowledge is neutral and contains all goodness within
itself. In reality, however, things are somewhat different. What we
have in the World Brain is the utopia of technocratic planning,
administration, and management. The encyclopaedic dream represents,
in fact, a technocratic consummation and travesty of what has been
termed the public sphere. In the place of informed debate and
interchange and of public knowledgeability (as aspirations, at
least), we are left with nothing but the commerce, collation, and
manipulation of data. As Jurgen Habermas has demonstrated, the
(bourgeois) public sphere has undergone a long process of decline.
Historically, we have seen the replacement of a political public
sphere by a depoliticized consumer culture that erases the difference
between commodity circulation and social intercourse, and by social
engineering through the massaging of "public opinion." Critique has
become integration, acclamation, consumption (Habermas, 1962, chs.
5-6). The public sphere becomes publicity and public opinion. And now
publicity and public opinion assume the diminished and alienated form
of the "world encyclopaedia" or "information society." Public debate
and discourse have given way to the mindless, avaricious, and
indiscriminate amassing of information. For the Fabian Wells--as for
the masseurs and diagnosticians of public opinion--it seems
self-evident that the free and bountiful flow of information will
bring people together. In reality, information can divide them,
render them ignorant, silence them, manipulate them, monitor them,
alienate and isolate them. For the majority of us, as André
Gorz has argued, the "information explosion" does not promise greater
freedom or independence:
The expansion of knowledge rather has gone in parallel with a diminution of the power and autonomy of communities and individuals. In this respect, we may speak of the schizophrenic character of our culture: the more we learn, the more we become helpless, estranged, from ourselves and the surrounding world. This knowledge we are fed is so broken up as to keep us in check and under control rather than to enable us to exercise control. (Gorz, 1976, p. 64)
What is missing in most accounts of the "information society" is an understanding of the way in which knowledge and information mediate relations of power. As we have already suggested, a society of routine and procedural surveillance is one that also, necessarily and automatically, gathers and processes information. Surveillance is also continuous and perpetual intelligence, the recording of existence, and the accumulation and the annexation of knowledge. Surveillance, knowledge, power: in the "information society" there is no one central "planning department" as there is in the Taylorized factory. The centers of power are multiple and differential, the archives of commerce and control are relatively dispersed. But in each of them social knowledge and resources are appropriated and transformed into power and capital. The store of collective knowledge and of popular memory and tradition, is tendentially displaced by the estranged objectivity of data banks and information reservoirs (Lyotard, 1980). Moreover, information, when it is harvested on a massive and systematic scale, becomes intelligence. Information on natural resources, or on the activities and transactions of individuals, becomes politically significant when it is held in large quantities that can be processed and aggregated by technological means. What we are suggesting, in fact, is that in the "information society" the intelligence function is the paradigm for all information gathering. In the words of one information apparatchik, what we are seeing is
the maturation of the intelligence function from its origins as a government spy service to full growth as an intellectual discipline serving the private and public sectors alike.... Today's proliferation of information banks and analytical centers for investment counselling, political risk assessments, and "futures" estimates are witness to the growth of the intelligence discipline outside traditional government circles. (Colby, 1981, pp. 67-68.
Information is not a thing, an entity; it is a social relation,
and in contemporary capitalist societies it expresses the
characteristic and prevailing relations of power.
The information industries, then, are undergoing a process of massive
institutional transformation, convergence, and integration. Behind
the myth of the "information society" there is the reality of a
growing commercial and political exploitation of social knowledge and
information. What we need in order to respond to this initiative by
capital is not a policy for cable, nor simply a media policy, but a
politics of information.
In this discussion we have tried to outline our difficulties with
the approaches of Nicholas Garnham and Ian Connell to the new media
technologies and industries. Each grasps particular and important
aspects of the new communications "revolution,"and, in our own view,
Garnham's work represents an important starting point for research.
But crucial dimensions of this "revolution" are overlooked by both
Garnham and Connell. We have sought to open up some of these in order
to explore the social meanings of the new technologies.
What we have suggested, first, is that media analysts must try to
understand the wider social, political, and economic restructuring
process that is now shaping the communications "revolution"--a
process that entails a significant recomposition of the forms of
social mobilization (for example, a transformation of state
regulation and "preventive" surveillance). Circumstances now conspire
to undermine parochialism, making it impossible for us to be media
specialists alone. We have then gone on to argue that this
disconcerting "revolution" cannot be understood simply in terms of
ideological or economic issues. These aspects are important,
but we must also understand the current upheaval in terms of the
mobilization and transformation of everyday life. Of
particular interest is the growing importance of technology beyond
the workplace--the increasing technological mediation of everyday
life; far from being socially neutral, information technologies are
beginning to shape the whole way of life and assume a profound
cultural significance. The category of "everyday life"--which has led
a kind of half-life in the interstices of cultural theory, in the
work of such different thinkers as Leon Trotsky, Fernand Braudel,
Henri Lefebvre, and Agnes Heller--can help us to see the pervasive
and intrusive nature of the "information revolution." For it points
to the ways in which the rhythm, texture, and experience of social
life--the very segmentation of time and space--are being transformed
and informed by capital. And, furthermore, it allows us to see how
relations of power penetrate and infuse the social body. This
emphasis upon power is central to our own analysis of the new
technologies: we are concerned with the ways in which everyday, and
apparently insignificant, activities, deportment, and interchanges
are disciplined and
controlled.[3] This leads
us to suggest that the development of integrated and systematic
information/communications networks significantly transforms the
economy of power in society. In our view, society as a whole comes to
function as a giant panoptic mechanism: automatic and continuous
surveillance, along with centralized power and peripheral isolation,
conspire to create a climate in which the inmates of society "not
only suspect, but [are] assured, that whatever they do is
known, even though that should not be the case" (Bentham, 1843, p.
66). The panoptic society is a society of routine and compulsive
information gathering. It is, we suggest finally, a society in which
the nature and composition of knowledge/information undergoes a
radical transformation. In the "information society," we have the
massive and systematic exploitation of information (intelligence) by
commercial and political interests. Information/knowledge becomes a
site--and stake--of the struggle for power.
Our response to the information revolution is somber. We are not
talking of what information technologies might do; of how
cable could further democracy if it was run by the
right people; of the possibilities for satellite television or
viewdata systems or word processors. We are talking actually
existing technologies--technologies already constituted to embody
particular social relations, technologies that threaten to constitute
a mega-machine, a systematic and integrated mechanism (and the more
integrated and extensive a technological system, the less possibility
there is of its flexible use). We must confront the reality of
existing technologies, technologies in the present tense. And we must
confront the reality of an "information age" that is now being
engineered in Thatcher's Britain. We can expect no utopia courtesy of
Ms. Thatcher. If we want one we shall have to invent it ourselves,
and the new technologies do not provide a short cut.