Summer 1996 - Issue Number 36
Globalization is a process aimed at absorbing every local, regional and national economy into a single world economic system. Telecommunications and computer-based communication make-up the definitive infrastructure of this system, one of the core technologies, along with high-speed, long-distance transportation, that makes the current global system possible.
This infrastucture allows the multinational corporations who make up the global system to unplug and move effortlessly about the planet, to move capital and other kinds of information at will. This prompts the breaking down of most regulatory controls of corporate activity. It is the technology that allows currency and information to flow accross national borders regulations effortlessly. And that is why it has been brought into being.
Telecommunications when combined with computers and media bring about new digital media, it opens global television and media culture and new media products and formats as critical paths for capital investment. Deregulations, privatization, tabloid television, talk radio, 24 hour stock trading, deindustrialization, capital flight, NFTA, GATT, WTO, mergers, mergers, mergers: Entertainment, telecommunications, financial services, software and computers. It is all of a piece.
At the core of the development of digital media is the need of the information economy to manipulate and transport information simply and rapidly; image, sound and text are given digital form for this reason, and digital or new media arise from this need. All the new media technology can be understood as being a part of the network infrastructure. They code and decode information for transmission, they display information received from the network, they are designed to interconnect on the network in order to work in more than one place simultaneously, their operations are augmented with data from the network and they store information for eventual use on the network. These are not separate technical developments, they are not isolated moments of artistic innovation -- nor are they merely technological change.
Telecommunications and New Media are part of a cluster of social changes. They mean new space and time, new economies, new organizational structures, new industries, new management attitudes, new skills at all levels, new occupational and industrial classification, new design, new training, new kinds of money, new kinds of ownership. They are the representational adjunct to a profound restructuring of everyday life, and the patterns of connection they create through the network are compelling images not easily separated from very definitions and metaphors we use to understand our social relationships. In the past it was common to imagine the shape of society or the workings of mind and body as machinery and engines; but surely by now no one has avoided some form of "networking", or thinking of social or personal relationships in terms of networking. (Mulgan 1991)
Increasing numbers of people around the world have come to recognize the potential of the telecommunications and new media to create social and political benefits. It is also recognized that this potential will not be realized in the absence of clear social policies and none are currently a matter of public discourse in the world of multinationals. Neither the US or the World Trade Organization's policy proposals have addressed the fact that the communication and information industries have become central in establishing the direction of social and political change globally. Nor do they acknowledge that the domination of this sector by corporate and military interests threatens democracy, the evolution of civil society and bio-diversity. Instead we are given simple techno-romanticism while huge numbers of the world are living in shantytowns and an urban sprawl that appears set to explode in a nightmare of diminishing resources, "road-warrior culture" and environmental catastrophe (Kaplan 1994).
This is technocratic ideology infused with blind faith in deregulated markets. The language and images used in the U.S. to imagine the future of telecommunications have a structure of their own, predictable patterns that recycle and play a recurring role culturally. They always promise to distribute power and wealth through decentralization and the proposed technical changes are always presented as the solution to social problems, never an embodiment of those problems (Streeter, 1987).
The National Information Infrastructure (NII), the (GII) Global Information Infrastructure, along with concepts like the "Information Revolution", and the "Information Society", are central themes in the tradition of technocratic thinking. They perform perfectly as ideology by focusing on the technical potential of the technology rather than the social relations that will ultimately determine the form in which those potentialities are realized. (Garnham 1990, Williams 1983) Technocratic ideology also consistently denies history, exaggerating the novelty of each technology being introduced. Everything is presented as new, new media, unprecedented communications potential, new societies, new times, new space.
THE NEO-LIBERAL LIEThe tendency of information industries to become centralized in ownership and control is based on the nature of information as a commodity. Most of the costs associated with making information go into producing the first copy. After that making more copies is extremely inexpensive and the more copies you make the cheaper each copy is. That means those companies that distribute most widely and grow the largest make more profit on each copy. It costs almost as much to make one music recording or software package as it does to make millions. This is reinforced by the fact that it is impossible in media to know which products are going to sell. For example only one in ten films makes a profit but since it is difficult to predict which one, a company must make all ten. This rewards big, centralized, capital-intensive corporations and punishes small ones.
Economically, the results of all this can be seen in the tendency of the media and communications corporations to grow larger and larger while becoming increasingly concentrated in terms of control and ownership. It is important not to confuse their geographic decentralization with ownership. They may be dispersed around the world but many predict there will only be five or six telecommunications corporations globally by the end of the century. The social implications of such an outcome are staggering.
GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT: A LITTLE TOTALIZING NEVER HURT ANYONESince the Oil Crises of 1973 there has been an acceleration of the pay off and implementation phase of research and communications undertaken since World War II. The response of corporate and government decision makers to the contradictions of dwindling energy resources, overburdened eco-systems and a world market glutted with cars and home gadgets has been massive long-term investment in global communications and transportation systems. This, coupled with huge subsidies from U.S. war and space research has set the arena for economic development throughout the world. (Harvey 1989)
Long standing time and space relationships are being crushed, the relative values of Labor, Capital and energy has shifted once again; global and local economies interpenetrate in a rapidly expanding global financial system that by-passes national levels of regulation and control. Corporate organizations are being physically moved to all parts of the globe in search of cheap labor, while ownership and control of those corporations becomes more and more concentrated and laced together with telecommunications.
Selling electronic images, sounds and information appliances is one of the few avenues of expansion in a world economy glutted with home goods and cars. Compare the time it takes to consume a movie to the time it takes to consume a car; the consumption time is decreased to the "twinkling of an eye" and the circulation of money is speeded up.
This is the New Media's social context. Home television is being redesigned to concentrate recreation and cultural consumption within the home. Thus lodging within private space the means to manipulate public opinion and taste for a corporate sector with an increasing need to sell images and information. Global television, linked by satellite and fiber, makes it possible to experience a rush of images, sound and data from nearly anywhere on the planet. In such an information environment all the spaces of the world are collapsed into the home television. (Garnham 1991)
These kinds of shifts alter our notions of space and time, they reformulate and reorder our perceptions and sensibilities, they alter the maps of the world and shift the conceptual and physical relationships of regions, cities and nations. In such times there is a near crises need to find new media tools and new means of artistic expression and representation. Cultural production becomes the site of active struggle for explanation, for control of images that can resolve the reordering of our perceptions.
CYBERSPACE VS THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY: WHAT'S A META(PHOR)?Fore grounding ideas of transportation rather than space, functions to suppress the point of view most useful to understanding the class and justice implications of this new technology. Our attention is diverted from the points of scarcity in the network and directed to points of near unlimited capacity, fiber optic transmission lines. Consider what happens when the information gets where it is going, the Cyberplaces: the commercial computer communication services, the space on the gopher servers and the data bases? All of which are becoming effectively the programming interfaces of the network. These communication forms and software shape the rush of information in order to make it more manageable, in other words to be "selected" to be "packaged", to be "compiled", to be "condensed", to be "spatialized" in a way that it can be used. This is program creation. This is where the economics of scarcity creep back the discussion. All the old information economies go into effect just as always. Mystifying fiber optics, and its massive frequency capacity, continues the illusion that the technology is limitless and that issues of access and control of culture are no longer relevant.
All the programming interface systems are and will continue to be in need of talent and resources, creativity, time and money in order to attract users i.e. an audience. Further, the data bases that now continue to codify, store and commodify the social knowledge and wisdom of the planet into privatized "bases" are not about transportation or bandwidth, these are enormous "information spaces" that can best be understood in terms of the Enclosure Movement and the seizure of commonly held resources. When the global restructuring further asserts itself the economics of culture and money power is poised to reproduce its social relations in a new digital space. It won't be any surprise who is locked out, the information poor and the poor are the same people. Caution requires that we understand this as an system predisposed to behave much like commercial television, except the it will be much easier to charge admission to these systems.
Then there are parts of Cyberspace where people actually connect with the network, where's that space? William Gibson has described Cyberspace as "the place where a long distance call happens;" but for our purposes it is important to locate Cyberspace as extending beyond the enormously expanded "spaces for representation," beyond hundreds of channels and the electronic network's capacity for real-time connectivity, beyond the data bases and electronic archives. Cyberspace should be looked at not as virtual space, but as a massive reorganization of all space.
The new media and telecommunications are infrastructure that allow the global economy to develop interconnected spaces in distant cities so that the corporate centers in one city exist intimately side by side and much closer than their respective suburban peripheries and sprawls. Cyberspace allows planning elites to code the urban grid and design around whole neighborhoods blinking them into invisibility and out of the flow.
