Preface

We live in an information society. This much is clear; indeed, this much is acutely palpable. It surrounds us and we are a part of it. We ‘know’ this society insofar as it constitutes a growing reality that is reshaping the world and what it means to be an individual, a worker, and a member of the public within it. Information technologies based upon computer logic have networked our world, shrinking it to the point where it is possible to be constantly in touch with others, no matter where they are or what the time is. The extent of this connectivity is historically unprecedented and it is something that is growing in complexity and utility every minute of every day. How do we make sense of it?

Most of us are by now pretty comfortable with the Internet, for example. We use it to shop, to be entertained and to find out information on the widest possible range of subjects. But why is it ‘there’? And what made it technologically (and politically) possible? Mobile phones, similarly, are a ubiquitous device used by seemingly everyone and are evident when walking on a city street, or travelling on public transport, from New Delhi to Sydney and from Montevideo to London. Mobile phones were first developed in the 1940s, but what caused the technology to lie undeveloped and uncommercialized until the 1990s when they exploded as a social and cultural phenomenon, to the point where half of humanity now owns or has access to one?

The information society (and the networkable applications and gadgets that comprise it) is also now a central component of how we earn a living. From the florist’s shop on the street corner to the executive office on the top floor, being a part of the network society is becoming more and more a necessity instead of a flight of fancy. The florists will use it to find the best prices from wholesalers and to advertise their wares; and the executives of the multinational will use digital connectivity for more or less the same reasons. We take all this for granted now, with barely a thought given to the process. Moreover, through practice and through trial and error we are becoming competent and often expert with these growing arrays of technical applications and gadgets, and through this learning process we simultaneously stitch ourselves deeper into the fabric of the information society. It becomes part of us and vice versa.

But what does it all mean? What has been gained, and has anything been lost? Is the world a more efficient, smarter and better-organized place? Perhaps most centrally, much of the rhetoric of the information society is oriented towards placing an emphasis upon the notion that information technologies ‘empower’ the individual. As Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, put it, computers are ‘the most empowering tool we’ve ever created’ (Grossman, 2004). How true is this? Do you feel ‘empowered’ by the acquisition of a new computer upgrade, or a faster processor, or a more multifunctional mobile phone?

These questions and more are becoming increasingly salient, and so this book is intended as an introductory guide to this new and radical society. We can begin by agreeing that it is impossible to look at the information society as some kind of punctual event – as if it is something that simply ‘happened’ in conjunction with sudden and unexpected advances in computer technology. The reality is, to employ a phrase by Fredric Jameson, that our technological present has ‘a before and after time that only gradually reveal themselves’ (2001). It has a history (or histories) that are traceable through an interpretive framework of political economy that makes connections to the relevant social, political, economic and technological structures and institutions. The strands of history stretch back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and have, along their course, ‘moments’ of great historical import with, for example, the development of the factory assembly line which first produced the Model T car in the USA in 1914. This moment set in train a whole productive logic that swept the world. The post-Second World War context of Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR is another moment of profound importance in terms of the development of computer science. More recently, the great economic and social changes that came in the wake of the global economic crises of the mid-1970s set in train yet more strands of logic and paths of historical development that led to the construction of our networked and digital planet; an information society driven by a particularly virulent economic reorganization of industrial and social relations on a world scale.

For the purposes of understanding these interrelated dynamics, it seems to me that we can construct our framework of analysis through three interdependent processes that have influenced and shaped our contemporary world in a most profound way. These will be defined and analysed in the main text, but let me preface them briefly.

The first is neoliberal globalization. This is the foremost economic dynamic that has, since the late 1970s, spread throughout the world to the point where, for the first time in history, an economic system has no serious challengers (Klein, 2007). It is a logic that has become the ‘basic grammar’ that informs our understanding of how the world operates (Anderson, 2007: 6). Second, and flowing directly from neoliberal globalization, is the information technology revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s the economic imperatives of an emergent globalization began to dramatically supercharge basic research into computers that had, until that time, been largely within the purview of military research and university lab tinkering – and brought it into the commercial realm. The third results from the e¤ects of the first two. Principally, this has been the ‘speeding-up’ of time and the ‘shrinking’ of space. Again, I shall explain these in more detail in the chapters, but it seems to me that much flows from this ‘time– space compression’ (Harvey, 1989: 241).

Many of us, I think, can relate to the shrinking of space. For example, we are now able to communicate with people far more easily than was possible only a couple of decades ago. New computer-based technologies such as the ‘voice over the internet protocol’ (VoIP), called Skype, links me (for free) to people who might live in di¤erent countries or di¤erent continents. With only a couple of keystrokes I can now see the faces of friends or family or colleagues and feel ‘in touch’ in a way that is unprecedented on a mass scale. This is but a small revolutionary dimension of a broader revolutionary process.

