Untitled - socium.ge

Informationalism and the network society 21their origins, they interacted extensively in their development. Thus, theculture of personal freedom that originated in the university-based socialmovements inhabited the minds of the innovators who designed the actualshape of the technology revolution. Thus the personal computer was contemplated,in direct contradiction to the programmed trajectory of the corporateindustry. And the tradition of proprietary invention was challenged, by assertingthe right to diffuse, at no cost, the protocols at the source of the Internet orthe software programs that constituted the bulk of applications of the newcomputing world. The university tradition of sharing discovery and communicatingwith peers was relied upon, in the hope of seeing invention improvedby the collective work of the network, in sharp contrast to the world of corporationsand government bureaucracies that had made secrecy and intellectualproperty rights the source of their power and wealth.One had to be imbued with the ideals and values of the cultural movementsof the 1960s and 1970s, oriented toward free expression, personal autonomy,and challenge to the establishment, in order to imagine the set of inventionsthat constituted the information technology revolution. Microsoft was, ofcourse, the exception to the rule, and this is reflected in the animosity that stillarises among the cutting-edge innovators of the information age. So, whilemost of the processes of technological innovation, and informationalism, originatedindependently of the corporate world (except for the invention of thetransistor, which was, in fact, rapidly diffused into the public domain by BellLabs), the shape and content of technology was culturally influenced by thesocial movements of the time. Not that the inventors were social activists (theywere not, they were too busy inventing), but they breathed the same air of individualfreedom and personal autonomy that was sustaining the movement, andwas sustained by the movement (Levy, 2001).On the other hand, when business engaged in its own restructuring process,it took advantage of the extraordinary range of technologies that were availablefrom the new revolution, thus stepping up the process of technologicalchange, and hugely expanding the range of its applications. Thus, the decisionto go global in a big way, while being facilitated by government policies ofderegulation, liberalization, and privatization, would not have been possiblewithout computer networking, telecommunications, and information technology-basedtransportation systems. The network enterprise became the mostproductive and efficient form of doing business, replacing the Fordist organizationof industrialism (see below). While it is true that the internal decentralizationof companies and networks of firms began earlier, based on the fax,telephone, and electronic exchange systems, the full networking of companies,the digitalization of manufacturing, the networked computerization of servicesand office work, could only take place, from the 1980s onwards, on the basisof the new information and communication technologies.