Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
be extended to scents and smells, but reflection on the struggles surrounding the
discovery of the genetic code highlights the enormous stakes involved. Early this
century new sciences (geneomics and proteomics) have been founded because
the DNA structure has been finally identified by some 2 billion letters. This will
radically and rapidly change medical science, since knowledge of genetic codes
announces an end to the development of drugs through trial and error. This
research has been made freely available by its developers at the Wellcome Trust
Sanger Institute. However, there was a race to define the code that involved a
commercial organisation that aimed to charge for every consultation. When one
considers that professionals from over 135 countries look at data from the Sanger
Institute at least 1 million times per week (Guardian, 3 November 2003, p. 1), the
implications of commodifying this knowledge can be fully appreciated. Almost as
profound are struggles over the programmes that allow the Internet to run.
Microsoft is the major proprietorial player, but open source code – developed as
a service that is freely available, by such as Linux and Apache – offers a serious
challenge to Bill Gates’s model (Weber, 2004).
The direction in which commodification of information, facilitated by ICTs,
moves is ‘towards a society in which much of the cultural activity that we
currently take for granted . . . . reading an encyclopaedia in a public library, selling
a geometry textbook to a friend, copying a song for a sibling – will be routed
through a system of micro payments in return for which the rights to ever smaller
pieces of our culture are doled out’ (Boynton, 2004). Schiller deplored such a
tendency, holding firm to the notion that information should be a public good,
not something to be bought and sold on the market (Rokowski, 2005).
Class inequalities
The pivotal role of the market in the informational realm means that information
and information technologies are made available to those best able to pay for
them. This does not mean, of course, that they are totally exclusive. Clearly, virtually
all members of society have some access to information products and
services, television, radio and newspapers being obvious examples. Indeed, since
the market is open to all consumers, most of what is offered is, in principle, available
to anyone – at least to anyone with the wherewithal to pay for them.
However, the fact that the market is the allocative mechanism means that it is
responsive to a society differentiated by income and wealth. In other words, class
inequalities – broadly, the hierarchical divisions of society – exercise a central
pull in the ‘information age’.
One popular way of presenting this has been to suggest that it evidences a
‘digital divide’ (Webster, 2004, part 5). A great deal of concern has been
expressed about this in recent years, especially with regard to adoption of the
Internet. There is abundant evidence that the better off are quickest to get
‘wired’ (see Eurostat, 2005). While Schiller would have acknowledged the
empirical reality of these divisions, it is doubtful that he would have endorsed
the technology-led thinking that permeates most digital-divide concern. The
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