The ‘speeding-up’ of time takes a bit more imagination to recognize. How can we speed up the clock, which is a rigid form of time? Well, we can’t but we can experience the acceleration of time if we recognize that the clock is simply a technology to measure duration, and that our experience of the duration of time (forget the clock) can become more intense. For example, we feel the intensification of duration through ‘multitasking’ or the packing of more tasks into an hour or a day than we used to. And it is information technology that allows (or forces) us to do this. We can browse on eBay while a split screen shows us the arrival of emails, and we can do these tasks while listening to a voicemail on our mobile phone, at the same time as feeding a child or writing an essay and listening to music streaming from the computer. Multitasking is a juggling act that is becoming integral to everyday life (Kenyon, 2008). This ‘speeding-up’, as we will see, has di¤ering articulations in work, in leisure, in family life and so on. Moreover, it is a pressure to act and be ‘efficient’, ‘productive’ and ‘connected’ that inserts itself into almost every realm of life. And this has potentially momentous consequences for our cognitive ability to understand the reality of our world and the nature of the information society under the aegis of neoliberal globalization. As we will also see, this process increasingly compels us to live more in the present – where the past seems less relevant to us and where the future, as it reveals itself, does so in the form of sometimes nasty and unanticipated developments. And so, at one level of analysis, the dream of the information society that we see in the TV ads for the enabling Microsoft Vista, or exciting Apple iPhone, are sometimes (oftentimes) lined with the nightmares of living in an insecure world of no guarantees, of the constant changing of careers, of a volatile and irrational stock market whose e¤ects permeate everything, and the increasing expectation to be ‘flexible’ and adaptable to these constantly changing situations. We need to remember, though, that this brave new world is made possible by the same networkable technologies that give us Facebook or YouTube or the personal blog.

The book will proceed by examining the various claims made for the information society – those of the boosters who visualize a world of dreams, and those of the more critical and reflexively oriented who see a world of nightmares – and try to judge them on their merits through the interpretive framework that will guide us. What makes this perspective somewhat di¤erent from a number of other very laudable books, such as Terry Flew’s New Media: An Introduction (2003), is that instead of being primarily descriptive, ‘laying it all out’ so to speak, it attempts to introduce a new dimension into our understanding of the dreams and the nightmares of the information society. The book argues that not only is it necessary to have some conception of the intellectual, political, economic and technological dynamics that make the information technology a reality, but we need also to be cognizant of what constitutes our understanding of this reality, and that is information itself – more particularly, our production and our consumption of it.

Here the narrative of speed and acceleration, stemming from ever-faster computer speeds and network speeds, that runs through the book becomes both important and revealing. The perspective presents us with an intellectual (as well as political and social) dilemma, the answer to which depends upon how we understand the nature of computing in a neoliberalized world. It is a dilemma we can see illustrated in the approaches to information and information technology from two highly respected figures in their field, individuals we will have cause to consider more in this book. First is J. C. R. Licklider, acknowledged as one of the intellectual ‘fathers’ of the Internet. He was all for computers. In an influential essay published in 1960, titled ‘Man–Computer Symbiosis’, Licklider observed that in the ‘symbiotic partnership’ between men and computers, humans will set the parameters within which computers will do the work, to ‘prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking . . . [and that] preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more e¤ectively than man alone can perform them’. Computers would be the servants of humanity, in other words, doing our bidding in the production of ‘intellectual operations’ (better than we are able to – but with us still in control), in the formation of the emerging ‘knowledge society’ that was already being anticipated (Machlup, 1962). A counter to this perspective comes from Herbert Simon, a pioneer in computer-based artificial intelligence, expert in cognitive psychology, and Nobel Prize winner for his work in economics. In 1971, in response to the growing amounts of computer-based information being generated that we were increasingly expected to consume, he seemed to lose his earlier enthusiasm for the possibilities held out by computerization. He began to argue that information takes up our attention span, and obviously too much of it may be a problem in terms of what we now call ‘information overload’. The information society today produces information in volumes that are infinitely larger than those produced in 1971. Computers may be able to ‘perform intellectual operations better than man alone’, as Licklider put it. But can they – in the context of a world that neither Licklider nor Simon could have imagined – ‘prepare the way for insights’ not only in the fields of science and technology, but into the human condition in a highly computerized and high-speed world, an information society?

What follows is, I hope, an accessible and comprehensible guide through these competing perspectives and resultant dilemmas.