Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
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What we have here is a two-sided insistence: the ‘information society’ reflects
capitalist imperatives – i.e. corporate and class concerns and market priorities
are the decisive influences on the new computer communications facilities – and,
simultaneously, these informational developments sustain and support capitalism.
In this way Schiller accounts for the importance of information and ICTs in ways
which at once identify how the history of capitalist development has affected the
informational domain and how information has become an essential foundation
of that historical development.
Transnational empire
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We may get a better idea of how Schiller saw things if we take a little time to
assess his views on the development of capitalism during the twentieth century.
He was particularly alert to the fact that as corporate capitalism has grown in
size and scope, so, too, has it created what might be called a transnational empire.
That term may appear too strong because of its imperial connotations, yet
it is surely unarguable that during the twentieth century we witnessed the
construction of a global marketplace and, with this, the worldwide expansion
of especially US corporations (but also, of course, European and Japanese). A
moment’s thought makes this evident enough: the automobile industry is today
a global activity in which the likes of Ford, General Motors and Nissan are prominent;
computers mean IBM and a cluster of smaller (but still huge) companies
like Digital Equipment, Dell and Apple; telecommunications means AT&T, ITT
and similarly positioned and privileged giants.
Information and its enabling technologies have been promoted by, and are
essential to sustain, these developments in several ways. One stems from the fact
that corporations that roam the globe in pursuit of their business require a sophisticated
computer communications infrastructure for their daily activities. Crudely,
it is unthinkable that a company with headquarters, say, in New York could coordinate
and control activities in perhaps fifty or sixty other countries (as well as
diverse sites inside the United States) without a reliable and sophisticated information
network. Indeed, transnational corporations route hundreds of thousands
of telecommunications data and text messages every day in their routine operations.
Further, information networks are crucial not only within particular
corporations, but also to knit together the business services that are essential for
the operation of a world market. Not surprisingly, international financial networks
are to the fore in the informational realm (cf. Hamelink, 1982).
To Herbert Schiller this indicates ways in which information is subordinated
to corporate needs, but a less committed observer might argue that the ‘IT revolution’
took place and just happened to suit corporate concerns, though over
the years there has come about a corporate dependence on information networks.
However, there are two objections to this line of reasoning. The first, as
we shall see below, is that the information flowing within and between sites is
of a particular kind, one that overwhelmingly expresses corporate priorities. The
second, and this is related to the first, comes from his elder son, Dan Schiller
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