The Information Society E-Book

Robert Hassan

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

What are we to make of the information society? Many prominent theorists have argued it to be the most profound and comprehensive transformation of economy, culture and politics since the rise of the industrial way of life in the 18th century. Some saw its arrival in a positive light, where the dreams of democracy, of ‘connectivity’ and ‘efficiency’ constituted a break with the old ways. But other thinkers viewed it more in terms of the recurrent nightmare of capitalism, where the processes of exploitation, commodification and alienation are given much freer rein than ever before. In this book Robert Hassan, a prominent theorist in new media and its effects, analyses and critically appraises these positions and forms them into a coherent narrative to illuminate the phenomenon.

Surveying the works of major information society theorists from Daniel Bell to Nicholas Negroponte, and from Vincent Mosco to Manuel Castells, The Information Society is an invaluable resource for understanding the nature of the information society—as well as the meta-processes of neoliberal globalisation and the revolution in information technologies that made it possible.

Leseprobe

The Information Society

Digital Media and Society Series

Mark Deuze, Media Work

Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society

Robert Hassan, The Information Society

Tim Jordan, Hacking

Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging

The Information Society

ROBERT HASSAN

polity

Copyright © Robert Hassan 2008

The right of Robert Hassan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge cb2 1ur, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5528-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.25 on 13 pt FF Scala by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn, Norfolk

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CONTENTS

Preface

1  The Information Society Today: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

2  The Coming of the Information Society

3  Information Takes Over

4  A Shrinking Planet

5  Commodification and Culture in the Information Society

6  Faster and Faster

7  Who Rules?: Politics and Control in the Information Society

Glossary

References

Index

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.

1

The Information Society Today: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience

In this introductory chapter I want to sketch out the broad contours of the information society. It is a necessary step, I think, because ‘information’ in its digital form constitutes an unconscious backdrop to the lives of many, if not most, of us. It has migrated, in a very short space of time, from being novel and radical, to somewhat demotic – if not invisible. Indeed, this latter, naturalized, state is what Generations X and Y have been born into, and so it is doubly important to make these implicit relations with information technologies more explicit – the better to hold them up to understanding and analysis.

For example, the networking of society, the interconnecting of people, processes, applications, work tasks and leisure pursuits, has led to a globalized society, a ‘one-world’ context where causes and effects can reverberate throughout the entire system. This is a society where digital information is, at its root, ideological. That is to say, it was developed not as a neutral concept and neutral technology – but as ‘an ideology that is inextricably linked to the computer’ (Kumar, 1995: 7). And the computer, as we shall see in later chapters, is itself a technology that is suffused with its own political, military and industrial imperatives that evolved in the context of the Cold War era of the 1950s and 1960s. However, today, and in respect of this general introductory overview, I note here only that digital information, along with its originary logic, permeates culture and society to an unprecedented degree. It brings with it what I have termed the ‘network effect’ that is expressed as an increasingly strong compulsion to be a part of the information society; it is a compulsion linked to the needs of a neoliberal global economy that demands connectedness; requires that we synchronize to its ever-quickening tempo, a tempo that produces positive and negative effects; and insists (as part of what might be called digital information’s ‘ideological effect’) that such connectedness is also efficient and productive – and can even be fun and allow us to express our ‘individuality’. The contours of the information society, then, beyond its implicit everydayness, are revealed as contradictory. On the one hand there is a definite compulsion – a logic that is difficult to escape or avoid – that is about working ‘smarter’ and faster, and all the stresses and strains that this can bring. And on the other hand there is, undoubtedly, the ‘fun’ element: the new multifunctional mobile phone, the thrill at finding an item on eBay, or the pleasure of Skyping friends or relatives in far-off places, or expressing yourself through a personal blog. The first intellectual move to make, therefore, is to ‘denaturalize’ the information society, to define it and judge it as a humanly constructed process that is shaped by the everyday conflicts and struggles in our society that, in their turn, are reflective of larger (and more portentous) political and economic dynamics.

