Times of the Technoculture

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* Book: Times of the Technoculture: From the information society to the virtual life. By Kevin Robins and Frank Webster. Routledge, 1999

URL = https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282847735_Times_of_the_Technoculture


Description

"The technocultural project, as it is concerned with information and communications technologies, now embraces a very broad range of issues—from economic policy to virtual popular culture — and consequently mobilises a variety of discourses. Given this range, there has tended to be a fragmentation in the public debate on new technologies — a consequence of the ever more refined intellectual and academic division of labour. Those interested in cyberpunk will have little to say about the information economy. Those who have something to say about virtual community will know little about the military information society. And those who specialise in communications policy will contribute little to debates on education and training in the information society. In this book, we have sought to bring together as many of these agendas as we could, and we mobilise a range of discourses — economic, political and cultural. We think it is important to be engaged as much with the political economy of the information society as with the cultural politics of the virtual society. Times of the Technoculture is the product of a long engagement with these issues.

...

In Part I we consider the most fundamental origins in the context of historical capitalism. For what is unfolding now is the continuation of what was set in motion in the early nineteenth century: what we now call the global information economy is, we argue, the most recent expression of the capitalist mobilisation of society.

In Part II of the book, we look more closely at the long history of the twentieth-century ‘information revolution’ itself. This takes us back to the early decades of the century, where we can identify the origins of organised and systematic information gathering, analysis and distribution, in the workplace, in the organisation of consumption, and in political relations. Like James Beniger, we consider that this period marked the real take off of the twentieth-century ‘control revolution’. Our insistence on a historical perspective is also motivated by the desire to identify continuities in the development of the new technology agenda. Whilst we recognise that there are certain kinds of innovation, we want to suggest that there is much about the ‘information revolution’ that is just business as usual (if the technologies are new, the social visions that they generate tend to be surprisingly conservative)."



Contents

"It is in this context that we take the opportunity, in Part I, of clarifying ourconceptual approach by examining a variety of ‘techno-visions’.

To this end, in Chapter 1 we review Humphrey Jennings’ project to capture the meanings of the ‘coming of the machine’ in Britain. Jennings, for too long regarded as merely a talented film-maker and aesthete, emphasises that industrialisation is not simply a matter of technological adaptation and associated changes in employment, productivity and such like. It is about these matters, but it is simultaneously about much more, about oceans of life that are excluded by such a miserable conception. Jennings’ great book, Pandaemonium, does attend to these obvious features of the growth of industrial capitalism, but it also pays attention to associated changes in the means of creativity, culture and imagination. In such ways can we better appreciate the range and depth of the Enclosures that the ‘information society’ portends, while yet remaining open to possibilities that emerge.

Chapter 2 then details our engagement with Luddism, endeavouring to better understand the Luddite movement in historical context, the better to take from this a more adequate comprehension and apprehension of change in the present day.

Following this, in Chapter 3 we offer a critique of the recurrent language of ‘progress’ which seemingly accompanies each technological innovation. We examine here popular approaches to information and communications technologies, and latterly to information itself, identifying—and rejecting— thecommon features of these accounts.

In Part II we present a series of essays on the genealogy of the ‘informationage’, something consonant with our stress on coming to terms with the historical roots of the present day. This extends our historical examination of Luddism toconsider further features of change.

Chapter 4 centres on the emergence and development, early in the twentieth century, of Scientific Management as a key element in the spread of the ‘information revolution’. In this way we are able to underline a dual tendency: at once a movement towards social planning and control and, simultaneously, the growth of surveillance and control through wide sectors of social, economic and political life. In

Chapter 5 we develop this argument further, in terms of the ‘rational madness’ of technological rationalisation and ordering. Drawing on the concepts of Jean-Paul de Gaudemar, we consider how knowledge and knowledge technologies have been implicated in the logic of social mobilisation, increasingly beyond the sphere of production and into the broader social realm.

Chapter 6 re-emphasises the importance of the interwar years in highlighting the significance of a neglected dimension of information—propaganda. Yet we see this as an integral aspect of the growth of planning and control, something acknowledged by major thinkers of the time such as Harold Lasswell and Walter Lippmann, but strangely neglected since.

In Part III of this book we turn to the politics of cyberspace, to examine several issues and areas.

In Chapter 7 we centre on the military role in the making and perpetuation of the ‘information society’, not least because it is readily overlooked in the euphoria for the ‘post-industrial’ era of peace and plentitude. We argue, to the contrary, that the military principle of ‘command and control’ is at the cutting edge of informational developments and that it is integrally connected to the wider search for order and control within and even without nation states. Any account of the ‘information society’ which attempts to relegate this, the realm of ‘information warfare’, is incapable of adequately appreciating what is happening in the world today.

Chapters 8 and 9 focus on education, first in schools and colleges, then in the universities. We do so because so much comment on education is excessively narrow when conceived by educationalists, and at the same time because education now occupies a pivotal position amongst politicians’ ambitions to guide entry into a ‘knowledge society’ as smoothly and as successfully as is possible. Investment in education (increasingly viewed from the perspective of ‘human capital’) as the privileged means to ensure economic success, and new patterns of control and discipline to be introduced by the education system, constitute a major ‘technoscape’ in consideration of the ‘information age’. We scrutinise these ambitions, offer a critical analysis of them, and in so doing connect educational developments to wider forces and direction of change in society.

Part IV engages with currently popular themes, ones which thrive amidst conceptions of the ‘virtual society’ of the Internet, cyberspace and the information superhighway, and which, taken together, make up another technoscape. Here we find the vibrant hope that ICTs will revive community relationships, improve communications, and in general enhance the democratic process and public participation, all the while enriching cultural life.

In Chapter 10 we cast a jaundiced eye on such aspirations for the ‘virtual life’, while questioning also the tacit goal—an ordered, stable and integrated world—of so much of the commentary.

Chapter 11 develops this argument, concerning itself with the subject of virtual spaces, and contesting the ideals of electronic community and interaction."


ToC

Introduction: the changing technoscape 1

PART I Techno-visions

A cultural history of Pandaemonium 132

Engaging with Luddism 393

The hollowing of progress 63


PART II Genealogies of information

The long history of the information revolution

The cybernetic imagination of capitalism

Propaganda: the hidden face of information


PART III The politics of cyberspace

Cyberwars: the military information revolution

Education as knowledge and discipline

Deconstructing the academy: the new production of human capital


PART IV Living in virtual space

Prospects of a virtual culture

The virtual pacification of space