Citizenship and Participation in the Information Age 9781442602465

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Citizenship and Participation in the Information Age

The Editors Roma Harris is a Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, as well as the Vice-Provost and Registrar, at The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. She has written several articles concerning the status of women in librarianship and is best known for her book, Librarianship: The Erosion of a Woman's Profession (Ablex, 1992). The current emphasis in her work involves a critical examination of gender relations and technology in librarianship, including, the portrayal of women and women's work in advertisements for information technology products, and public perceptions of occupational roles in the information sector. Manjunath Pendakur is a Professor and Dean in the College of Mass Communication and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois. He specializes in the political economy of international communication and his publications include Canadian Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadina Film Industry (1990). He is coeditor of Illuminating the Blindspots: Essays Honoring Dallas Smythe (1992). His current research is on globalization of India's mass media and culture.

Citizenship and Participation in the Information Age edited by Manjunath Pendakur and Roma Harris

Garamond Press Aurora, Ontario

© The authors, 2002. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review. Printed and bound in Canada A publication of Garamond Press, 63 Mahogany Court, Aurora, Ontario L4G 6M8 www.garamond.ca [email protected] Cover Illustration © Nora Good Original French language edition: Citoyennete et participation a I 'ere de I 'information Published by Editions Saint-Martin 5000, rue Iberville, suite 203 Montreal, Quebec H2H 2S6

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Citizenship and participation in the information age Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55193-035-8 1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Information technology—Political aspects. 3. Information society. 4. Political participation. 5. Freedom of information. I. Pendakur, Manjunath II. Harris, Roma Matia, 1953HM851.C57 2001

303.48'33

C2001-903127-0

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction Competing Visions: The Social Impact of Information and Communications Technology • Roma Harris and Manjunath Pendakur

9

Perspectives on the Information Society Forthcoming Features: Information and Communications Technologies and the Sociology of the Future • Peter Golding Illusions of Perfect Information and Fantasies of Control in the Information Society • Dwayne Winseck Software Industry, Religious Nationalism, and Social Movements in India: Aspects of Globalization? • Ramaswami Harindranath Labouring to Be a Citizen: Trade Unions, Public Interest and Cyber-Populism in India • Paula Chakravartty Imagining the Knowledge-Based Economy: Soon-to-be Labour Force Entrants Predict the Future of Work • Roma Harris and Margaret Ann Wilkinson Market Knowledge and the Good Citizen • Richard Maxwell Neo-Liberalizing Welfare: Politics and Information Technology in a New Era of Governance • G. Dean Barry Defining the Canadian DNA Data Bank: A Sociological Perspective • Neil Gerlach ICTs in Dutch Schools: Problems, Prospects and Promises • Leer? d'Haenens, Made/on Kokhuis, and Cindy von Summeren

19 33 56 65 79 87 94 103 121

Competing Interests: Censorship and Access to Information International Communication and the Extremist Right • John Downing The Harm of Hate Propaganda • Hilliard Aronovitch Censorship in Library Collection Development Practices and Civic Participation: A Theoretical Approach • Juris Dilevko Having a Cow: Reactions To "Veggie Libel" Laws and the Oprah Trials • Diana Knott Risk and the Internet: Perception and Reality • Eric A. Zimmer and Christopher D. Hunter

137 147 164 183 196

Concentration of Ownership in the Information World Universal Access in IHAC and NIIAC: Transformed Narrative and Meaning in Information Policy • Martin Dowding Saving Books from the Market: Price Maintenance Policies in the United States and Europe • Laura Miller Books and Commerce in an Age of Virtual Capital: The Changing Political Economy of Bookselling • Jon Bekken Copyright and Citizenship • Michael Rushton

V

211 219 231 250

CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE

National Public Radio: The Case for Normative Mission in the Marketplace • Michael McCauley

267

Citizenship and Democracy Human Rights in the Information Society: Civic Participation in Shaping the Future • Cees Hamelink Networks for Social Knowledge: The Anti-NAFTA Challenge • Sophia Huyer Globalization, Information Society and Social Movement • Marc Lemire Web Sites of Resistance: Internetworking and Civil Society • Kelly O'Neill The Citizen's Right To Communicate • William F. Birdsall and Merrilee Rasmussen Crossing the Great Divide: Connecting Citizens to Government in New South Wales, Australia • Jan Houghton and Linda Tsiu-Shuang Chin Jacques and Jill at VPL: Citizenship and the Use of the Internet at Vancouver Public Library • Ellen Balka and Brian J. Peterson Does a Networked Society Foster Participatory Democracy Or is Commitment to Place-based Community Still a Necessity for Civic Engagement? • Mary Wilson Access to U.S. Federal Government Information for People with Disabilities: An Analysis of the Legal Requirements, Interpretations, and Implications • Kimberley Lauffer Remapping the Canadian North: Nunavut, Communications and Inuit Participatory Development • Gail Guthrie Valaskakis Bush and Bureaucrats: Women's Civic Participation from the Australian Outback • Lyn Simpson, Leonie Daws, Leanne Wood, Josephine Previte The Contributors Index

vi

287 300 310 322 337 347 361 372 388 400 415 427 431

Tables Forthcoming Features Table 1. Household Ownership of Selected Communications Facilities. UK 1997-98 Table 2. Demographic Correlates of Internet Access. UK, 1998

Table 3. Levels of RSACi Nudity Categories Table 4. Levels of RSACi Sex Categories Table 5. Levels of RSACi Nudity Categories

26

Books and Commerce in an Age of Virtual Capital Table 1. Sales of Leading U.S. Booksellers (in millions of dollars) 232 Table 2. Amazon.com 5-Year Performance (in thousands of dollars) 235 Table 3. Barnesandnoble.com Operating Results 237 Table 4. Sales & Losses at Four Leading Online Booksellers (in millions of dollars) 240

26

Illusions of Perfect Information and Fantasies of Control in the Information Society Figure 1. Spending on ITCs, Culture and Media in Canada by Business, Government and Households 40 Labouring to Be a Citizen Figure 1. National Trade Unions Representing Telecommunications Service Workers

205 205 205

Jacques and Jill at VPL Table 1. Age and Sex Distribution of Internet Users Responding to Post-Use Survey Table 2. Age Distribution of Chinese and Caucasian Internet Users Responding to Post-Use Survey Table 3. Use of Library Internet Terminals by Sex

72

Imagining the Knowledge-Based Economy Table 1. Students' Ratings of Occupational Prestige and Professional Status 81 Table 2. Perceived and Actual Educational Requirements 81 Table 3. Percentage of Women Employed 82 Table 4. Expected Starting Salaries Versus Actual Earnings 83 Table 5. Occupational Growth Potential: Students' Perceptions and Government Projections 83

366 366 367

Does a Networked Society Foster Participatory Democracy Or is Commitment to Place-based Community Still a Necessity for Civic Engagement? Table 1. Percent of Respondents with Memberships in Organizations 375 Appendix A: Profiles of the Study Area Samples 387

ICTs in Dutch Schools Table 1. Overview of GDP and Educational Expenditure as a Percentage of GNP per EU Member State 125 Table 2. PC Applications in Schools (Primary Education) 129 Table 3. PC Applications in Schools (Secondary Education) 129 Table 4. PC and CD-ROM use. Average Number of Minutes Per Day (Secondary Education) 130 Table 5. PC and CD-ROM use. Average Number of Minutes Per Day (Secondary Education) 130

Bush and Bureaucrats Table 1. Percent Rural and Urban Distribution of Membership and Information Flow on Welink, March to November 1997 417 Table 2. Percent Farm, Government/Industry and Academic Membership and Information Flow on Welink, March to November 1997 419 Diagram 1. Practicing Leadership: A Conceptual Framework for Examining Rural Women's Leadership Practices Using Electronic Discussion Lists as a Medium 419

Risk and the Internet Table 1. The Recreational Software Advisory Council Internet Rating System 204 Table 2. Levels of RSACi Language Categories. 204

vii

Acknowledgements Creating this book from the papers presented at the conference, Citizens at the Crossroads: Whose Information Society?, has been a pleasure for a number of reasons. First, the intellectual resources at a major university such as The University of Western Ontario are deployed in different departments, often bound up with their own disciplinary considerations. We were able to work together with some of the best scholars on this campus on the Conference Program Committee which played the role of referee and helped us to select an array of papers that reflected the interdisciplinary nature of the issues at hand. The Program Committee, chaired by Manjunath Pendakur, consisted of Dr. Robert Young, Department of Political Science; Drs. Anton Allahar and Kevin McQuillan, Department of Sociology; Dr. Ian Kerr, Faculties of Law & Information and Media Studies, and Drs. Grant Campbell, Carole Farber, Roma Harris, and Mr. Steven Joyce, Faculty of Information and Media Studies. The government partners were represented by Mr. Dick Stanley, Acting Director of the Strategic Research and Analysis of the Department of Canadian Heritage and Ms. Nancy Wildgoose, Director General, Policy Research of the Canadian International Development Agency. Both Dick and Nancy took an active interest in shaping the conference from the very beginning and helped us to select appropriate papers for presentation. We acknowledge the serious commitment of time and effort that all these individuals made to achieve a successful international conference. Ms. Kristen Romme has worked tirelessly on the book project from its very inception. She has helped us in all of the detailed work of corresponding with the authors and preparing the papers in this collection for publication. Her skills of communication and organization, as well as her unflagging good humour have been invaluable in the completion of this project. Our deepest gratitude goes to the authors who not only wrote the pieces you see here but were patient with our crazy schedules. A book of this kind is nearly impossible to produce without the generous sponsorship we have received from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canadian International Development Agency. Dick Stanley and Nancy Wildgoose have given us their unconditional support and complete freedom as co-editors. We have both very much appreciated that spirit. While working on editing the manuscripts, Roma and I came to a quick understanding of what was important in telling a story that would capture the essence of the conference and the major concerns expressed by the presenting scholars. Exploring the information society critically, from a number of diverse perspectives, is the central intent of the book. We hope that it will be useful, not only to students of the information society, but to policy makers who must grapple with the real problems and opportunities it poses. Manjunath Pendakur

viii

INTRODUCTION

Competing Visions: The Social Impact of Information and Communications Technology Roma Harris and Manjunath Pendakur

sonable evidence and good arguments. Our purpose in bringing these papers together here is twofold: (1) to alert readers to what might be ahead in the new information society and (2) to serve as a guide in unraveling the public policy implications of the changes wrought by ICTs. As a guide to what may lie ahead, the authors in this volume have tackled the problem of citizenship and participation in the information age from a number of angles. To assist the reader, we've divided the papers into four sections. The first deals with the broad issues of the information society. Here are papers addressing the historical, political and social implications of developments in information technology. The second section includes papers dealing with questions of censorship and the threat of the extremist right. In the third section, questions of ownership and control of information are discussed. In the final section, the papers are concerned with the role of citizens as participants and decision-makers in the information society.

