Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
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presumption in general is that digital divides are regrettable, even reprehensible,
because they exclude the unfortunate from full participation in society. A policy
of maximising access to the Internet duly follows, perhaps by attempting to make
terminals available in schools or libraries so that the disadvantaged might get to
them. The premise of such policies is that it is technology that blocks people from
opportunities, a viewpoint starkly evident in Republican Newt Gingrich’s proposal
in 1995 that the poor would be better off being given a laptop computer than
welfare benefits. Thinkers such as Herbert Schiller would have protested that such
a recommendation confuses cause and effect, and its practical consequences for
the poor are risible.
Vincent Mosco’s (1989) description of a ‘pay-per society’ spotlights the
ability-to-pay factor as a determinant force in the generation of and access to
information. Bluntly, the higher one is in the class system, the richer and more
versatile will be the information to which one has access; as one descends the
social scale, so does one get information of an increasingly inferior kind.
Herbert Schiller (1983a) endorses this position, identifying as the ‘chief
executors’ of the ‘information revolution’ – by virtue of their capabilities to afford
the most expensive and leading-edge products of the ICT/information industries
– three institutions: the military/defence agencies, large private corporations and
national governments. In this he finds support from business consultants who
estimated that over three-quarters of the European ICT market is accounted for
by corporate and state outlets, with the ‘general public’ (i.e. everyone else apart
from these two privileged groups) making up the remainder. In short, the virtuoso
technologies go to the likes of Ford and the Air Force; the majority of the
population get the leftovers – for the most part television-type playthings.
The centrality of ability-to-pay criteria, and the close linkage these have with
class inequalities, leads Herbert Schiller to emphasise what one might call information
stratification. He distinguishes, for instance, the ‘information rich’ and the
‘information poor’, both within and between nations. Thus:
Access to information becomes a factor of wealth and income. The general
public and the State itself are progressively excluded. . . . The division inside
the society between information ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ deepens just as it
does between nations, making the less-developed ones – which in the information
age means the overwhelming majority – still more dependent on the
few information generators, processors and transmitters.
(Schiller, 1983b, p. 88)
This is easily enough illustrated. In countries such as Britain and the United
States, for example, it is striking that, for the ‘general public’, the ‘information
revolution’ means more television. As mentioned earlier, not only have the major
developments been, in all essentials, enhancements of the television monitor
(cable, home computer, video, Internet), they have also been programmed with
a very familiar product – entertainment. And the reasons for this are not hard to
find. They lie in the fabulous success of television over the years (household saturation
of equipment, a tremendous vehicle for advertising, entertainment shows
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