Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
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consciousness (one might recall here those maps of the world covered in ‘British
red’ studied by schoolchildren well into the 1960s).
Benedict Anderson (1983) reminds us of how essential information resources
were to these processes in the colonial era. He discusses the ‘institutions of power’
(p. 163) that played leading parts in establishing national identities and in facilitating
conquest. Among these, maps and censuses were central and interconnected.
Maps ‘penetrated deep into the popular imagination’ (p. 175) among the
colonialists, and they were also essential to enable colonialism to operate. The
refinement of map-making, the precise calculation of longitudes and latitudes, was
a requisite of conquest – the military needed to know where it was going! – and
in turn censuses were essential to know, and thereby to order, those whom one
was to rule. As Anderson says, the ambition of the military conquerors was for
‘total surveyability’, ‘a totalising classificatory grid, which could be applied with
endless flexibility to anything under the state’s real or contemplated control: peoples,
regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth’ (p. 184).
This point about the nation state being rooted in war/defence may be put
in a less dramatic way. From the definition of the nation state as sovereignty over
a given territory, it follows that a minimal responsibility of national governments
is upholding the integrity of borders. Bluntly, preparedness for war (i.e. a credible
defence capability) is a requisite of all nation states and this principle has been
repeatedly put to the test throughout modern history.
A third key feature of the nation state is closely connected to the second.
This is that modern war/defence became much more decisively implicated with the
wider society during the twentieth century. On one level this simply means that
greater proportions of the population were engulfed by modern warfare than
previously. Conscription and mass mobilisation were obvious expressions of this.
Relatedly, one can trace an increase in the number of casualties of war among
both combatants and civilian populations. Crudely, war killed and maimed more
people than ever before. It is usual to see the First World War as marking a decisive
turning point in warfare (Fussell, 1975): certainly the military casualties were
unprecedented. Yet as the twentieth century unfolded it was among the civilian
populations that war wreaked its most severe damage, modern warfare leaving
no hiding place from aerial and other forms of attack. Illustratively, the 1939–45
war, though actual combatant losses were much fewer for Britain than in
1914–18, led to over 45 million dead, the vast majority civilian (Gilbert, 1989,
pp. 745–7), with losses amounting to around 10 per cent of the populations of
Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia and Germany.
If modern wars between states increased in ferocity in this sense of their
taking many more civilian casualties, there remains another, related way in which
warfare extended deeper into the social fabric. One feature of this has been a
close connection between industrial activity and preparedness for war. As
Giddens (1985) puts it, in observing the developing links between the state’s war
activities and industries such as chemicals, energy and engineering, it was during
and after the First World War that commentators began to recognise ‘the integration
of large-scale science and technology as the principal medium of
industrial (and military) advancement’ (p. 237). It follows that, with war/defence
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