Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
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To be sure, such thinkers do insist on the resonance of familiar themes in social
analysis, but there is among them a group of commentators deeply aware of trends
in the information domain. Led by Herbert Schiller, thinkers such as Peter Golding,
Graham Murdock and Nicholas Garnham in Britain, Cees Hamelink in Holland,
Armand Mattelart in France, Kaarle Nordenstreng in Finland, and Vincent
Mosco, Gerald Sussman and Stuart Ewen in North America offer a systematic and
coherent analysis of advanced capitalism’s reliance on and promotion of information
and information technologies. As such, these Marxian-informed accounts
achieve more than enough credibility to merit serious attention.
Herbert I. Schiller (1919–2000) was the most prominent figure among a group
of Critical Theorists (something of a euphemism for Marxist-influenced scholarship
in North America) commenting on trends in the information domain during
the late twentieth century. Like Daniel Bell, Schiller was a New York-raised intellectual
who came of age in the 1930s. However, unlike so many of his contemporaries
from that city and its educational forcing house City College (CCNY),
Schiller did not mellow politically as he aged (Bloom, 1986). He was radicalised
by the slump of the inter-war years during which his father was unemployed for
a decade and by experiences with the military in North Africa and Europe between
1943 and 1948. Though he had been raised in a one-bedroom apartment, Schiller
was deeply shocked by the acute deprivation he saw in Morocco and Algeria,
while in Germany he had been appalled to see US and British officials reinstate
Nazis to positions of power as anti-Communist sentiment grew. Herbert Schiller
remained a man of the Left in his adult life. Throughout he kept a keen eye out
for conditions in what came to be called the ‘Third World’, those places where
the majority of humanity live out their lives, generally in or close to poverty, and
his experiences in Berlin left him sceptical of US governments’ repeated claims
to be acting honourably at home and abroad (Maxwell, 2003).
Though he came rather late to academe, publishing his first book in 1969
and beginning to teach in the information/communications field only a couple
of years earlier, he has had a marked effect on perceptions of the ‘information
age’. Not least this has come about from his conscientious attendance at conferences
and meetings around the world where his memorable oratorical and
debating skills were shown on a wide stage. Tall and angular, Schiller’s sardonic
wit and fluency, delivered in an unmistakable New York accent, impressed many
who saw and heard him. His influence also stemmed from a regular output of
books and articles, among the most important of which are Mass Communications
and American Empire (1969), The Mind Managers (1973), Who Knows? (1981),
Information and the Crisis Economy (1984) and Culture Inc. (1989). In addition,
much of his impact must be a consequence of the fact that he highlights in his
work issues that ‘information society’ enthusiasts tend to overlook – the poor, the
disadvantaged, the nations outside Europe and North America.
Political economy
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Herbert Schiller was trained as an economist, though he became a Professor
of Communications at the University of California, San Diego, in 1970 where he
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