Perhaps the most significant cyberspace is the city center corporate enclaves. "Nested complexes" of corporate offices and interconnected hotel and recreation areas designed with their backs to the street, under constant surveillance, these are the command centers of the global economy. They house the management, financial, media and legal support firms that monitor the multi-nationals throughout the world. As much as 30% of the costs of such citadels represents the electronics and "intelligent" systems built into their designs. Cyberspace is far more than the space where a long-distance telephone conversation happens. (Smith, 1987)
ISSUESFrom this perspective there two overriding issues. First, how can people locally, regionally, nationally and globally find a way to participate democratically in communication development. Keeping in mind this question has very different answers depending on whether you live in a developed country or an unevenly developed country, it is possible to identify one common issue. That is market driven development and commercial media systems. By themselves they are incapable of fostering democratic development or assuring universal access to telecommunications for diverse people and ideas.
The second issue is defining universal access. Universal access must be defined socially not technically. This is particularly true as telecommunications networks become only the interlinking component in services that include metered use fees, "smart", and expensive, end-use software and hardware connecting to the edges of the network, and requiring enormously expanded user education and competence? That means defining universal access as the capability to construct significant, local, national and international audiences. This will be true for global computer networks as well as global television. It may be a different audience, assembled in a different time frame, for example, but the issue will remain access to both the system and an audience. You can have access to the technology and still fail to have an impact without a significant audience. This is the lesson of alternative media.
Alternative media is just that, something besides the mainstream media. That is not to say that the alternative media's work in creating media literacy, new forms of programming or a culture of media participation is not incredibly important work. It is to say that media dominance is a function of economic power, not truth, artistry or free expression. The ability to daily massage mass consciousness, to set the framework for public debate and delimit the universe of popular concerns means having the raw power to construct and maintain a large or significant audience. These are times when the US can move a half million troops and support around the world, invade a country or two and leave an occupation force in place, all in a couple of months. Popular support gets created by packaging the whole thing in the mass media as a sports event, complete with high-end graphics, computer simulations and live feeds from the "front" giving the audience video images from cameras installed in the nose cones of descending missiles. Grassroots organizing and local alternative media do not address this situation.
CONCLUSIONThe Clinton government and Cyberculture have defaulted to a strand of technological utopianism and free market ideology in American culture. It is not surprising that the administration's attempts at policy and CyberCulture's attempts at resistance to "Cybernetic Capitalism" confusingly draw from the same ideological well. For now both have abandoned our traditions of community and civic culture, public space and values of commonwealth managed for the common good. Once separated from those values and traditions development options are extremely limited. It may be their absence explains how early Cyberpunk sci-fi's radical critique of capitalism devolves to the digital consumerism now being peddled in "Wired," a magazine started by former Whole Earth Catalogue writers and now owned by a major publisher. The absence of a commitment to those values may also explain how the promising Clinton campaign with its rhetoric of social investment has been redefined as the Clinton Administration's commitment to deficit reduction and "redesigning government."
It certainly explains how the Administration's communication policy proposals failed to be adopted by Congress. There was no popular understanding or support for the National Information Infrastructure proposal. It's rhetoric of democratic development to be delivered via the market fooled no one. Least of all the megacorporations driving development. They stalled Congress while continuing to pursue their long-term interests. They continue to merge and globalize while the 1994 Congressional elections have brought in a Republican majority which will be very receptive to private development and market-driven information and media. The largest shift of U.S. communications policy since 1934 is still underway but its going even further right than most believed possible.
In times such a these it is important to hold in mind the notion that the power to control development, to structure time and space, which is what the new media and telecommunications are about, does not mean that the objectives of the powerful always win out. Contradictions arise. (Harvey 1989) The reason restructuring is occurring is to solve problems that have arisen for the powerful, problems they do not have complete flexibility in solving. For example, information systems are being introduced to give corporations the freedom to move and control the flow of capital, people and materials. But to make information more fluid opens up new means of expression and resistance.
New opportunities for resistance arise with the introduction of every control technology. Communications and control systems introduce new levels of speed and complexity that take decision beyond human control, they create new perceptions, new skills are required. More not less education is needed to work in an information-based work place, even one that has hard-wired two centuries of skilled labor into their robotics. While communications technology has replaced millions of workers it is not unthinkingly utopian to expect that similar technology could be used to create many jobs. It may even prove true that more cooperative, participatory and democratic work environments are more productive in the information economy. It is almost certain that if they are not they are at least more easily and non-violently disrupted.
Fred Johnson is a writer, media producer, teacher and telecommunication policy analyst--media@igc.apc.org. This article is based on work for 'Cyberpunks in the Whitehouse', published in the collection, Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context, ed. Jon Dovey (Lawrence and Whishart, 1996).
ReferencesReturn to the Index of Summer 1996