The network effect

To inform a young person, say, a ten-year-old (the age of my eldest), that we live in an information society would be almost meaningless. My son Theo is not stupid, but to state something like this to him would be akin to saying we live in time and space. At one level this would be a profound observation, but then again we are born into time and space and move through them with hardly a thought, so second nature have they become. ‘What’s to know?’ might be his incredulous reply. For the typical ten-year-old in a developed country (and increasingly in many developing countries too), connectivity and access to networks are simply part of what life is. We live in and live by pervasive and rapid ‘flows’ of digital information (Castells, 1996). Why did this come about? How did we individually and collectively become so au fait and casual with information technologies and the world they create? Are we really so? And anyway, do we really want to be? And do we have any real choice in the matter? We shall discuss these questions in some detail in the subsequent chapters, but a quick schematic sketch from the point of view of computer scientists – as opposed to social scientists – gives some useful background.

In their celebrated 1996 paper, ‘The Coming Age of Calm Technology’, Xerox engineers Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown forwarded the idea of ‘ubiquitous computing’. They saw this as the third stage of computer evolution. The first stage was the ‘mainframe era’, which saw the arrival of bulky, hot and slow ‘data processing’ or ‘defence calculator’ computers that in the 1950s and 1960s took up the space of a couple of large rooms. They were devised and built by corporations such as IBM and were used mainly for military research into thermonuclear weapons. Second was the ‘personal computer (PC) era’, beginning in the early 1980s, that was the result of innovation in micro-processing technology that was able to put a standalone (non-networked) computer on an office or home desktop. After that came what the authors called the ‘transition phase’ that began in the 1990s with the growth and increasing sophistication of the Internet and computer networks in businesses, in the universities, and in what Howard Rheingold (1993) called ‘virtual communities’. Weiser and Seely Brown distinguish this transition as one of ‘distributed computing’. This third phase they calculated to occur over the years 2005–20 and it would be distinguished by what they term ‘ubiquitous computing’. Here the Internet and embedded microprocessors in everything from garments and mobile phones, and from bus tickets to refrigerators, will push an awesome and invasive computing power into the background, just below the horizon of our consciousness, to emit its ‘calming’ effect. Through attention to the design of ‘calm technologies’, the authors argue, the era of ubiquitous computing – which we have already entered – will herald a radically new age. It is to be an era of perfect ‘man–computer symbiosis’ that Internet pioneer J. C. R. Licklider had already dreamed of in the early 1960s, where ‘men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria and perform the evaluations [and] computing machines will do the routinizable work’ (1960). Clearly taking their cue from Licklider, Weiser and Seely Brown predict that ubiquitous computing and ‘calm technologies’ will create an information society where people ‘remain serene and in control’ (Weiser and Seely Brown, 1996).

We need only look around to know that computing is certainly ubiquitous, but whether or not it is ‘calm’, unobtrusive and enables us to free up our lives for higher things, as these technological utopians predict, will be a major focus of this work.

For good or ill, computers are all around us, enveloping us in an information ecology that is comprised of networks, systems, processes, technologies and people – and they are not about to go away or become any less prevalent. Ten-year-olds, teenagers and adults inhabit this information society, and it pervades almost everything that we do. Our everyday working lives that take place in jobs in manufacturing industries or in the provision of services have either been radically transformed through computerization or have evaporated into obsolescence. Millions of us do new jobs in new industries that did not exist in our fairly recent past. The nature of business itself has changed due to the transformative effects of computerization. For example, the primary goal for large corporations, and for many smaller businesses too, is – as Jeremy Rifkin puts it – to become ‘weightless’ (2000: 30–55). That is to say, to get away from the ownership of fixed assets such as factories, machines, fleets of trucks and so forth that dominated the productive forces of an earlier age. In this so-called ‘new economy’, intangible assets, above all ideas, are ‘more powerful than controlling space and physical capital’ (Rifkin: 55). Ideas, moreover, are eminently suited to computerization, to be transformed into processable information through binary logic. Indeed it is ideas that make Microsoft, or Apple, or Google what they are – huge informational entities that are comprised of few or relatively few fixed assets. The comprehensiveness of this process means that the need for weightlessness is not confined to high-tech companies either. More traditional industries, those that still have comparatively high percentages of fixed assets such as plant and machinery, also use information technologies to their utmost capacity to speed up production, make production and distribution more flexible, and be more able to respond to changing customer demand. Automobile manufacturers, for example, the quintessence of the ‘old economy’ mode, are now awash with flexible computerized systems that make the car factory an utterly different business to what it was only twenty-five years ago.

