Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
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others, and accordingly there is a central role to be played by media of all sorts
in today’s world.
If disembedding requires heightened reflexivity, this also has major consequences
for control over our futures. Crucially, information gathering and analysis
allows us to choose our futures on the basis of ‘risk assessment’. That is,
nowadays we observe situations, reflect on what we learn, then calculate the
consequences of deciding on a particular option. For instance, everyone getting
married will consider the qualities of the proposed partner before taking the
plunge, will know the risks of divorce, and they will be aware of the greater likelihood
of marital failure should they have been divorced previously. This is not
an exact process, but it is evident that such an intimate decision involves risk
assessment informed by one’s consideration of the relationship so far and what
information can be garnered elsewhere. When government or corporations adopt
a policy towards the environment, transport or farming, similar principles come
into operation: surveillance and information accumulation, reflection and decisions
made on the basis of risk assessments.
Living as we do, anxiety and uncertainty go with the terrain. This makes for
a paradox: we now have much more freedom and control over our lives than our
ancestors, yet we are arguably more unsure of how to act than they who
just ‘did what they had to’. Children were reared in traditional ways, tasks were
undertaken because they ‘had to be done’, death was a ‘fact of nature’. Today
parents commonly worry about how to relate to their offspring, alternative ways
of doing jobs are routinely introduced, and death is resisted by medicine, diet
and exercise regimes. Living in a ‘post-traditional’ society is full of paradoxes, to
which we turn in a moment, but for now we may stress that this world has an
insatiable appetite for information, one driven by the questioning of all traditions
and a yearning to ‘take control’ at all levels, from the corporate and political to
the personal.
Paradoxes of modernity
It is well known that most commentators had glum opinions about the growth of
surveillance. For instance, Max Weber’s (1930) resignation to the inevitability
of bureaucratisation lessened neither his gloom at the prospect of a world filled
with ‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’ nor his distaste for the
‘mechanised petrification’ which accompanies the ‘iron cage’ of rational–legal
organisation (pp. 181–2). Given the currency of such views – amounting to what
we now call Orwellian (‘Big Brother Is Watching You!’) images of society – it is
as well to make a comment on what one may refer to as paradoxes of modernity.
At the outset it is useful to distinguish individuation from individuality. The
former refers to the situation when each and every person is known about, hence
identified by a singular record – say, of name, date of birth, residence, employment
history, educational achievements and lifestyle preferences. The latter,
which many commentators believe to be threatened by increased social organisation
and the observation which is its accompaniment, is about being in charge
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