Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
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There are complex reasons why this should be so, and there remain to this
day important pockets of resistance to their spread, but it appears to me that we
have witnessed the massive intrusion of ‘business civilisation’ in recent years.
This has been, it may be emphasised, both an intensive as well as an extensive
affair. Intensive in so far as market practices have enormously intruded into areas
of intimate life hitherto relatively immune even in the West. One thinks here, for
instance, of child-rearing (the plethora of diverting toys and television for the
young), of the provision of everyday foodstuffs (just about everyone nowadays is
reliant on the supermarket for food, while not so long ago many families selfprovided,
at least in large part, through gardens and allotments which allowed
vegetables to be grown and useful animals to be reared) and of the decline of
self-providing activities such as dressmaking and knitting (Seabrook, 1982b).
Extensively, of course, we may instance the spread of globalisation, a process
that has colonised many areas that previously were self-supporting. The obvious,
if underestimated, instance of this is the elimination of the peasantry from most
quarters of the earth. This, by far the majority of the world’s population
throughout recorded time, is now on the eve of destruction (Worsley, 1984). It
has been calculated that in 1900 nine out of ten people in the world were peasants
(Ponting, 1999, p. 13), but the great peasant societies of 1900 – China and
Russia – can no longer be described in such terms, and the peasantry has virtually
disappeared from Europe itself. And the reason is clear: the peasantry is
antipathetic to market civilisation. Peasants are largely self-supporting, they are
sceptical of technological innovation, resistant to wage labour and distanced from
market organisation. As such, their ways of life have been diminished by what
Kevin Robins and myself refer to as the ‘enclosure’ of the earth by business practices,
by which we mean the incorporation of activities once outside into the
routines of the business realm (Robins and Webster, 1999).
There can be little doubt about the incorporation of informational issues
within ‘business civilisation’. Consider, in this respect, the spread of ‘brands’ in
and beyond everyday life, or the heightened importance of ‘intellectual property’
in matters ranging from scientific research to the merchandising of sports teams.
Increased commodification is manifest in the information domain where moves
to charge for permission to use any piece of recorded music, each frame from a
movie or indeed any piece of ‘creative property’ threaten to inhibit what
Lawrence Lessig (2004) calls today’s ‘remix culture’ that amalgamates pictures,
music and words in a digital medium and is supplanting text-based forms of
expression that once were protected by ‘fair use’ rules that have no provenance
when it comes to visual and sound products. Of course there are countertendencies
of decommodification, for instance in the spread of free government
information, public service websites and digitalised collections of out-of-copyright
literature. However, it is hard to interpret this as an effective countervailing
tendency against the wave of corporate and legislative efforts to maximise returns
to owners on investment in creative and knowledge property.
Should there be some who perceive, on reading the foregoing, nostalgia for
times before the triumph of capitalism, let me stress a number of things. First
of all, the penetration of market mechanisms does not, by any means, mean that
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