he new century promises to be a roller Tcoaster ride fueled by rapidly changing

information and communications technologies (ICTs). With the capacity for the almost instant transfer of digital information across the planet, commonly held notions of distance and speed, as well as our understanding of the nature and meaning of interpersonal contact are being challenged and possibly redefined. With redefinition, some believe that the very structural underpinnings of society will be transformed. Good or bad, it is hard to predict just what will be the eventual political, social and cultural impact of the global interconnectedness made possible by new technologies. In an attempt to explore the possibilities, scholars, researchers and activists from around the world were invited to share their thoughts at a conference for Canadian cultural and information policy makers held in London, Ontario in October, 1999. The conference, "Citizens at the Crossroads. Whose Information Society?," was sponsored by the Government of Canada's Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canadian International Development Agency and hosted by the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario. The edited collection in this book represents some of the excellent papers read at the conference. Each article reflects its author's vision of the future, visions that range from the enthusiastic and hopeful to the pessimistic and fearful, each outlook supported by rea-

1. Perspectives on the Information Society In the lead paper, Peter Golding discusses recent developments in ICTs in the context of sociological theory. He questions whether the changes wrought by ICTs are really as fundamental as many proclaim, pointing, for example, to the "persistent if variable role of the nation-state boundary in human experience 9

CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE

For Harindranath, a key issue arising from this international division of labour "is the increasing marginalization of the majority of the Indian population from the emergent middle class economy, as illustrated by the boom in the software sector." Paula Chakravartty, too, is concerned about the disillusionment of young Indian people who expect to benefit from a booming information economy. She writes, "the future that sparks the imagination of young, urban Indians is clearly a job as a computer or management professional in the new transnational information economy. However, after nearly a decade of work in a liberalized economy, the vast majority of Indian workers in the information economy are subject to the global 'race to the bottom' in wages and unprecedented price hikes for basic goods and services. In this setting, a more probable future for the majority of those employed in India's information economy is work as part of the expanding disposable labour force with few of the freedoms and rewards generally associated with the so-called 'computer revolution.'" Harris and Wilkinson also comment on the impact of the information society on the aspirations of young people. Their study of beginning university students' perceptions of the information labour force suggests that while students envision tremendous career opportunities in the information professions, some of those professions, especially fields in the information sector in which women have traditionally predominated, such as librarianship, do not figure prominently on the occupational landscape. According to these authors, young Canadians have perceptions of the information economy that "raise troubling questions about the future of women and women's work in the new information economy."

in the medium term future," as well as the faulty reasoning behind the idea that the information society is the basis of a shift from a goods-producing to a service economy. He pokes fun at exaggerated claims about the change potential of new ICTs, such as email, relative to the impact of earlier communications systems, such as the telegraph. Golding also reminds us that, not only has ICT development failed to result in the end of work, but "the plenitude of the information economy" will not "end deprivation and greed." As he points out, ICTs have not "unlocked the door to a society of unlimited resources" and their presence has done little to end labour market segmentation by gender and class. Another critic of the information society, Dwayne Winseck, challenges the Habermasian view of perfect information, the idea that more information reduces uncertainty and the expectation that new ICTs can support an economy that is a truly free worldwide market. Winseck argues that with more information there is actually greater uncertainty which governments and business make considerable effort to control, thereby shaping the information society, sometimes in negative ways. Like Golding, Winseck suggests that "there is a large gap between the economic benefits promised by the communications revolution and the existing evidence." This theme is also explored by Ramaswami Harindranath who questions "the social, political and economic repercussions of information capital for those in the margin, especially in the developing South, who are not participants in or members of the information society." Harindranath notes that, in India, labour arrangements for software development have discouraged the building of a technological infrastructure and inhibited the development of higher-order technical skills and product innovation. He refers to this as the "locational and skill-based division of labour" which is "expressly maintained by multi and transnational companies, drawing labour from the peripheries and in the process creating a labour force across developing countries competing for work."

2. Competing Interests: Censorship and Access to Information There is a delicate balance between preserving freedom of speech and access to information while, at the same time, protecting the rights of vulnerable citizens. In his paper on

10

INTRODUCTION

count of the conflict between freedom of expression versus the protection of economic interests. When considered in relation to other papers in this section, Knott's discussion of the "Oprah trials" could lead readers to the conclusion that, at least in America, people who incite hatred against others may receive greater protection under the law than those who want to express concerns about the safety of foodstuffs. In the final paper in this section, Eric Zimmer and Christopher Hunter describe an empirical study of the proportion of pornographic web pages relative to other non-offensive sites on the Internet. The results of their analysis "suggest that the Internet contains a very small percentage of offensive material." Zimmer and Hunter are concerned that the public policy debate over the impact of children's access to the Internet is informed by overly alarmist views of the Web. They suggest that their findings "call into question the press's coverage of the Internet as a dangerous place, the public's fear of the Internet, and government's attempts to impose Internet content controls."

the harm of hate propaganda, Milliard Aronovitch argues that "there is a valid argument for prohibiting hate propaganda, but that it must be made with reservations and with an awareness of the compromise in values it involves." Respecting the difficulty in balancing competing interests, he notes that "tentativeness is called for from those who .. aspire to maintain in morals and politics a commitment to the values of liberalism, which emphasize both individual freedom or autonomy of a strong sort and also the essential equality and dignity of all persons." In spite of recommending tentativeness in dealing with the problem, Aronovitch concludes that "hate propaganda has a logic, that of intimidation and destruction. As such it harms: it cannot claim the defence of harmless free speech, and may be justifiably prohibited." Similarly, Juris Dilevko suggests that "differentiated censorship may be reasonable in library collections policies." According to Dilevko, "insofar as practices that result in conscious or subconscious censorship are already an ineluctable part of the library landscape, public librarians should give careful consideration to adopting a policy that would censor a specific class of materials, namely, hate literature, defined as material that is racist, anti-Semitic, or sexist." He suggests that by applying overly rigid or abstract anticensorship policies, public libraries could be seen to interfere with the rights of certain individuals or groups to participate fully in society. "Public libraries may, through their provision of various forms of uncensored hate literature, be complicit in perpetuating a series of harmful stereotypes that society in general has deemed pernicious and unjust." In quite a different spin on the problem of censorship, Diana Knott describes the Texas beef industry's libel suit against Oprah Winfrey resulting from remarks made by a guest during a show on "mad cow disease." Knott explains the history of agricultural product disparagement laws and how the threat of lawsuits by big agribusiness interests can chill media commentary on food safety. Her paper provides an intriguing ac-

3. Concentration of Ownership in the Information World Many authors in this collection are concerned about the intense consolidation of ownership across the information and communications industries. Martin Dowding raises serious issues concerning government information policies, suggesting that citizen access to information is being compromised by "commodification, globalization, and convergence," particularly when "the private sector is handed the job of creating the information highway." Focusing on a particular sector in the information economy, the book trade, Laura Miller describes how the consolidation of ownership threatens access to information. She explains how various nations have tried to deal with the problem through regulatory methods such as "resale price maintenance." Exploring the tension "between the desire to facilitate the exchange of diverse ideas, and 11

CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE

Rushton, "the system of intellectual property that arises out of copyright statutes regulates the trade in intellectual goods treating them not much differently from tangible consumer goods, like apples or toasters." In his paper, he examines how the design of copyright law might change if citizen participation or "civic republicanism" were considered in the mix, along with corporate interests and the rights of creators to gain from their labours. Rushton suggests that rather than focusing exclusively on "protecting private property at all costs," or "maximizing wealth," a third goal of copyright law should be to "facilitate dialogue among citizens." Michael McCauley argues that, in order to facilitate the type of dialogue among citizens to which Rushton refers, a national radio service can be a very effective medium. According to McCauley, such a service "can foster healthy public debate, provide useful political information to citizens, and sufficiently portray the country in all its diversity." He argues that public radio "has the best chance of achieving these normative goals, since commercial broadcasting tends to produce content that appeals mainly to consumers rather than citizens." Despite these advantages, and illustrative of what seems to be a rather deep-seated ambivalence about free speech in the United States, is the history of U.S. National Public Radio. McCauley notes that "public broadcasting in the United States is funded at a per capita rate that is, by far, the lowest among today's leading industrial democracies" and argues that, "at the most general level, wholesale deregulation within a capitalist economy is tantamount to creating a political culture based on 'one dollar, one vote' instead of 'one person, one vote.'" The experience of U.S. public radio suggests that mere technological capacity is not sufficient to ensure that democratic forces will prevail. There is little reason, based on this case, to believe that providing citizens with Internet access will be any more successful at encouraging citizen participation. As several authors in the next section will argue, the idea of facilitating citizen participation

an ideology that supports the unrestrained workings of the marketplace," she argues that "resale price maintenance in North America and Europe has been undermined in two ways: first, by an ideology that condemns most fetters on the market, and second, by a conceptualization of book readers as consumers guided by a desire to maximize their economic interests rather than citizens who desire access to a diverse array of ideas and information." Like Miller, Jon Bekken also focuses on the book trade. The predatory practices of large bookstore chains may be another form of censorship. As Bekken explains it, "there is nothing resembling a competitive marketplace in book distribution. Independent booksellers face competitors who pay substantially less for books, receive a wide range of special inducements, allow customers to escape sales tax on the books they buy, and need not earn a profit in any particular location (or, in the case of on-line booksellers, at all) to stay in business." Bekken quotes bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver, who says, "it's a First Amendment issue. To put it bluntly, chain stores and publishers are in league to manipulate what Americans will see, purchase, and read." According to Bekken, the devastation of small and independent publishers "is not the result of natural selection." Rather, "publishers' subsidies and investors have long driven the chains' march to market dominance, and are now sustaining on-line operations that could never survive were they forced to pay their own way, as independent booksellers must." He writes further that, "were this simply a matter of small businesses being displaced by larger ones, it would be a matter of little concern. However, it involves a vital cultural sector, one which plays a central role in the dissemination of ideas. As such, the accelerating concentration of book distribution into ever fewer hands has serious implications for the ability of new voices to enter the not-so-metaphorical marketplace of ideas." Michael Rushton, too, is concerned about restrictions on the flow of ideas caused by the ownership of information. According to 12

INTRODUCTION

through the Internet is promulgated more in support of commercial interests than by real commitment to the notion that the public interest is best served by exposure to the diversity of ideas.

men, diplomats, and politicians toward a world political arena in which people in local communities involved themselves directly in the world's problems, often bypassing their national officials. As these local communities begin to network and cooperate, a new formidable force in the shaping of world politics develops." To illustrate the type of force Hamelink refers to, it is instructive to consider the paper by Sophia Huyer in which she describes how anti-free trade groups have been able to organize, using the Internet. In a similar vein, Marc Lemire discusses how opponents of globalization have used ICTs to mobilize resistance to world trade talks, not only by providing an alternative media perspective, but through the use of electronic guerilla tactics, such as blocking or altering "official" web sites. Describing the significance of "cyber-activism," Kelly O'Neill notes that ICTs "allow citizen groups to expand their networks by forming strategic alliances that cross national borders with an unprecedented fluidity." According to O'Neill, "as pressures mount to further liberate trade from environmental and social restrictions, information technologies help to renew the drive by non-governmental organizations to hold corporations to account for their activities around the globe." Like Hamelink, Birdsall and Rasmussen are also critical of the lack of democratic decision making in the information economy. They point out that, in Canada, "government pursuit of a single-minded information policy developed behind essentially closed doors continues increasingly to alienate Canadians who are anxious about their future in the information society but who are excluded from having a say in it." According to Birdsall and Rasmussen, "it is necessary to re-introduce the idea of a right to communicate in the policy debate because government information policy is focused on a concept of citizen participation in the information society that is defined in economic terms only. As a result, in its drive to promote the private sector development of the information high-

4. Citizenship and Democracy In the lead paper in this section, Cees Hamelink points to a "growing emphasis on the economic importance of intellectual property and the related priority of providing protection for investors and corporate producers." Hamelink explores the broad question of who makes decisions in and about the information economy, noting that "increasingly large volumes of social activity are withdrawn from public accountability, from democratic control, and from the participation of citizens in decision-making." Like Dwayne Winseck and Martin Dowding, Hamelink argues that there is "a worldwide trend for governments to delegate the responsibility for basic social choices to the marketplace. The democratic control of important social domains is thus increasingly eroded without any major societal debate. Following their desire to deregulate, liberalize and privatize, many governments are leaving the governance of the new ... ICTs in the hands of private entrepreneurs." According to Hamelink, "the globalization of the new world order is characterized by social Darwinism and fragmentation." He writes, "it seems unlikely that we could mobilize counterforces against a world order which provides an uneven access to the world's communication resources and which reinforces a growing gap between knowledge-rich and knowledge-poor nations and individuals." Nevertheless, he maintains a rather optimistic outlook about the possibilities for citizen participation: "millions of people around the world are involved with forms of local community-based activities that focus on global problems. A new type of world politics is emerging through these initiatives. That change represents a shift from conventional international relations mainly conducted by the national foreign affairs elites of states13

CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE

and extent of the telecommunications resources available to them." Despite what seems to be a rather considerable enthusiasm for facilitating citizen access to government information by promoting use of the Internet, Ellen Balka and Brian Peterson's observational study of Internet use in the Vancouver Public Library suggests an interesting challenge to this idea. Their findings reveal that the reality of Internet use in the library is that majority of use is by young men who spend their time playing games. While it could be argued that this opportunity for electronic networking performs the useful function of helping young men bond with one another in an enjoyable social activity, it hardly supports the notion that libraries should facilitate "civic republicanism" by providing the public with access to the Internet. Mary Wilson also explores whether new possibilities for electronic networking enhance democracy, noting that "despite the lessons from the history of technology, claims that the new forms of telecommunications will foster more democratic social and political relationships - both to those who already enjoy the benefits of democracy, as well as to disenfranchised and oppressed people in the remainder of the world - have not subsided, and perhaps have grown stronger." Her analysis suggests, however, that the reality of using the Internet as a tool to facilitate citizen participation has had mixed results, suggesting that the mere availability of electronic networks is not a panacea for overcoming citizen marginalization. According to Wilson, "if electronic networks are left unmanaged and unregulated, the advantages of civil communication and debate are outweighed by disorderly communication and a lack of public accountability." Although it is also a widely touted belief that Internet access should enhance opportunities for persons with disabilities to participate in civic life, Kimberley Lauffer's analysis suggests that this has not necessarily been achieved. According to Lauffer, "ideally, the interaction of disability legislation and access legislation should afford wide access to gov-

way, government is abandoning the citizens it is meant to represent." Describing the process used to come up with a Canadian federal "Telecommission report," Birdsall and Rasmussen observe that "it became government practice to appear to be undertaking a public process while, in fact, confining the process to an enclosed policy community of elite insiders." In this arrangement, "government's primary role is to promote a competitive market through deregulation and privatization" and "the primary responsibility of a good citizen is not to be politically active, but to become a good consumer at the information highway mall." According to Birdsall and Rasmussen, "the core objective of the Government's access strategy is to get as many Canadians as possible hooked up to the Internet in order to create a critical mass of consumers that can sustain the private sector development of the information highway." They argue that in its information highway strategy, "government is abandoning citizens in favour of consumers." l Similar initiatives are underway in other countries. Jan Houghton and Linda TsiuShuang Chin describe a government strategy in New South Wales to use ICTs "to provide greater public access to government information" in order to increase responsiveness and cut costs by eliminating "waste and red tape in providing services." According to Houghton and Chin, the New South Wales initiative will ensure that government is seen "to be at the forefront in using the new technologies to promote economic growth and community benefits." As though illustrating Birdsall and Rasmussen's point, Houghton and Chin note that a strategic priority for the Australian federal government is "to maximize opportunities for all Australians to benefit from the information economy." Also referring to the Australian experience, Lyn Simpson and her colleagues argue that ICTs facilitate "the participation of rural communities, linking them to government in new and creative ways, and enabling them to increasingly play a role in determining the nature 14

INTRODUCTION

ernmental information for people with disabilities. However, the multitude of exceptions to format requirements as well as lack of awareness about technology combine to limit access." As a result, although an estimated 20% of the U.S. population has one or more disabilities, "governmental agencies have not fully utilized ... information technologies to facilitate access to their public documents that are presumptively open to citizens." In spite of such problems, Wilson urges governments to assume responsibility for ensuring "universal access to the information superhighway" in order to "close the chasm between the upper and lower strata." She argues that, "if left to the private market system, access will be developed only where there are market incentives." And, despite some good reason for scepticism about the motives behind national information policies, whether government interests are separable from those of the private market system, and whether the opportunities for citizen participation in an information economy are always real, it also appears that technology can facilitate citizen involvement in some very profound ways. In the final papers in the collection, Lyn Simpson and her colleagues describe how ICTs facilitate grassroots development among women in rural Australia and Gail Valaskakis explains the important link between the way in which communications technology facilitated the political positioning of Inuit people and the development of the new Territory of Nunavut in Canada's Far North. In this instance it is clear that the people of this region have been able to "thread together old traditions and new technologies" as they build their new social institutions and sort out their "civic roles."

