Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
remained until his death thirty years later. This background and interest, combined
with his own radical dispositions, is reflected in his central role in developing
what has come to be known as the ‘political economy’ approach to
communications and information issues. This has a number of key characteristics
(cf. Golding and Murdock, 1991), three of which seem to me to be of special
significance.
First, there is an insistence on looking behind information – say, in the form
of newspaper stories or television scripts – to the structural features that lie behind
these media messages. Typically these are economic characteristics such as patterns
of ownership, sources of advertising revenue, and audiences’ spending
capacities. In the view of political economists these structural elements profoundly
constrain, say, the content of television news or the type of computer
programs that are created. Second, ‘political economy’ approaches argue for a
systemic analysis of information/communications. That is, they are at pains to
locate particular phenomena – say, a cable television station or a software
company – within the context of the functioning of an entire socio-economic
system. As we shall see, this is invariably capitalism, and political economists start
from, and recurrently return to, the operation of the capitalist system to assess the
significance and likely trajectory of developments in the information realm.
Another way of putting this is to say that the approach stresses the importance
of holistic analysis, but, to pre-empt critics charging that this is a closed approach
where, since everything operates in ways subordinate to the overall ‘system’,
nothing much can change, a third major feature comes to the fore. This is the
emphasis on history, on the periodisation of trends and developments. Thus
political economists draw attention to the import of different epochs of capitalist
development and the particular constraints and opportunities they evidence.
This latter is manifest in the work of Schiller, who is especially concerned
with contemporary trends in communications. His starting point is that, in the
current epoch of capitalism, information and communication have a pronounced
significance as regards the stability and health of the economic system. Indeed,
echoing a seminal essay of Hans Magnus Enzensberger published in the early
1960s, Schiller and like-minded thinkers regard ‘the mind industry’ as in many
ways ‘the key industry of the twentieth century’ (Enzensberger, 1976, p. 10). This
is a point that Herbert Schiller frequently affirmed, for example:
There is no doubt that more information is being generated now than ever
before. There is no doubt also that the machinery to generate this information,
to store, retrieve, process and disseminate it, is of a quality and
character never before available. The actual infrastructure of information
creating, storage and dissemination is remarkable.
(Schiller, 1983a, p. 18)
Of course, this is also a starting point of other commentators, most of whom
see it as the signal for a new sort of society. Schiller, however, will have none of
this. With all the additional information and its virtuoso technologies, capitalism’s
priorities and pressures remain the same. Thus: ‘contrary to the notion that
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