In the information society, the age-old and modernist conception of there being some kind of bifurcation between private life and work life has been made as redundant as the 3.5-inch floppy disc. Flexible working systems, the proliferation of part-time and casual working, and the increased working load that many now have to bear, mean that the once-distinct and regularized times for work and rest have become blurred – if not eliminated altogether (Schor, 1993). Networked computers, mobile phones, PDAs, wireless laptops and so on mean that we are far more mobile and no longer so tied to the office desk or designated workplace. But they also mean that our work is able to follow us wherever we go. Being ‘always on’, as the network advertisers like to remind us, is an allegedly wonderful thing that allows us to ride the cusp of the high-tech wave. But it also means that the student who works part-time is made available at short notice to a boss who suddenly needs more staff for a couple of hours; and means that the office worker is made available to read and act upon a report that will be emailed to her at home at 10 o’clock on a Friday evening, with a response due by 9 o’clock Monday morning. There is today a distinct pressure that compels the individual within the network society to be connected and ‘always on’. And so if you want a decent job and a career, or to start up a business of almost any sort, you will need to be a willing and connected ‘node’ in the networked economy. The result has been that there are fewer and fewer refuges in time and space where you can be outside the pull of the network effect, to resist the virtual life and to experience another reality.

The pressure to be connected exists at almost every level. In the developed economies it is now almost impossible to go through high school and university, for example, without what would not so long ago have been considered advanced computer user skills. Not only that, but students must also be able to access networks and be online for considerable amounts of time if they want to progress through the curriculum. Universities have taken up the challenges of the information society with alacrity and are amongst the most computer-filled places in the world. Indeed these institutions, especially in the Anglo-American economies, see themselves as progressively more ‘weightless’ businesses that exist largely to deliver pedagogy to its ‘customers’ or ‘clients’ through flexible computerized systems (Currie, 1998; Hassan, 2003; Bates, 2004). The Internet has even become a way for the elite universities such as Yale and MIT – who set such reputational store by their ‘traditions’ – to go global and decidedly non-traditional. Both these universities have put course materials online for free, with Yale going one better by uploading video lectures in 2006. This acts as a global branding and marketing exercise for these and the other universities who will doubtless emulate them. By offering access to free material, the hope is that users will then want to get the Yale or MIT degree by becoming actual online students and paying for the privilege. In the information society where the ‘user pays’ principle dominates, the keenly contested ‘student market’ thus truly becomes universal through such hi-tech practices. No longer do you need to go to the physical university to get a degree – the university, even the biggest, most prestigious and traditional of them, will come to you (at a price). We see that the logic of acceleration imposes itself here, too, with degrees becoming ‘virtual’ and ‘flexible’ and ‘fast-tracked’. A typical example of the marketing of the alleged attractions of gaining a three-year degree in two years comes from the website of a UK university that claims this compressed degree will ‘accelerate your career: [allowing you to] gain a real advantage by entering the job market a year earlier. You’ll save money and get on the career ladder sooner’ (University of Northampton, 2007). Note that the emphasis is not on learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, but on efficiency, and getting into the workforce sooner so as to save time and money.