Conclusion Taken together, the papers gathered in this book reflect the significance of achieving a form of balance between the competing priorities of global business and the interests of individuals and groups of citizens in a world in which we are more and more interconnected by electronic media. One the one hand, according to Hamelink, "one implication is that the realization of the social potential of ICTs comes to depend more on investment decisions than on considerations of common welfare." On the other, again according to Hamelink, "if democracy represents the notion that all people should participate in .. decisions that shape their future welfare, such social forces as the ICTs cannot just be left to the interests and stakes of commercial parties on the market." A major concern of many of those who contributed to this book is whether states are able to provide the necessary balance between these interests or if, as Harindranath suggests, traditional inter-state boundaries and borders are becoming too eroded, especially in the South, as a result of globalization. As Winseck cautions, "the democratizing potential of new communications technologies is indeed powerful. However its realization will depend on countering the turn to closed media system by the communications industries and legitimated by governments as part of their strategy of fuelling the transition to an information society." Whatever role governments are to play, it is inevitable that a successful balance will only be achieved through the very active participation of citizens. What's new in the times ahead is that this participation is not necessarily limited by geography.

Notes 1. Using this analysis, one might look with a rather jaundiced eye at the recent cash-back scheme of the Government of Ontario in which thousands of citizens received $200 tax-rebate cheques in the mail. Perhaps providing citizens with these cash "bonuses" is a means of encouraging consumerism, while quelling concerns about the loss of government services.

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Forthcoming Features: Information and Communications Technologies and the Sociology of the Future1 Peter Golding

ociology is always writing the history of Sthe future, yet routinely declares itself

to understand the emergence of industrial and modern urban society, and constructed clear dichotomies to characterize the difference between new and old. We are, it seems, always on the cusp of a new sociality. At the end of the twentieth century this urge to inhabit the dawn is fostered above all by the spread of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This article briefly assesses the extent and character of the changes consequent to their arrival, and the adequacy of sociology to understand them. Its simple theme is that continuity exceeds discontinuity. While recognizing the very real and substantial changes provoked and enabled by such technologies, we need to see these, in Webster's phrase, as "an informatisation of life which stems from the continuity of established forces" (Webster, 1995, p. 218). In part this is an insistence on the endurance of modernity and the intellectual and political baggage that comes with it. In part it is a plea for a stay of execution of the core tools and methods of the sociological imagination, and a reminder that the basis of prediction lies in examining social dynamics rather than technological innovation. The imagery of the future looms over the landscapes of the present; tomorrow is everpresent in the cultural icons of everyday experience. For the parti-pris, like the world's richest man, Bill Gates, the information highway along which Microsoft is transporting us "is going to give us all access to seemingly unlimited information, anytime and any place

unready for the task. Somehow, whenever we sense the emanation of epochal change, sociology is deemed to be wanting. In the intense debate of the 1960s, Alvin Gouldner, predicting then the 'coming crisis of western sociology,' argued that the sheer success of the discipline in entering the mainstream of popular culture had stunted its aspirations and achievements. Yet paradoxically, as social theory was being put to one side, those few that persisted in such work ignored the very real transformations of the society around them. Such theorists "work within a crumbling social matrix of paralyzed urban centres and battered campuses. Some may have cotton in their ears, but their bodies still feel the shock waves" (Gouldner, 1971, p. vii). Curiously, a generation later, recurrent attempts to prevent sociology succumbing to a 'flight from a reason' have been provoked by another succession of perceived disciplinary crises (Alexander, 1995; Mouzelis, 1995). Professional modesty feeds a prevailing sense of inadequacy in the face of apparently colossal, indeed millennial social change. This is, though, the eternal condition of sociology, and indeed its very genesis. As Smith notes, in recent years the imminent end of an era has frequently been signalled by analyses reporting on the end of history, of organized capitalism, of modernity, or of western civilization (Smith, 1990, p. 1). The grand narratives of classic sociology responded to the urgent need

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quality of life, expressiveness, the environment and so on. From a cohort of somewhat dull and aspiring workaholics has been bred a generation of underachieving aesthetes. The thesis has been the basis for a substantial industry of empirical, largely survey research, and an extensive literature addressing the conceptual as well as methodological assumptions and reservations which this now massive, influential (especially in political science), and sophisticated body of work has attracted (see inter alia, Scarbrough, 1995; Warwick, 1998), not least the vexed issue of whether what is being tapped are generational or cohort effects. The essential narrative is straightforward, and nicely nurtures a growing esteem for the sociology of lunching and shopping. Indeed a burgeoning fascination New for Old: Interpreting the with garden centres, DIY, and designer clothInformation Society ing would seem to complement Inglehart's Understanding the sociology of the shifts en- work. The relevant issue here is not the wider gendered by the rapid expansion of ICT has assessment of post-materialism, but its inexdrawn on a number of key concepts, of which tricable linkage with the notion of an informathree will be briefly examined here. tion society, to which we turn shortly. For Post-materialism. The first is the notion Inglehart, post-materialism arises from a of 'post-materialism' arising especially from societal shift in which scarcity disappears, extensive empirical work by Inglehart and his and post-materialist values nurture the emercollaborators. Rooted in Mas low's psycho- gence of a 'new class' within the knowledge logical concept of a needs hierarchy, and and information occupations. However, an something akin to a principle of marginal alternative reading of these trends is that postutility, the thesis has two key hypotheses materialism becomes the acceptable ideology (Inglehart, 1990). These seek to explain why of occupational and educational elites: "... cultural change is "leading to the de-empha- these variables are the bearers, at the indisis of economic growth as the dominant goal vidual level, of the effects of macro-level of society" (Inglehart, 1990, p. 3). The first, changes in the economic and social environthe 'scarcity hypothesis,' suggests people place ment ...." (Scarbrough, 1995, p. 149). Not first and highest priority on those things least surprisingly large proportions of the available to them. The second, the populations of western industrial societies ' socialization hypothesis,' suggests a person' s turn out to be firmly, and sensibly, rooted in values will continue to reflect those prevail- materialist concerns for an income, the next ing in their maturing, pre-adult years meal, and a roof over their heads. (Inglehart, 1990, pp. 56, 68). Added together Globalization. The inevitably ideological these produce an account of cultural history in character of concepts fuelled by ICT developwestern countries since 1945 which argues ments is equally reflected in the notion of that unprecedented prosperity, peace, pre- globalization. Again, it is impossible here to vailing affluence, and social stability, have give adequate attention to the important denurtured a shift from materialist values, rooted bates provoked by this notion. Suffice to note in concern for material and physical security, the emphasis in the literature on globalization to post-materialist values, concerned with on the ability of new ICTs to emancipate

we care to use it" (Gates, 1995, p. 184). Technophiliac rebellion against decades of bleak paranoia about the portent of an Orwellian future has spawned belief in "a new digital Jerusalem ... Advertisements for cars, mobile phones, digital and satellite consumer goods all ask us to reflect on how new technologies will transform not just our social and cultural environments but the very idea of what it is to be human" (Sardar, 1999, p. 25). Consequently we run towards the sound of funfair, as the increasing digitization of everyday technologies apparently opens vistas of freedom from the constraints of material scarcity, and from the mundane barriers of power, privilege, and place. This is not, however, the stuff of serious sociology.

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human experience from the familiar ties of social and economic formation. Waters (1995, p. 124), for example, suggests that globalization means "material and power exchanges in the economic and political arenas ... progressively becoming displaced by symbolic ones, that is by relationships based on values, preferences and tastes rather than by material inequality and constraint." The parallel with post-materialism is obvious, and hard to reconcile with the continuing evidence of inequalities on a planet in which 70 per cent of resources are consumed by 15 per cent of the population. As I have argued elsewhere, "We are a long way, surely, from believing that parallel style wars among the urban youth of Tokyo, Dar-Es-Salaam, Lima, and New York are a greater reality than the desperate efforts to eke out some form of subsistence among the billion or so of the world's inhabitants living on less than a dollar a day" (Golding and Harris, 1997, p. 8). The concept of globalization also underestimates the persistence of the nation-state as political form and economic entity, albeit in dynamic and changing structure (cf. Weiss, 1998). While the new international division of labour has certainly relocated production and the circuits of goods, people and capital, the varied extent of success between national economies suggests something other than globalization. Despite the undoubted increase in global flows of capital and labour, most remain within national boundaries. The USA in particular remains immune to such dissolution of nation-state frontiers. As for capital so too for consciousness. As Billig has recently reminded us, what he terms the daily 'flagging' of nation and nationality forms an inescapable and formative backdrop to everyday experience and rhetoric. The boundaries between 'us' and 'foreigners' are not just the lines around which the racism of ethnic antagonisms are drawn, though they serve that purpose only too well. "These habits of thinking persist, not as vestiges of a past age, having outlived their function; they are rooted to forms of life, in an era in which the state may be changing, but has not yet withered

away." (Billig, 1995, p. 139). The ability of ICTs to enhance as well as banish the frontiers of modernity is too often ignored. While some can buy their books, drugs, cars and pornography online trans-nationally, others remain locked into the constraints of local economy. That their protection from lowwage regimes imposed by Nike and Nintendo in Asian factories depends on national legislation, not the will of the North-American or European consumers of their work, underlines the persistent if variable role of the nation-state boundary in human experience in the medium term future. The Information Society. The third notion briefly assessed here is the most fundamental - a broad encapsulation of the argument that the growth of ICTs has fostered a wholesale shift in the social order. The idea of an information society lurks behind several other such general characterizations, including those considered above, and its various manifestations nurture much futurology. Its ideological aspects have never been obscure, and have attracted frequent commentary (cf. Slack, 1984). Originating in Japanese observation, in the notion of 'johoka-shakai,' usually translated as the information society, its influence has been pro found (Duff et.al. 1996). In its western lineage the focus has been on employment and the economy, not least in measures of sectoral employment and shifting profiles of occupational activity (cf. Machlup, 1962). The most enduring development has been in the scholarly and influential work of Daniel Bell (1976; 1979). The post-industrial tag, for Bell, was the context for the emergence of a new economic order characterized by the central importance of information and theoretical knowledge, and by a shift from a goods-producing to a service society. It is this latter observation that is central here. As Webster (1995, pp. 34-46) and others have crucially observed, the movement to a service economy has, in fact, been a long term trend, thoroughly pre-dating recent rapid innovations in ICTs. But the notion of an information society rests fundamentally on this presumed shift. In Britain, for example, the 21

