Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
Bubbling away among these observations on the power emanating from corporate
access to information networks is another important ingredient – the spice
that makes the ‘information explosion’ available only on proprietary grounds. I
have already said a good deal about the central role of corporations in today’s
economy and how this brings with it their priorities and excludes other ways of
thinking. This has profound effects on information. We have encountered some
of this in considering the consequences of ability-to-pay criteria and operating on
the basis of market principles. Here I wish to highlight that it also establishes the
proprietary principle of private ownership as the pre-eminent means of handling
information. One consequence, as we have seen, is that the corporate sector, with
the most economic clout, is provided with the major information services. Another
is that much information, once purchased, is then removed – or more likely never
permitted to be seen – from public view precisely because it is privately owned.
Herbert Schiller thinks this is evident in contemporary America, where ‘a great
amount of information is withheld from the public because it is regarded and
treated as proprietary by its corporate holders’ (Schiller, 1991a, p. 44). Obvious
examples of this principle – owners can do what they will with what they own –
are information garnered by market research companies and research and development
programmes undertaken by the corporate sector. Intellectual property,
patenting and copyright are burgeoning areas of law in the ‘information age’: they
are testament to the weight of proprietorial principles in this day and age.
Finally, it ought to be emphasised that corporate capital is not merely an
external environment into which ICT/information is being introduced. The ‘information
revolution’ is not just being targeted at the corporate sector; it is also being
managed and developed by corporate capital itself. In fact the information
industry is among the most oligopolistic, gigantic and global of corporate
businesses. A roll-call of leading information companies is one which announces
some of today’s largest world corporations, the likes of IBM, Digital Equipment,
Microsoft, Philips, Hitachi, Siemens and General Electric. It is a business in
ferment, mergers and takeovers being the order of the day, though these characteristically
involve large-scale corporations levering to get better access to fastchanging
markets which increasingly spill over into one another, with computing
blending with communications, office equipment with personal computers, publishing
with education. The industry is an arena operated by large-scale corporate
capital which increasingly is responsible for organising and delivering connectivity
and content together. As the information business follows a path of convergence
and integration (of technology and service, hardware and software),
there are frantic efforts made to ally wherever possible and to take over wherever
feasible. This corporate domination inevitably finds expression in very familiar
commercial priorities: it privileges profitability, commercial criteria and supply on
a basis of ability to pay.
Consumer capitalism
The foregoing has concerned itself with how Schiller and like-minded critics argue
that the ‘information society’ is shaped by and most beneficial to advanced
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