Possibly it is in the realm of entertainment that the orbital pull of information technologies has been most apparent and habit-changing. For example, television executives have been increasingly vexed by the fact that viewers are switching off and logging on instead. Time spent online has what is termed a ‘hydraulic’ effect in that it diverts from time spent on other pursuits (Markoff, 2004). And while online increasing millions consume and contribute to the growing ‘flows’ of information that make up the information ecology. We do this, for example, by generating billions of emails every day. Add to this the uncountable text messages, voice calls, video conversations, picture sending and so on, and you get some idea of the ‘hydraulic’ gravitation towards online activity. For those who spend extended periods online, outside of the formal work situation, we need to look to the video gamers, the growing millions of users who are the simultaneous consumers and creators of an entertainment industry said by Bill Gates in 2003 to be bigger than the movie industry. Indeed, accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers predicted that the industry (game consoles and software sales) would expand from $21.2 to $35.8 billion from 2003–7 (PWC, 2005). The market, moreover, has enormous room for further expansion as the network society spreads and deepens. For example, the number of users in China went from around zero in 2000 to 14 million by 2005; and industry leaders Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony are deliberately seeking to expand the global market out from its young male demographic (Joseph, 2005). It is a strategy that seems to be working, probably to the further consternation of TV industry executives. For example, journalist and media theorist Aleks Krotosi observes that in South Korea, for example, ‘practically every street in Seoul has an Internet café – a “PC Bang” – where kids and OAPs game side by side’ (2006). Moreover, online games, or what are called ‘massively multiplayer online role-playing games’ (MMORPG), are exploding in popularity. One game, Lineage, held the record for the largest number of players for a few years until the current mother of all MMORPGs, World of Warcraft, was released in 2004 and attracted up to 7 million users worldwide. As Krotosi notes, however, Lineage is still hugely popular in South Korea, with 4 million users, which is reportedly more than the total number of TV viewers (Krotosi, 2006).

Add to this the immense popularity of video-enabled mobile phones, DVDs, iPods, PlayStations, Xboxes, GameCubes, Wiis and the rest, and it becomes clear that in the information society entertainment is a dominant ‘hydraulic’ force on the time people spend online; time that is progressively more screen-based, digitally transmitted, and comes through networkable devices.

This mass migration to digital forms at work and in leisure brings us to the nub of the ‘network effect’. We see an example of this when, say, your best friend buys a mobile phone. The action exerts a certain social pressure, a pressure which, depending on the circumstances, either gently cajoles you into buying one yourself at some stage, or compels you into getting one the very next day. Those who have a mobile and reflect upon their reasons for purchasing it can easily understand this phenomenon; and marketers have understood this dynamic for a long time. In the information society taken as a cultural and economic totality, however, there is another kind of network effect at play. That is to say, to be part of the information society and to be affected by its pressure and its imperatives, you don’t even need to be connected – you only have to live and work in a modern or modernizing economy. It is important to recognize that so deeply and powerfully has the information society transformed our world that it moves us as workers and as consumers in ways we hardly register, except often as a form of stress. Even if we don’t sit at a networked computer screen, or walk around with a mobile phone clamped to one ear, as millions of people do, these others who are ostensibly ‘unconnected’ are nonetheless linked to vast networked flows of information that create momentum and speed, to produce what Hartmut Rosa has termed a generalized ‘social acceleration’ (2003). In other words, as the social world gets faster, its centripetal force (the network effect) draws us all in whether we are connected or not.

Let me explain this idea a bit more through an example. It is still common for mail sent through traditional means to take days or weeks, but now such time lags for communication seem anachronistic, from a very different world indeed. Letter writing is in decline mostly because ‘society’ now deems it too slow, and this will affect the unconnected through the closure of many post offices, the disappearance of uneconomic postboxes, the increasing cost of postage and so on. The network effect thus presents us with a choice: which is either to get connected and speed up your mode of communication – or be left behind. To ignore the network effect is to miss out on what might be important information, to lose out on opportunities or to be ignorant of changes that can affect us in our everyday lives. In the information society, to be in a position of unconnectedness is to run the risk of sinking rapidly from the social, economic and cultural radar.

