Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
It is this that leads Professor Schiller to ask exasperatedly:
What kind of information today is being produced at incredible levels of
sophistication? Stock market prices, commodity prices, currency information.
You have big private data producers, all kinds of brokers . . . who have their
video monitors and are plugged into information systems which give them
incredible arrays of highly specific information, but this is all related to how
you can make more money in the stock market . . . how you can shift funds
in and out of the country . . . that’s where most of this information is going
and who is receiving it.
(Schiller, 1990b, p. 3)
David Dickson (1984) extends this argument in his history of science and
technology – key knowledge realms – since the Second World War. Here he identifies
two elements, namely the corporate sector and the military, as the critical
determinants of innovation. To Herbert Schiller these are reducible to one, since
it is his conviction that the military’s responsibility is to protect and preserve the
capitalist system and its market ethos. Thus he writes that:
The military’s preoccupation with communication and computers and satellites
. . . is not some generalized interest in advanced technology. The
mission of the USA’s Armed Forces is to serve and protect a world system
of economic organisation, directed by and of benefit to powerful private
aggregations of capital.
(Schiller, 1984b, p. 382)
The military might make enormous demands on information, but since this is to
bolster the capitalist empire worldwide the fundamental shaper of the informational
domain is the market imperative at the heart of capitalist enterprise to which
the military dedicates itself. It is in this light that we can better appreciate Schiller’s
summary judgement of the ‘information society’. Far from being a beneficent
development, it is expressive of capital’s commitment to the commercial ethic.
Hence
What is called the ‘information society’ is, in fact, the production, processing,
and transmission of a very large amount of data about all sorts of matters –
individual and national, social and commercial, economic and military. Most
of the data are produced to meet very specific needs of super-corporations,
national government bureaucracies, and the military establishments of the
advanced industrial state.
(Schiller, 1981, p. 25)
Dickson extends this theme when he identifies three main phases of the
United States’ science policy. The first, in the immediate post-war years, was
dominated by the priority of gearing scientific endeavour to the needs of military
and nuclear power. During the 1960s and 1970s there was a discernible switch,
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