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the process along included a plethora of select committees and reports, the DTI Multi-Media Industry Advisory Group, and the same department's Information Society Initiative (Phillips, 1997). At European level the same anxiety to hasten the inevitable has been fuelled by an obsession to see off competition from Japan and the USA, but with a wholly contradictory double focus on, on the one hand, the need to protect and foster a presumed European culture, and on the other the need to enhance European industrial and economic progress in the ICT sector. In both the UK and at European level it is plainly the latter which prevails, as the emergence of the information society is embodied in the imposition of commercial need and corporate strategy onto the remnants of cultural and social policy in the communications field (Murdock and Golding, 1999). The EU Fifth Framework Programme seeks to embrace and deliver a 'user-friendly information society.' From the premise, uncompromisingly proclaimed, that "We are undergoing a fundamental transformation: from an industrial society to the information society," it slips awkwardly between concern that "Europe's industrial competitiveness ... depends on it being at the leading edge of the development" and that the same developments will "contribute to cohesion in the European Union" by overcoming isolation in remote communities (European Commission, 1997a, p. 1). Strangely, by the time we get to the final report of the Union's expert group on the information society this ambiguity is beginning to resolve. We now learn that "New commercial opportunities ... will focus in the first instance on those activities with the most commercial potential .... Seen from this angle a generalized European directive on an extended USO [universal service obligation in telephony] is unlikely to contribute in any real sense to regional cohesion" (European Commission, 1997b, p. 37). Information society policy both anticipates and celebrates the privatization of information, and the incorporation of ICT developments into the expansion of the free market. The launch of a

proportion of the labour force in manufacturing has been relatively stable for much of the last century, the more significant shift being the decline of agriculture and the growth in services. But this also disguises some tacit assumptions about the nature and function of work. The wage-slave welded to a desk, wordprocessing invoices for Ford Motors, is information processing in one sense, but producing cars in another and more meaningful sense. Those computers and faxes easing the path of the 'weightless economy' emerge from plastic, metal ore, steel, and assembly line industries somewhere around the world. In fact, much of the shift in recent years has been within sectors. Analysis by Gershuny showed that of the increase in 'knowledge workers' during the sample period in the 1970s he examined, "less than a quarter appears to be due to the growth in the service industries, while, more than three-quarters comes from the increase in the proportion of employees in service occupations within industries" (Gershuny, 1983, p. 107). Changes in work practice, work relations, but not the industrial order emerge as the 'information society' becomes more evident (cf. OECD, 1981). The notion of an information society has been equally profound in the politics of prophesy. If the birth of the information society is inevitable, it will not lack for powerful and rhetorically insistent midwives. In preparing for office the 'New' British Labour Party confidently declared that "We stand on the threshold of a revolution as profound as that brought about by the invention of the printing press. New technologies, which enable rapid communication to take place in a myriad of different ways across the globe, and permit information to be provided, sought, and received on a scale hitherto unimaginable, will bring fundamental change to all our lives." It went on to note that, "In the new information society, we can either allow the technology to drive these changes forward in a haphazard and incoherent fashion, or we can choose to shape them for the benefit of our community as a whole" (Labour Party, 1997, p. 1). The new government's initial attempts to nudge 22

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'Magna Carta' for the information age sets not least in that it is ideological "in the sense this firmly in the libertarian rhetoric of US of distracting from underlying, more deeply political economy; "... the key principle of rooted, structures of interest ..." (1998, p. ownership by the people - private ownership 114). Garnham argues that these develop- should govern every deliberation. Govern- ments are not new, or at least not epochal, but ment does not own cyberspace, the people reflect the continuing need to create value with information commodities. do." (Calabrese, 1996, p. 16). The spirit of technological determinism One member of the EU expert group was Manuel Castells, and his powerful and ency- is hard to exorcise from many renderings of clopaedic survey of the 'information age' information society theory. In place of what represents the most important recent exami- Raymond Williams (1974, p. 15) succinctly nation of the information society thesis. describes as a "continuing complex of need Castells distinguishes carefully between the and invention and application," is a heightinformation society (which could apply to ened regard for the fundamental social shifts almost all past societies) and the 'informa- presumed inevitable and inherent in new tional society,' "in which information genera- media of communication. The danger is that tion, processing, and transmission become the fascination of the new distracts sociology the fundamental sources of productivity and from its proper focus on what Winston, in his power" (Castells, 1996, p. 21). In such socie- book-length assault on technological deterties ICT promotes networking as a "dynamic, minism, describes as 'the law of the suppresself-expanding form of human activity" which sion of radical potential' (Winston, 1998: "transforms all domains of social and eco- passim), in other words the solidity and nomic life" (Castells, 1998, p. 336-7). Castells' endurance of social and economic formaexhaustive and massively researched elabora- tions in the face of technical novelty. But tion of this argument is a major contribution how new is new? to social analysis, and cannot be adequately addressed here. Nonetheless, with its echoes Means and Ends: of the 'modernization' thesis - a hint that all Two Types of Technology societies will move inexorably over the next Technology may be construed as the mechatwenty years to the condition of late twentieth nisms by which human agency manipulates century southern California (though Castells the material world. We can conceive of two eschews both futurology and historicism) - forms of technological innovation. Technolhis analysis has inevitably prompted dissent. ogy One allows existing social action and Garnham (1998), for example, in a force- process to occur more speedily, more effiful and compelling critique, notes that the ciently, or conveniently (though equally pospresumption that ICTs engender vast expan- sibly, with negative consequences, such as sion in the productive capacity of those soci- pollution or risk). Technology Two enables eties in which they are pervasive, is not born wholly new forms of activity previously imout by the evidence - rapid growth of produc- practicable or even inconceivable. In essence tivity in Japan and Germany was in periods in many new ICTs are more obviously Technolwhich they were relatively low in ICT devel- ogy One than Technology Two. Compared with the 'miracle' of telephony opment. Castells makes much of the 'spirit of informationalism' - as he puts it himself, - speaking over vast distances, in real time, to "Schumpeter meets Weber in the cyberspace unseen interlocutors contacted accurately from of the network enterprise" (Castells, 1996, p. among millions of potential alternatives - the 199). As Garnham notes, there is an almost hype surrounding the impact of e-mail seems mystical dependence on this concept, which is extravagant. The capacity of the Internet to not only tautologous, but also parallels many facilitate online communities through Usenet of the less certain features of post-modernism, and newsgroups is indisputable, but over23

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suggested (1999) in the age-old debate about the primacy of nature or nurture, sociology finds itself disconcerted by the novelty that it may be easier to change human genetics than social or cultural context. If the nineteenth century was the age of the telegraph and telephony, and the twenty-first becomes that of biotechnology, it is not necessarily the case that the intervening era of late modernity is best conceived as the 'information age.'

statement of their social importance might be compared with an equally implausible claim that enthusiasm for pen-pals created a new social order among the literate. Equally, and even earlier, the profound social impact of the telegraph vastly exceeded, at least so far, that of more recent ICTs. As Carey notes, a full account of the telegraph would describe how it "altered the spatial and temporal boundaries of human interaction, brought into existence new forms of language as well as new conceptual systems," and not least enabled the networking of a national commercial middle class in the US. Not surprisingly, he claims, "... the innovation of the telegraph can stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history" (Carey, 1989, p. 203-4). Interestingly, at its birth the telegraph attracted the same form of almost spiritual accreditation as Castells accords new ICTs; what Leo Marx terms 'the rhetoric of the technological sublime' (cited in Carey, 1989, p. 206). As the telegraph was unleashing and enabling north American commercial expansion, so too it provided the nervous system of empire. Submarine telegraphy made contact with the outposts of the British empire independent of intermediate countries, and further enabled central control from London. By 1870 permanent lines installed at the Foreign and Colonial offices completed the circuit (Standage, 1999, pp. 96-7; 148). The unmistakable link between the telegraph and the contours of imperialism - possibly among the most profound global legacies of later modernity - is still readily discernible, not just in th geometry of international telecommunications but in the topography of post-colonialism. By contrast with the Technology One character of most recent ICTs, developments in biotechnology presage real change in what human action and activity might obtain and pursue. They represent examples of Technology Two. Advances in genetics, or the as yet uncertain ripples from the human genome project, posit the possibility of manipulation of human biology at the molecular or even chromosomal level, such that, as Rose has

Towards a Sociology of the Information Age: Fallacies and Futures

The theme of this article is the robust relevance of the key terms of sociological enquiry, as they emerge from an engagement with capitalism and modernity, to the social changes inherent in and consequential to new ICTs. Four such terms can very briefly be listed here to illustrate, though not adequately to demonstrate, this point. In so doing at least four potential fallacies of the information age thesis come into view. Identity: the fallacy of the post-modern subject. For Tony Hall, chief executive of BBC News, one unique value and virtue of the BBC is its capacity to show it "can be good to be British." However dynamic and difficult to define, "Britishness is still based on a profound sense of fair play, personal liberty and voluntary commitment. We still queue at the slightest provocation, while ball-tampering is practically a hanging offence" (Hall, 1999). But the ubiquity of ICTs is seen by many as precisely the means by which identity is playfully disposable and malleable, a matter of choice and demonstration rather than imposition, of achievement rather than ascription. Not just 'where do you want to go today?' but 'who do you want to be today?' The fallacy of the post-modern subject finds its keenest expression in much writing on computer-mediated communication (cf. Jones, 1998; Ito, 1996; Bromberg, 1996). Much analysis of the sociology of cyberspace apes, but does not match, the visionary fiction of William Gibson. Turkic, of whom this is not true, however, argues that the Internet is 24