We experience the network effect at the level of the individual, but it is felt too in institutions and industries that must also constantly adapt and synchronize – or die. This is clearly evident in ‘old’ media such as television, newspapers and radio. These media have had to speed up in the frantic quest for relevancy in the information age. Any TV show worth screening (and many that are not) will now have its own website where viewers can email each other about it, give feedback on what they like or dislike, and so on. Indeed, through podcasting and digital streaming, television content is migrating online in a big way. The BBC, for example, podcasts much of its audio content from its radio stations, thereby keeping listeners connected as if they were still listening to ‘old media’ radio. In late 2007 the BBC also launched its iPlayer which allows internet users to view BBC video content for up to seven days after it went to air – again allowing ‘old media’ players to not only keep people watching their content, but also take a lead in some ways, in respect of the shaping of how people use the Internet.

Newspapers saw the writing on the wall at least a decade ago and went online in a big way. Good examples are the British-based Guardian and the New York Times. Both are profit able enterprises, offering a combination of free and paid-for articles. For instance the Guardian through its Guardian Unlimited site gives much of its content away for free. And for a fee it gives the functionality to print the paper as it appears on the newsstands, enabling the reader to get the ‘morning’ paper in any part of the world at any time. The squeezing of time and space through information networks means that, for example, someone in Australia is able to read the London morning edition of the Guardian before most Londoners are out of bed. Through its blogs, the Guardian allows a globalized readership to immediately comment on op-ed pieces by being able to directly email the author and/or enter into a debate with other respondents. Radio too has gone online with most large commercial stations, and even small subscription-supported stations, offering streaming audio of their content, having separate web pages of their programmes which feature their popular hosts, and so on. In media and in business more generally, and at the level of both the individual and society, the pressure of the network effect to become part of the network logic is ever more compelling, bringing with it an acceleration of economy, culture and society.

The speed effect of the network effect

The network effect means that old media speeds up, communication speeds up, economies speed up and life speeds up. And this fast pace of life, as we shall see in chapter 6, has its benefits and its costs. But before we get to that discussion, I want to preface it – indeed preface the whole book – with a sharper idea of speed and what it means in the context of the information society, and how it is able to produce both dreams and nightmares for those who are part of it. Speed is built into the logic of computers. The perceived need to process information faster, it could be said, is their raison d’être. And speed can be good or bad, depending on the circumstances. We can enjoy instant communication with friends or loved ones over great distances and this is unambiguously good; but, as any stage magician knows, speed also blurs perception and dulls acuity. It can confuse and muddle our thinking, and the pressure of speed can cause us to act too quickly (or not quickly enough) – with results that may be decidedly bad. Think of reading that op-ed just mentioned from the Guardian, hot off the press so to speak on your computer. Reading on, fifteen hundred or so words later, you come across the author’s email address, and are invited to submit comments to the blog that will go online almost immediately. You are enraged by the piece and fire off a response quickly (because you can, and because the network effect prods you on), and suddenly it is finished. You press the ‘send’ button. Seconds later, your email has flashed through and your comments are uploaded for all

the world to see. And then you read it and think: I spoke too soon. I should have said this; did not really mean that; or could have expressed this point more clearly; that sentence makes me sound like a bigot. Too late. The dream of instant communication and information sharing has become the nightmare of personal embarrassment and public (global public!) ignominy. The best you can hope for is that no one will recognize your username, or that you will be ignored completely. A moment of red-faced embarrassment may be all that will transpire, but as we will see below, the pressure of speed may have a much more disastrous effect.

