Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
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capitalism, to its market strictures, its structures of inequality and its corporate
organisations. However, critics can go further than this in two ways. The first,
expanded by Oscar Gandy (1993), combines the theme of surveillance with an
emphasis on the class and capitalist dimensions of the process. Thereby it is
suggested that the informatisation of relationships is expressed by the increased
monitoring of citizens in the interests of a capitalist class. In these terms, for
example, the state is a capitalist state, hence the spread of surveillance at its
behest is a means of bolstering a subordinate class, by for instance building up
files on active trade unionists, political subversives and radical thinkers, en route
to more effectively restricting dissent. Similarly, the spread of surveillance for
economic purposes is dedicated to strengthening the hold of capitalist relations
(Mosco, 1989, pp. 119–24). The second, connected contention is that the ‘information
revolution’ furthers capitalism by extending deeper into the everyday
lives of people, hence encouraging the creation and consolidation of consumer
capitalism.
This latter can be a vague term, but here it is taken to mean an individualistic
(as opposed to collective) way of life, one in which people ‘buy a life’ (Lynd
and Hanson, 1933) by paying personally for what they get. It entails a lifestyle
which is home-centred to the detriment of civic relations, where people are
predominantly passive (consumers of what capitalism has provided), where hedonism
and self-engrossment predominate and find encouragement. Consumer
capitalism is thus an intensely private way of life, with public virtues such as
neighbourliness, responsibility and social concern displaced by a concern for
one’s individual needs that are felt most likely to be met by purchases in the
store and the shopping mall (and here, in the fantasy that in purchases we can
find fulfilment of the self, is evidence of the collapse of the self itself: Lasch, 1984).
Informational developments are central to the spread of consumerism since
they provide the means by which people are persuaded by corporate capitalism
that it is both a desirable and an inevitable way of life. Through a sustained information
barrage, attests Schiller, ‘all spheres of human existence are subject to
the intrusion of commercial values . . . the most important of which, clearly, is:
CONSUME’ (Schiller, 1992, p. 3). Here I telegraph some of the ways in which it
is argued that consumer capitalism is encouraged by the ‘information revolution’.
First, television is enhanced to become a still more thorough means of
selling goods and services to the individual buyer and to bolster the consumerist
lifestyle. Television has already contributed much to the stay-at-home ethos of
consumerism, and critics anticipate that flat-screen television sets, home entertainment
systems, Internet, video and cable will deepen this trend. Robert
Putnam (2000), in his influential book concerned with the decline of ‘social
capital’ in the United States, presented compelling evidence that ‘more television
watching means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social
involvement’ (p. 229), television stealing time and ‘encourag[ing] lethargy and
passivity’ (p. 238) that contributes to ‘civic disengagement’ (p. 246). For all the
talk of ‘interactivity’ that has accompanied digitalisation, there is reason to
suspect that ‘interaction’ to vote for or against the removal of a contestant in a
‘reality TV’ show will do nothing to shake viewers from the lethargy of ‘couch
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