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"changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities" (Turkle, 1996, p. 10). Her case studies of participants in multi-user computer games (MUDs, and the like) signify a wider context in which we find "eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self ..." in the patterns of everyday life (Turkle, 1996, p. 10). There are here, essentially two problems. First, identity continues to reflect the resilience of national and state boundaries, albeit in increasingly complex and protean formation. Billig's insistence (1995) on the perpetuity of 'banal nationalism' reminds us that it is one of the obstinate contours of identity formation. As Keohane and Nye (1998, pp. 82,85) argue, "Prophets of a new cyberworld, like modernists before them, often overlook how much the new world overlaps and rests on the traditional world in which power depends on geographically based institutions ... the information revolution exists in the context of an existing political structure...." Secondly, presuming a shift from a politics of distribution to a politics of identity elides the supply side of symbolic circulation. The media, and more generally the communication and cultural industries, provide the symbolic resources that people use to make sense of their lives and their relationships with social institutions. These resources are increasingly controlled and rationed by surprisingly few, largely corporate, interests. Stuart Hall notes that the erosion of national identities by the global post-modern is countered by resistance locally to globalization. More crucially, as he points out, cultural (not just national) identity comes from representation. The very decentring of the subject at the core of the post-modern analysis means we are "confronted by a bewildering, fleeting multiplicity of possible identities," including those of the narrative of nation (Hall, 1992, pp. 277, 292). But this multiplicity is not infinite, and depends significantly on powerful flows of representation. As Morley and Robins (1995, pp. 19,38-9) point out, for example, the retreat of

public service broadcasting across Europe dismantles a political culture in which questions of identity and citizenship were bound together. The space within which the symbolic resources for addressing such questions can be found "is shaped and maintained by transnational capital: it is the space of IBM and AT&T, of Murdoch and Berlusconi." Information society theses, like some kinds of postmodernist theory, remain preoccupied with image, simulation, and spectacle (Morley and Robins, 1995, p. 39). The manufacturers and distributors of the raw resources of identity construction are to be found elsewhere, in familiar and very material locations. Inequality. In the future, it is claimed, ICTs will unlock the door to a society of unlimited resources. The plenitude of the information economy will end deprivation and need. Here we run into the fallacy of universal abundance. The diffusion of new consumer goods in the past has inevitably moved from more affluent groups rapidly through to the less affluent, until widely, even ubiquitously, available. However, recent communications goods and resources do not replicate this pattern for two reasons (Golding, 1990; Golding and Murdock, 1989). First, earlier innovations were introduced in a period of rapid economic growth, rising popular affluence, and diminishing inequality, none of which obtain now or in the medium term future. Secondly, ICT goods require recurrent investment. The PC needs updating or regular replacement, feeding with software, garlanding with add-ons - a modem, a printer, a scanner, online costs. The consequence for the distribution of such goods is inevitable. As Fortner (1995, p. 142) notes, in the USA "the only information technology that has consistently high penetration regardless of income is television." The pattern for the UK is presented in Table 1. The cliche that ICT development leads to information poor and information rich is nowhere more evident and substantiated than in the growth of the Internet. Director of the MIT Media Lab and digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte argues that: "Some people worry 25

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Table 1. Household Ownership of Selected Communications Facilities. UK 1997-98 Proportion of Households owning Item (%) in each quintile group by income Consumer goods 1

Lowest 20% Second quintile

Third Quintile

Fourth Quintile

Highest 20%

All

79

92

96

98

100

93

Mobile phone 1

3

6

12

21

38

16

Satellite dish

Telephone

7

16

20

26

28

19

Home computer1

8

12

22

34

57

27

VCR 2

65

76

91

94

97

84

1

Source:1 Office of National Statistics (1997, p. 154);2 Office of National Statistics (1998, p. 135) Table 2. Demographic Correlates of Internet Access. UK, 1998 Socio-Economic Group

% with a PC at home

% with Internet access

AB

64

27

C1

50

17

C2

41

9

DE

26

6

All (15+)

44

14

Source: BMRB (1999, pp. 5, 7) • AB = professional and managerial groups • C1 = supervisory, junior managerial, administrative (=lower middle class) • C2 = skilled manual workers • DE = unskilled manual and casual workers, and lowest income groups dependent on welfare

when .com domains exceeded in number all others, the politics has itself become part of the commercial embrace. As Huber put it, "By providing efficient integrated global data connections, telecommunications companies now offer voters the ultimate shopping experience: shopping for better government" (Huber, 1996, p. 142). Among the frequently observed dangers inherent in 'direct' democracy is its evacuation of secondary association, what Coleman (1999, p. 18) describes as 'technopoulism,' serving as "a chilling warning of the kind of plebiscitary authoritarianism which lies not far beneath the surface rhetoric and imagery of the Global Village Meeting House." The promise of interactivity is that voters will have direct access to their political rulers. The electronic referendum would provide a recurrent check for accountability and democratic politics, and political information for citizenship would be boundless and instantly accessible. The digital Athenian democracy this conjures up also, among sceptical observers,

about the social divide between the information-rich and the information-poor, the haves and the have-nots, the First and Third Worlds. But the real cultural divide is going to be generational" (Negroponte, 1996, p. 6). But he has the wrong demographic variable. Table 2 sets out recent figures for Internet access in the UK. Increasing evidence of consistency in such figures suggests a settling pattern of high users and excluded non-users which will provide a digital underpinning to structures of material inequality that are more likely to become self-replicating than abating. Power. The distribution of new ICTs can provide the vehicle for the conquest of dirigiste and centralized government; the push button democracy or electronic forum is but a few cables away. That presumption, the fallacy of interactivity, is found most prevalently in preliminary analyses of politics and the Internet, and its analysis would extend beyond the space available here (cf. Golding, 1998). As the Net has become more and more a commercial medium, from the point in 1995 26

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prompts the reminder that in Athens neither women nor slaves got much of a political look in. Not only that but the character of the politics envisaged in these scenarios changes the essential nature of democracy. As Stoll points out, "This electronic town hall removes valid reasons for representative government. What's the purpose of a representative when each of us can vote immediately on every issue?" (1995, p. 33). There is here the potential for a fundamental individualization of politics. In cyberdemocracy the role of representative and intermediary organizations - trade unions, community groups, political parties, pressure groups - atrophies. As a result, as Dutch analysts Van de Donk and Tops suggest, "representative organizations may disappear .... A direct plebiscitarian democracy becomes feasible when the 'demos' ... can come together 'virtually'" (Van de Donk and Tops, 1995, p. 16). But the presupposition of universal access, itself illusory, is also based on a fiction about the nature of interactivity. Home shopping on the Web has not yet taken off because people want to touch, see and interact with what they are buying and those from whom they purchase it. But that may change as systems become more reliable and secure; by 1999 selling goods to the public over the Internet was already a $500 million business, and Web site advertising, the more likely growth area ('on-screen real estate') was attracting an estimated $325 million. Interactivity on the Web, far from a mechanism for democratic debate and influence, will distil, as Besser (1995, p. 63) sardonically notes, into "responding to multiplechoice questions and entering credit card numbers on a key pad." Thus individualization, unequal access, and disenfranchisement may be the outcome of Net politics. Change. Crucial to the fundamental shift assumed to be endemic in the social order of the information society is the compression of time and space, and indeed the 'death of distance,' "probably the single most important force shaping society in the first half of the next century" (Cairncross, 1998, p. 1).

The flow of people, images, goods, information, and materials is so fast, and often instantaneous, it is suggested, that physical space diminishes as a dimension in human experience, finally and fully colonized by human sovereignty over communication and movement. How far this fallacy accords with the evidence of urban gridlock, air travel whose average speed from destination to destination has changed little in decades, or the frustrations of 'computer rage,' driving e-mail addicts to reach for a postage stamp or the phone, bears further investigation. Theoretically the shift is forward from the consequence of modernity described by Giddens, in which 'time-space distanciation' means that the present and propinquity are not the only, or even primary contexts and determinants of action and understanding. "The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering relations between "absent" others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction" (Giddens, 1991, p. 18). From here we come to Castells' argument that the decline in the power (though not the influence) of the state allows individual subjects, with sovereignty over selfdefined and plural identities, autonomy from the state bounded definitions of time and space (Castells, 1997, p. 243). This process extends so far in the network society that reflexively organized life-planning, for Giddens a characteristic feature of modernity, becomes impossible for most, inhibited by "the systemic disjunction between the local and the global" (Castells, 1997, p. 11). Civil societies disintegrate, and what Castells terms project identity, or collective action, emerges only from communal resistance (cf. Melucci, 1996). As Bauman has noted, even if this account were to reflect the experiential realities of some, it is certainly not the fate of all or even many. Time (and also distance) is, as they say, money. Commenting on the notion of the 'end of geography,' Bauman notes that "'distance' is a social product." But, as he goes on, this polarizes rather than homogenizes experience. "For some people it augurs an unprec27