Speed and illusion

The speed effect of the network effect can also create an illusion. The illusion in the above example may be that, notwithstanding the potential global audience your words have, no one will ever give your reply a second thought. It could be that for all the alleged potential of computerized communication, you might as well have not bothered. But let us look at the issue of speed and illusion a bit more closely. A lot of books begin their chapters with quotations. This one, as you will have noted, is no different in this regard. It’s a serviceable way to get the reader’s head into a certain space, to think down this or that line of reasoning, and to act as a kind of mise en scène for the narrative that is about to unfold. Inserting a quotation has also, by the way, been an appropriately self-effacing way of conveying to the reader your extensive range of learning. Therefore, something judiciously chosen from Plato’s Republic would imply that I had read it, and that my thesis or argument is suitably profound and is supported by the immense intellectual tradition of 2,000 years of Platonic learning in Western civilization.

In truth the above quote was picked, more or less at random, from a Google search function that trawls its directories for quotations downloaded from the Internet. It took not the two or three days it might take to read a book – but less than two minutes. Nonetheless, the quote is a fairly good one; it’s apt and it fits with what I want to say in this opening chapter. Incidentally, Laing’s book The Politics of Experience has in fact taken up a bit of space on my bookshelf for a long time, but has been completely unexplored since the day I brought it home from a second-hand bookseller. I have it before me now and discover inside its pages a tram ticket dated 13.11.89. I have no idea if I purchased the ticket or some previous owner did. However, precisely how I came by these particular words, floating in cyberspace, disconnected from the rest of Laing’s writing, is illustrative of what I want to write about in this book. The very ease with which I could pluck it from the digital ether is in itself nothing short of astonishing if we pause for a while and reflect upon this fact, a fact we now routinely take for granted. And so a major aim of this book, thinking about you the reader, is that it is intended, in a very modest way, to be a ‘pause’ for reflection within the maelstrom of technological transformation.

This short digression is also intended to highlight the fact that the information society is a society in constant flux and change. It moves at an ever-quickening pace and causes the ties that bind us to the old, to the traditional and to the known, to easily slip their moorings. In such instability, illusions are easy to create, as I showed with the example of the quotation. I didn’t need to read the book, or even reach to my bookshelf to flip through its index. It was readily to hand in cyberspace and accessible through a few keystrokes on my computer. Moreover, what is available to me in the ‘network of networks’ is being added to, massively, every hour and every day of the year. Hundreds of billions of web pages containing almost every conceivable idea and utterance and image are now within my reach. Similarly, the information creating and gathering technologies that sustain these networks and flows of information are being improved and made more efficient and powerful every hour and every day of the year.

In the midst of ongoing change, everything is constantly new. But what is disturbing about this is that we have quickly become used to novelty; we are soon jaded by the next generation of this or that phone or computer, or digital gadget. We become jaded because the fruits of the information society are ultimately unfulfilling. The illusion is laid bare for only a short time, however, until the next new thing briefly distracts us and beguiles us. The speed of the action, in the construction of the seemingly ‘new’, disguises what is essentially an empty gesture. It is the illusion, in other words, that constitutes the reality of the information society.

A caveat needs to be inserted at this point. To say that the information society constructs illusions – and it could be argued that many of us know this at some level of intuition, such as when the computer is found to be too slow, or the iPod malfunctions too easily, or when the new software just complicates things even more – is not the same as saying that what is being projected in the rapid flickering of the screen and in the flows of digital networks is necessarily and always false. Illusion and reality exist side by side; they intermingle and interchange. Your illusion may be my reality and vice versa. It would follow that if truth constructs reality, then especially in our postmodern world, we need to always keep in mind that truth is provisional (Lyotard, 1979). As a community and society we need implicitly or explicitly to agree that something is true – such as the once widely held belief that plastic was a cheap, flexible and durable substance that would transform the way we live. It did. But new knowledge (new context, new understanding) showed that it is made from a finite and constantly more problematic source (oil) and it does not easily degrade, and is destined to stay inert in landfill as waste for hundreds of years. Truth then can become a chimera when the context that sustains that truth changes. As Helga Nowotny noted in the context of knowledge production: ‘new knowledge arises under changed conditions of creation and in changed structures of organization’ (1994: 87).

