Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND THE MARKET
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systems of surveillance both strengthen managerial control and increase choices
for people. An instance would be credit card systems, which have undeniably
resulted in greater monitoring of individuals by corporate capital; at the same
time, these capitalist enterprises have also provided a great convenience for many
people, facilitating economic transactions in many spheres of life.
A cognate objection is to the suggestion of one-way commodification of
relationships. It is hard to ignore the pervasive intrusion of market relationships
in so much of life, from television services to the care of children. Lawrence
Lessig (2002) provides timely warnings about the absence of ‘fair use’ protocols
(that allow reasonable quotation from text-based sources without infringement of
copyright) when it comes or music and movie production. New technologies
make images and sound much more amenable to use in production of, say, a
critical review or a parody, but the same digital processes and the absence of
‘fair use’ clauses mean that originators of those images and sound can prevent
their use – or charge for every phrase of a sound or still used. Failure to comply
with such insistence on proprietary rights (can one imagine having to pay a fee
for every quotation from Shakespeare or the poetry of Robert Frost?) risks one
being guilty of ‘digital piracy’.
However, there are significant counter-tendencies to this advance of commodification,
as may be witnessed with the development of the Internet. Thus
we have growth of blogging, chatrooms and electronic communities, the spread
of Web pages (most of which are non-commercial), and the availability of free
downloads (notably for music, but also for out-of-copyright literature and poetry).
All such represent instances of decommodification. They may only be a temporary
phenomenon that will be eroded by the commercialisation of cyberspace,
but for now they are at least a partial refutation of the Marxian claim that the
market continues on its inexorable way in informational affairs.
On the subject of information inequalities, it may be noted that the radical
critique, while it helpfully focuses on class differences in access to information
resources, works with a crude conception of the stratification system. To distinguish
between the ‘information rich’ and the ‘information poor’ avoids precise
delineation of who these are and fails to consider the complexity and range of
different positions in a class-divided society. In short, the model lacks sufficient
sociological sophistication to allow consideration, say, of gender, racial and
ethnic differences, to say nothing of the expansion of non-manual groups and the
resulting positions these occupy in the class hierarchy. Similarly, Schiller’s attention
to the corporate sector as the major beneficiary of the ‘information
revolution’, while clearly being implicated in the class system, cannot be entirely
accepted since institutional cannot be equated with personal wealth. That is, the
‘information rich’ as people are not synonymous with corporate capital, and the
gap needs exploring in any acceptable analysis of information inequalities.
Further, Schiller’s underdeveloped conception of class fails to take account of
cultural (as opposed to economic) capital, though in the realm of information/
knowledge cultural capital such as higher education, access to libraries and
linguistic command may be decisive (compare, say, the affluent but ill-educated
with the modestly rewarded but highly literate). I would not wish to counterpoise
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