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edented freedom from physical obstacles and unheard-of ability to move and act from a distance. For others it portends the impossibility of appropriating and domesticating the locality from which they have little chance of cutting themselves free in order to move elsewhere" (Bauman, 1998, pp. 12,18). Time and space are mediated by material resources, and both are social to the extent that they impinge on and derive from other dimensions of collective experience. Extensive travel may be desirable if voluntary and in attractive locations, avoided or resented if provoked by long distance commuting or the mobile office. Time is only a resource if positively and enjoyably occupied. Increases in work hours, for example, suggest a compression of leisure time driven socially and economically, not technologically, creating among other things, the phenomenon of the 'resource rich and time poor.' The evidence of untrammelled and instant movement is less than compelling. A sharp transference from public to private travel in recent years, from bus and train to car, is manifest. But in 1998 in the UK about 13 million people did not have access to a car. Average speed of travel in those cars in the Greater London area declined from 18 m.p.h. in 1970 to 16 m.p.h. in 1996 (Social Trends, 29, p. 196). Not everyone was airborne. While only 1 per cent of miles travelled was by air, the car reigned supreme (table 12.2). Most travel is wholly functional (commuting and shopping), and while commuting trips are increasing in volume (and discomfort) they remain relatively short (Office for National Statistics, 1999: table 1.8; Banister and Gallent, 1998). Many travel seldom and parochially. In the UK 41 per cent of the population in 1998 took no holiday away from home at all during the year, a figure which has scarcely fluctuated in the last twenty years. Jones notes the paradoxical effect of some new ICTs to abolish not distance but proximity; "we may eschew some forms of proximal communication ... for ones that distance us," e-mailing our nearest and dearest, or at

least local colleagues rather than encountering them in person over the photo-copier (Jones, 1998, p. xiii). Twenty years ago the coming of ICTs was threatening the end of work (cf. Jones, 1982; Jenkins and Sherman, 1981). The 'death of work' is certainly not reflected in data on the labour force. The growth of new technologies has in many areas compressed time through the expansion of work, and changed the nature of space, rather than eliminating it, by diffusing the spatiality of work into other zones. The unleashing of an embarrassing excess of leisure opportunities forecast in the 1970s and 1980s is now confronted by evidence of both longer working hours and the increase, particularly among women, of participation rates. Between 1984 and 1997 the UK labour force increased from 24 million to 26.7 million, especially enlarged by the growth of the female labour force from 9.9 million to 12 million in the same period. Work hours have not reduced to compensate. Average hours worked were 44.3 per week in 1984 for men, and 44.1 in 1997. For women, more concentrated in part-time work, the average has nonetheless remained static (actually rising from 30 to 30.8 over the period). The total volume of paid employment time, as an aggregate for the population, is thus substantially higher now than a generation ago. (Office of National Statistics, 1999). This trend defies the more usual presumption that "the growth of employment in the expanding industries (especially the IT sector) is not enough to counterbalance the declining industries and to accommodate the growing population" (Van Den Besselaar, 1997, p. 389). As the efficiencies of new ICTs displace traditional occupations, instead of the triumph of leisure we obtain both increases in unemployment but also the expansion of insecure, low-paid, and largely female paid employment in a labour market expanded to embrace work previously located in the informal or service sectors. This is especially true of the kind of paid work facilitated by new ICTs, notably home working. Analyses of homeworking highlight 28

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great uncertainty about their numbers, though it is quite certainly a largely female labour force, and one that has possible trebled since 1981 (Felstead, 1996). The impact on differential opportunity for time-space compression (emancipation for some, confinement for others), is nowhere more intense than in the homeworking of the information age, 'telework.' As Stanworth shows, the anticipated liberation arising from 'virtual organizations' has rarely arrived, while flexible 'outsourcing' creates a dependent and insecure, online labour force. Although for some the mobile phone and laptop service a mobile office, releasing the hot-desking sales manager onto the motorway and rail network, for others it is simply the transfer of the costs of production from employer to employee. Telework is only growing very slowly, and much new work is in routine tasks such as data entry. However, "there is clear evidence of the perpetuation of labour market segmentation and the continued importance of gender and class divisions in the teleworkforce" (Stanworth, 1998, p. 59). As in so much else in this debate, one is compelled to mutter,plus qa change....

This is not yet the death of the book, but it does underpin what is widely seen as the accelerating convergence of ICTs, abolishing any meaningful distinction between film, video, television, publishing, or the Internet. The consolidation of computing, telecommunications, and broadcasting especially, rewrites the previously distinct character of analogue media. More importantly, however, convergence should be read as an organizational and economic phenomenon, recognizable most obviously at the level of corporate strategy and structure. In Europe this activity has been mainly in telecommunications, in the USA in the audiovisual sector, and in Japan in electronics. The wider trend of mega-mergers in the audiovisual sectors has included the take-over by Canadian wine and drinks giant Seagram of MCA, which controls Universal Studios; Time Warner's buy out of Turner Broadcasting; Disney's purchase of Capital Cities (including the ABC network), and the take-over by Westinghouse of the CBS network. TimeWarner, the largest purely media corporation on the planet, embraces Time magazine, Warner music and Warner Bros, studios, the Home Box Office TV channel, and major holdings in cable systems and channels, as well as the mammoth operation in bookselling operated by Time Life Books, and Time Warner Telecom. The growth of vertical integration strategies which this trend represents places the audio-visual sector in a key position, as distribution becomes the next priority for Internet commercialization. This is well represented by the 1994 purchase by media giant Viacom, which controls the MTV channels, of the Paramount movie studios. Viacom also own publisher Simon and Schuster, the Nickelodeon chain, and Blockbuster video. The merger in 1999 of Viacom with CBS in a $36 billion deal created a content and distribution combine of unprecedented proportions and market reach. Behind the new giant, Disney, previously second only to Time Warner as a media corporation, controls search engine Infoseek. America Online, now the domi-

Trends and Continuities: The Sociology of Impatience

The recent and rapid emergence of new ICTs among the vistas of everyday experience, not least for the intelligentsia and literati, has fuelled a powerful sense of having crossed a fissure into tomorrow. Impatient for a wholly different social order we prematurely discover its embryo in contemporary innovation. But the technocentric core to this sensibility is occasion for sociological caution. In assessing the impact, both recent and immanent, of these technologies, we find, above all, the abiding fault lines of modernity. Three broad trends emerge - convergence, deregulation, and differentiation. Convergence. The digitization of various communications media enables the common distribution and storage of information, knowledge, and entertainment across what were previously quite distinct platforms or media. 29

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nant player in Internet services since its takeover of CompuServe, finds itself under growing competition from software colossus Microsoft, which fends off antitrust assaults while expanding into cable television and news networks. British Telecom has formed an alliance with AT&T for data, voice, and video services. The 1999 merger of Excite, provider of Internet services to 28 million registered users, with the Home Service TV footprint of more than 65 million homes worldwide, illustrates what the new company's chief executive described as "the dawn of a new Internet era that will revolutionize the way consumers view and interact with communication, information, and entertainment services," (company press release). Somehow the dream of Jeffersonian democracy through optic fibres had been transposed into the opportunity to save a twenty minute round trip to the video rental store. Deregulation. The atrophy of public service broadcasting is emblematic of decreased certainty about the role of the state in relation to communications institutions (Golding and van Snippenberg, 1995). Eternal conflict over the twin, but contradictory role of communications as both the raw resource for citizenship, governed by criteria of need, rights, and communality, but also as commodities for consumers, governed only by market power, has continued to challenge policy debate. New ICTs provide a wider range of distribution channels but do not in principle address that contradiction. European policy has continued along twin tracks, unclear which is the priority, while G7 direction is insistently neo-liberal. Regulation of information and communication has traditionally sought to inhibit presumed harmful or 'anti-social' material, while promoting the productive, socially desirable, and educational. The terms of this debate become ever less certain as the boundaries of public and private, culture and difference, disintegrate. The trend of recent years has normally been seen as 'deregulation,' the retreat from direct statutory intervention by the state into communications institutions.

But, while most evident in the expansion of private sector broadcasting and the waning of public corporations, more widely the issue becomes the re-regulation of the relationship between the state and the production and distribution of information and communication goods and services. Differentiation. The tables presented above simply provide a snap-shot of the rapid translation of income inequalities into ICT stratification. For the reasons advanced earlier, this is more likely to be a stable pattern than a transient state. What was once the 'syndication of experience' becomes niche culture. Increasingly, differentiated cultural consumption across social sectors constricts access to common experience, and thus thwarts the shared interrogation of cultural symbols which is at the core of a social and political order. Evidence from many industrial societies would seem to point to an intensified segmentation of cultural consumption and, with the transfer from public to private of much of the communication order, a further move away from a public sphere of any recognizable vitality. How these changes will shape the cultural landscape of Britain in 2025 is plainly difficult to predict. The theme of this article is the persistence of familiar patterns of social structure and experience. The growing prevalence and prominence of new ICTs, however, may have two beneficial consequences for the discipline's capacity to assess and analyze those patterns. First, the pervasive impact of new technologies on the worlds of work, leisure, consumption, and education will, or should, ensure that any theory construction addressed to their understanding will necessarily engage with crucial questions of social and public policy across a range of institutional spheres. The accidental organizational and disciplinary rift between sociology and social policy may be bridged as a consequence. Secondly, the welcome re-emphasis in sociology on the cultural, in recent years, has also, and in parallel, seen the growing autonomy of studies of the zones of human life - the media and popular culture especially - into quasi disciplines. But culture has its structural and 30

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institutional dynamics too, and the permeability of these areas of interest and study by the core concerns of sociology would be to the benefit of both. It is easy to construct a visionary epic from the impact of new ICTs, peopled by cyborgs and digitized into a Utopian landscape of limitless expressive leisure, or alternatively a bleak wasteland of panoptic centralization and anomic screen-bound cultural dupes. Prediction is the snare of the social scientist, and a folly to be resisted. But the key lesson of our experience to date of the startling and rapid innovations in communications is the enduring centrality of the key analytical elements of modernity, explored here as identity, inequality, power, and change. The sociology of the future is ineluctably the sociology of the present.