To try to make some sense of this rather tricky conundrum in the context of the information society we need first to ask: what is the illusion of cyberspace meant to portray and, second, when (and for whom) does the illusion (the dream) attain reality?

A digital dream

Not long ago I was at an academic conference in the UK where a range of speakers, from universities, from governments and from businesses, gave their views on how to engage with the future. Ways to think about time obviously formed a core theme of the conference. I gave a paper which argued, in short, that liberal democracy as a political practice functioned at a particular pace and cannot be overly rushed, and so therefore is unable in many ways to function properly (democratically) in our high-speed information society. At the parallel sessions, where I attended to hear papers, there was always the same person who seemed to be attracted to the same ones as me. I could see from the obligatory name badge that he was not an academic from a university, but a corporate employee, an American living in Paris and working as a consultant on future strategies for a high-tech multinational. He dressed immaculately, in contrast to most of those present. An expensive watch complemented his crisp shirt, silk tie and dark business suit. He looked poised, confident and relaxed. He sat at the front row of each session with a tiny Sony laptop on his knees and typed on it at high speed, using all his fingers in the manner of a super-efficient typist. He never looked up while the speaker gave his or her paper, just typed. After each presentation, he would close his laptop and quickly raise his hand as he lifted his head from his computer, all in one seamless motion. He was always first in with the questions and they were always calmly put, incisive and to the point, ensuring that he finished with his own counter-point as well (he never seemed to agree with the academics). He came to hear my paper and I could see him as I spoke – head down as usual, clicking away thoughts that were immediately fixed on to his computer’s hard drive. When I finished speaking his hand shot up even while the mandatory ripple of applause was going round the room. He asked, as I anticipated, about my argument regarding ‘social acceleration’, about how and why information technologies have speeded up society to an unprecedented degree.

I must have given him an unsatisfactory answer because afterwards, at a tea break, I noticed him softly clicking his mobile phone shut and making a straight line towards me with a broad smile on his face. He was an affable and supremely smart fellow, and I could see as he made his way towards me that I needed to come up with better answers this time. Over the following twenty-five minutes he didn’t actually ask any questions at all. He simply argued his case that ‘social acceleration’ was a myth. Time today in our postmodern, information society was actually going slower and it was information technologies that were causing this to happen – the polar opposite of my proposition. His position was actually one I’d heard before, and a version of it is well put by Jeremy Stein in a collection, Timespace (2001: 106–19). For my American interlocutor, however, the really radical speed-up in time and space occurred not for him and his generation, but for his great-grandparents who had moved from Russia during the early part of the twentieth century. For his forebears and for everyone else in the USA at that time, the introduction of the telegraph, the motor car and the railroad were the epitome of what Marx (and he knew his Marx) called ‘all that is solid melts into air’ – meaning that it was their world that had been completely transformed. It was they who truly experienced the temporal rupture from the pace of the countryside, to the drive of the mechanized city; theirs was a world out of their control with larger forces than they could comprehend, overwhelming them until they gradually learned to adapt and synchronize to the new pace of life, to twentieth-century modernity. This was what ‘speeding-up’ was all about, he maintained.

He, on the other hand, was in the process of constantly evolving with the information society. For example, the call he had been making previously was to his five-year-old daughter who was sitting on a swing in a Paris playground. What could be more life-affirming, positive and convenient? Where was the so-called ‘disorientation’ that the network society was supposed to induce? Information technologies conferred control and autonomy upon him, he insisted. As far as he was concerned, life would be impossible without ICTs, as would the company that employed him. But this did not mean he was a slave to them. He told me he could switch them all off and go hiking, which he regularly did; he loved his job as he dealt with ideas and communication, and real people, and he made a lot of money and he had a wonderful family who were all bilingual. Life was good. The pressure of work he could deal with because he was in control; he controlled its pace and never felt harried or rushed. What was all the fuss about?

