Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
from medical records to telephone accounts, from bank statements to school
records) moving in tandem with the increased organisation which is so much a
feature of life today. Organisation and observation are conjoined twins, ones that have
grown together with the development of the modern world.
The increasingly organised character of life is a key element of Giddens’s
theory of ‘reflexive modernisation’, for which he draws explicitly on the work of
Ulrich Beck (1992). Central to Giddens’s argument is that life is increasingly
disembedded, by which he means that, more and more, life is not controlled by
fixed (or embedded) communities (villages, tribes, religions) or by nature (the
seasons, landscape, soil). In embedded situations one does ‘what one must’
because, for example, the beliefs and mores of the neighbourhood in which one
lives are inescapable and unchallengeable, or because the dictates of nature are
overwhelming (cows must be milked, crops must be sown). In contrast, nowadays
people increasingly choose how to live, personally as well as collectively,
whether this be a matter of choosing one’s intimate partner or adopting genetically
modified crops.
An important corollary of this development is a growing refusal to accept
fate or destiny or any argument that asserts that ‘things must be done this way
because that’s the way they have always been done’. Giddens suggests that we
inhabit a ‘post-traditional’ society, one in which everything is questionable and
indeed questioned. Consider, for example, how one chooses friends or pastimes
oneself, or the ways in which all moral claims are now contested, or how ‘natural’
limits are refused (deserts are made to bloom, infertility is combated, old age
resisted). This is not to say that people make free choices here, there and everywhere,
since clearly each of us makes decisions in circumstances that constrain
in one way or another. The central issue, however, is that it is increasingly
acknowledged that arrangements we enter into are not givens, but are socially
constructed, hence chosen. It follows that those who resist consideration of
choices are regarded as ‘fundamentalists’ of one sort or another whose recourse
is to tenets which are subject to challenge and are, indeed, regularly challenged
(e.g. ‘it’s God’s will’, ‘children must obey their parents’, ‘women are born to serve
men’, ‘science proves that . . . ’, ‘there’s only one true religion’).
Modernity being a matter of increased choices made at every level necessitates
heightened reflexivity, by which Giddens means increased surveillance
(information gathering) so that we may develop knowledge upon which may be
made choices about ourselves and the sort of society we want. After all, if today
religion is increasingly a matter of personal conviction, then it follows that people
need information about other religions as a requisite of their making their own
choices. Again, if more and more people are to choose to adopt a lifestyle which
appeals to them, then a requisite is that a lot of information must be available to
them about varied lifestyles, not least so they may refuse those lifestyles which
others might prefer them to adopt. Choice is feasible only where information
has been gathered about actual and possible situations, hence monitoring of
arrangements must be undertaken. By the same token, where there is heightened
reflexivity there must also be means of making this information available to
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