Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION AND DEMOCRACY
Information management
The preceding review leads us on to a wider terrain of information management.
The public sphere has not only been denuded from within by an assault on its
public service functions, but has also suffered from a more general development
of information ‘packaging’. We need to enter here into consideration of the
emergence of the ‘spin doctor’, the ‘media consultant’, ‘image management’ and
associated practices in contemporary political affairs. Connected to this is the
explosive growth in the means of ‘persuading’ people, much in evidence in
politics, but also extending deep into the arena of consumption. In addition, there
has been a massive expansion of ‘entertainment’, one involving both increases
in the means of providing it and an extension of an ethos into areas from which
it was once excluded, something which results in a surfeit of what Herbert Schiller
dismissingly termed ‘garbage information’. All told, the thesis is that enormous
amounts of greatly increased information in the modern age are of dubious value.
Let us look a little more closely at some dimensions of this argument.
A striking feature of the twentieth century, and especially of the post-war
world, was the spread of the means, and of the consciousness of purpose, of
persuading people. What is often called ‘information management’ is indeed
an integral feature of liberal capitalist societies. As Howard Tumber (1993b)
observes:
Information management . . . is fundamental to the administrative coherence
of modern government. The reliance on communications and information
has become paramount for governments in their attempts to manipulate
public opinion and to maintain social control.
(Tumber, 1993b, p. 37)
It put down its strongest roots in the opening decades of the century when,
as recognised by a spate of thinkers – prominent among whom were political
scientists like Harold Lasswell (1934) and Walter Lippmann (1922) and,
most important, the founder of modern public relations Edward Bernays (1955)
– the growth of democracy, in combination with decisive shifts towards a
consumption-centred society, placed a premium on the ‘engineering of consent’
(Bernays, 1952).
There is an extensive literature on the growth of ‘propaganda’, later softened
into ‘public opinion’ and later still into ‘persuasion’, which need not be reviewed
here (Robins and Webster, 1999). Suffice to say that it became evident to some
thinkers early on in the twentieth century that mechanisms of control were necessary
to co-ordinate diverse and enfranchised populations. In Lippmann’s view
this meant ‘a need for imposing some form of expertness between the private
citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled’ (Lippmann, 1922,
p. 378). This expertise would be the province of the modern-day propagandist,
the information specialist in whose hands ‘persuasion [becomes] a self-conscious
art and a regular organ of popular government’ (1922, p. 248). Note here that
in the eyes of Lasswell, Lippmann and Bernays information management is a
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