A digital nightmare

There is an immensely popular computer game called The Legend of Mir 3 that online players from around the world can get involved in. Like many in the gaming world it is of the fantasy genre, full of heroes, mysteries, castles, monsters and gods. Its website defines it as:

a massive online multiplayer role-playing game based in a mysterious Oriental-style world. In The Legend of Mir you can be a powerful warrior and develope (sic) your ability in close combat, a skilled wizard with a whole set of spells or a mystic Taoist provided with inner spiritual powers. (Legend of Mir, 2007)

Again, as with many of these games, combat is the thing. In the different ‘quests’, you fight enemies and in defeating them become stronger and gain trophies and weapons, and graduate up the levels of expertise. Characters are represented by ‘avatars’, which in virtual-reality games are icons (symbols or pictorial images) that represent the user. Avatars are important. For serious gamers, they represent ‘real’ things that vitally affect their online status and their online persona, such as whether they are heroic, or wise, or have attained a high level of combat proficiency. Swords are of course important avatars in such virtual-reality games, as would be, say, a laser-power gun in a more futuristic game. Some swords in Legend of Mir are ‘wooden’ and others ‘metal’, and their skilful and ‘honourable’ use can propel the user up the various levels. Indeed, just as with a commodity or thing in real life, these avatars can be bought and sold, so a novice with a lot of real money can purchase a prized sword to help her progress – or at least gain some online status. Avatars can be bought and sold online between users at an agreed market price on websites such as eBay. As one seller noted in his/her eBay auction for a female warrior avatar for the Legend of Mir, the buyers ‘are paying for the time it takes me to earn this char[acter] and items involved’.

The weaving of the evanescence of virtual reality into the concreteness of real life – the spending of real money to buy virtual things – is testimony to the power of the dream in online gaming. However, virtual dreams can and do have nightmarish real-life consequences. In mid-2005 the gaming blogosphere buzzed with the news that a gamer in China, a Mr Qiu Chengwei, killed another gamer, Mr Zhu Caoyuan, in a dispute over a ‘dragon sabre’ that is a virtual sword for use in the Legend of Mir. Mr Qiu loaned his sword to Mr Zhu, who allegedly sold it to a third party. BBC News Online reported, curiously in its ‘technology’ section, that: ‘Qiu Chengwei stabbed Zhu Caoyuan in the chest when he found out he had sold his virtual sword for 7,200 Yuan (£473)’ (BBC, 2005). The China Daily Online reported on the same day that Mr Qiu had been sentenced to death, a penalty that could be ‘commuted to life in prison if he behaves well in jail, and no other crimes relating to him are uncovered’ (China Daily, 2005).

The virtual dream of heroism, of warrior status and online respect shattered into a real-life nightmare for Mr Qiu and for the family of the victim of his stabbing. The power of the information society to colonize the lives of individuals and so to shape and help determine their thoughts and actions could not be clearer than in the case of Mr Qiu. The contrast between cyber dream and digital nightmare, indeed, could not be more marked than that between Mr Qiu and my conference colleague. For one, the information society is replete with powerful resources that enhance one’s control over online and offline life. Personal self-confidence and success in career and family life are the result of a low-key and positive relationship with information technologies. For the other, the network effect has had much more drastic consequences. An essentially solitary pursuit builds up a virtual world of importance where it is no longer clear where reality begins and ends. Where morality begins and ends becomes fatally blurred too. The commonplace of virtual death crosses over for a single instant into the death of a real individual, to change forever the lives of all those involved. The reality of the nightmare begins to assert itself for Mr Qiu when his digital dreaming is no longer possible in a Chinese jail cell that is presumably not modem or wi-fi connected.

Digital dream and cyber nightmare have been contrasted here in two real-life, but nonetheless singular