Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
This is because it is only when domestic audiences are aggregated that they represent
a commercially viable prospect. To be sure, programmes put out at 2 a.m.
are scarcely seeking mass audiences. Nevertheless, the commercial imperative
operates here since such programming is invariably cheaply produced – cheaper
by far than peak viewing shows – and/or reruns of previous transmissions.
Surveying the surfeit of information offered in recent decades to the ‘general
public’ – from pulp fiction available now even in food stores, to free ‘newspapers’
delivered to every home, to the explosive growth of ‘junk mail’, to 24-hour-a-day
television services, to the extension to every high street of video rental shops –
the eminent journalist Carl Bernstein (1992) concluded that ‘ordinary Americans
are being stuffed with garbage’. Herbert Schiller (1987) concurs, arguing that ‘we
see and hear more and more about what is of less and less importance. The
morning television “news”, which provides an hour and a half of vacuous or irrelevant
chatter, epitomises the current situation.’ In this sense the ‘information
revolution’ has given the ‘information poor’ titillation about the collapse of royal
marriages, mawkish accounts of the dying days of football genius and alcoholic
George Best in late 2005, daily opportunities to gawp at soap operas, graphic
discussions of the sexual prowess of sportspeople, round-the-clock transmission
of Big Brother contestants, but precious little information that may let them in on
the state of their society, of the construction of other cultures, of the character
and reasons for their own situations.
Corporate capitalism
In Herbert Schiller’s view the major beneficiary of the ‘information revolution’,
because it is the most appealing market, is the corporate sector of advanced
capitalism. Throughout the twentieth century the market economy changed from
one characterised by innumerable small-sized enterprises to one in which the
major part of economic activity is dominated by a select few corporations which
are very large, vertically and horizontally integrated, and enjoy a large geographical
reach.
This corporate capitalism has several crucial consequences for the information
environment, each of which stems from its enormous wealth and central position
in the modern economy. One is that information and allied technologies are
developed and put in place with the corporate market uppermost in mind. The
major computer installations, the front end of telecommunications services and
the leading forms of electronic information processing are all to be found among
corporations which have the ability to afford such things and, connectedly, have
identifiable needs for ultra-sophisticated information facilities. For instance, as
they have expanded in size, scale and space (corporations are generally bigger,
involved in more things and across wider frontiers than ever before), so it is clear
that modern corporations have a built-in need for developed information networks
and advanced systems of management control. Up-to-the-minute computerised
technologies are a prerequisite of co-ordinating, of integrating and administering
organisations which typically have disparate locations.
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