Notes 1. This article originally appeared in Sociology, Vol. 34, No. 1 (February 2000). It is reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

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Alexander, J. C. (1995). Fin de siecle social theory: relativism, reduction, and the problem of reason. London: Verso. Banister, C. and Calient, N. (1998). Trends in commuting in England and Wales-becoming less sustainable. Area, 30(4): 331-341. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: the human consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, D. (1976). The coming of post-industrial society: a venture in social forecasting. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Bell, D. (1979). The social framework of the information society. In Dertouzos, Ml. and Moses, J. (Eds.), The computer age: A twenty year view. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Besser, H. (1995). From Internet to information superhighway. In J. Brook and I. Boal (Eds.), Resisting the virtual life: the culture and politics of information. San Francisco: City Lights. Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage. British Market Research Bureau (BMRB). (1999). Is IT For All? London: BMRB. Bromberg, H. (1996). Are MUDs Communities? Identity, belonging and consciousness in virtual worlds. In R. Shields (Ed.), Cultures of Internet: virtual spaces, real histories, living bodies. London: Sage. Cairncross, F. (1998). The death of distance: how the communications revolution will change our lives. London: Orion Books Calabrese, A. (1997). Creative destruction? From the welfare state to the global information society. Javnost-The Public, 4(4), 7-23. Carey, J. (1989). Technology and ideology: the case of the telegraph. In J. Carey Communication as culture: Essays in media and society. London: Unwin Hyman.

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CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE Negroponte, N. (1996). Being digital. London: Coronet Books. OECD (1981). Information activities, electronics and telecommunications technologies: Impact on employment, growth and trade. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Office of National Statistics. (1997). Family Spending. London: HMSO. Office of National Statistics. (1998). Family Spending. London: HMSO. Office of National Statistics. (1999). Labour Force Survey. London: HMSO. Phillips, Lord (1997). Information Society: agenda for action in the UK. Journal of Information Science, 23(1), 1-8. Rose, N. (1999). Comments as panel member 'Sociology and Biology' British Sociological Association, Glasgow, April

Golding, P. (1990). Political communication and citizenship: the media and democracy in an inegalitarian social order. In M. Ferguson (Ed.), Public communications: The new imperatives. London: Sage. Golding, P. (1998). World wide wedge: Division and contradiction in the global information infrastructure. In D.K.Thussu (Ed.), Electronic empires: Global media and local resistance. London: Arnold. Golding, P. and Harris, P (1997). 'Introduction' in Golding and Harris, Beyond cultural imperialism: Globalisation, communication, and the new international order. London: Sage. Golding, P. and Murdock, G. (1989). Information poverty and political inequality: Citizenship in the age of privatised communications. Journal of Communication, 39(3), 180-195. Golding, P. and van Snippenberg, L. (1995). Government, Communications and the Media. In 0. Borre and E. Scarbrough (Eds.), The scope of government. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gouldner, A.W. (1971). The coming crisis of western sociology. London: Heinemann. Hall, S. (1992). The Question of Cultural identity. In S. Hall et. al. (Eds.), Modernity and its futures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hall, T. (1999). Best of British. The Guardian 9th. April. Huber, P. (1996, December). Cyberpower. Forbes Magazine, 142-147. Inglehart, R. (1990). Culture shift in advanced industrial society. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Ito, M. (1996). Virtually embodied: The reality of fantasy in a multi-user dungeon. In D. Porter (Ed.), Internet culture. London and New York: Routledge Jenkins, C. and Sherman, B. (1981). The Leisure Shock London: Eyre Methuen Jones, B. (1982). Sleepers, wake! Technology and the future of work. Brighton: Wheatsheaf Books. Jones, S. G. (1998). Introduction. In S.G.Jones (Ed.), Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting computer-mediated communication and community. London: Sage. Keohane, R.O. and Nye J.S. (1998). Power and independence in the information age. Foreign Affairs, 77(5), 81-92. Labour Party. (1997). Communicating britain's future: A Labour Party report. London: The Labour Party. Machlup, F. (1962). The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morley, D. and Robins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity: global media, electronic landscapes and cultural boundaries. London: Routledge. Mouzelis, N. P. (1995). Sociological theory: What went wrong?: Diagnosis and remedies. London: Routledge. Murdock, G. and Golding, P. (1999). Common markets: Corporate ambitions and communication trends in the UK and Europe. Journal of Media Economics, 12(2), 117-132.

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Sardar, Z. (1999). The future is ours to change. New Statesman, 19th March, 25-27. Scarbrough, E. (1995). Materialist-postmaterialist value orientations. In J.W. van Deth and E. Scarbrough (Eds.), The impact of values. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Slack, J. (1984). The information revolution as ideology. Media, Culture and Society [check vol no etc.], 247-256. Smith, D. (1990). Capitalist democracy on trial: the transatlantic debate from Tocqueville to the present. London: Routledge. Standage, T. (1999). The Victorian Internet: the remarkable story of the telegraph and the nineteenth century's online pioneers. London: Phoenix. Stanworth, C (1998). Telework and the information age. New Technology, Work and Employment, 13(1), 51-62. Stoll, C. (1995). Silicon snake oil: Second thoughts on the information highway. London: Macmillan. Turkle, S. (1996). Life on the screen: identity in the age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. van de Donk, W.B.H.J and Tops, P.W. (1995). Orwell or Athens? Informatization and the future of democracy. In de Donk and Tops (Eds.), Orwell in Athens: a perspective. Amsterdam: IOS Press. Van Den Besselaar. (1997). The future of employment in the information society: A comparative, longitudinal and multilevel study. Journal of Information Science, 23(5), 373392.

Warwick, P.V. (1998). Disputed cause, disputed effect: The postmaterialist thesis re-examined. Public Opinion Quarterly, 62(4), 583-609. Waters, M. (1995). Globalisation. London: Routledge. Webster, F. (1995). Theories of the information society. London: Routledge. Williams, R. (1974). Television: technology and cultural form. London: Fontana Books. Winston, B. (1998). Media technology and society: A history from the telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge.

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Illusions of Perfect Information and Fantasies of Control in the Information Society Dwayne Winseck

Electronic media... are dispersed in use and abundant in supply. They allow for more knowledge, easier access, and freer speech than were ever enjoyed before (Pool, 1983, p. 251). The Internet interface must somehow appear "transparent," that is to say, appear not to be an interface, not to come between two alien beings, and also seem fascinating, announcing its novelty and encouraging an exploration of the difference of the machinic (Poster, 1995, p. 19). ... the essential human attribute of speech provides the ground for an ideal society against which existing societies can be judged and found wanting and to which we can aspire (Garnham, 1990, p. 108). The meaning of information is precisely a reduction of uncertainty (Arrow, 1979, p. 307). he above quotes reveal a fascination Twith the idea of 'perfect information,'

whether from the perspective of mainstream economics, postmodernism or the critical social theory of Jiirgen Habermas, as represented in the quote by Nicholas Garnham. Despite the diversity of the authors' positions, each shares a familiar view of information as knowledge, the antithesis to uncertainty, a source of transparency and other good things associated with democracy and capitalism.

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The fact that such disparate perspectives can share similar assumptions is a key reason why the idea of the information society is such a powerful one. Essentially, this diverse base of intellectual props and the broader resonance of such views across the culture help propel the shift to information societies. The information society promises to realize the basic assumptions regarding information held by sociologists, philosophers and economists alike. Thus, for Habermasian sociologists and communication scholars, the information age promises the decline of mediation and new forms of extended quasidirect interaction, and, consequently, the possibility of non-distorted communication. The extensive, and almost single-minded embrace of Habermas' idea of the public sphere by so much communication scholarship over the past decade reflects the allure of 'perfect information,' or, in Habermas' terms, the 'ideal public sphere' (Garnham, 1990; Calhoun, 1992; Volkmer, 1997). From this view, the new media open opportunities for extended forms of communicative interaction that could escape the spatial, economic and technical constraints of the 'old' media, although, at least from critical perspectives, such potentials might yet be thwarted by continuing attempts to aggrandize power and

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control by states and markets (Herman & McChesney, 1997). These illusions, or perhaps delusions, of perfect information are shaping the evolution of new communication systems and the transition to information societies around the world. According to Daniel Bell (1989, p. 169) and Manuel Castells (1996), information is a "new ... axial principle" of modern societies, a concept that describes "the codification of theoretical knowledge and its centrality for innovation, both of new knowledge and for economic goods and services" (p. 169). The most obvious point of convergence between information society theorists and economic theory is around the idea of the 'information economy.' Of course, theorists have spoken about the information economy for at least three decades now, pointing to the expansion of markets for information, the information technology revolution, greater spending on information and communication technologies (ICTs) and services and the growth in the number of information workers, and so on, to illustrate their case (Bell, 1989; Webster, 1995). Yet, the connections between discourses of information and economic theory go deeper than this. Against the backdrop of the risk generating trends of contemporary societies (Beck, 1994) - slow economic growth, rapid rates of technological innovation, globalization and information abundance - neoclassical economics offers a soothing definition of information as the reduction of uncertainty (Arrow, 1979, p. 306). In this view, more information equals more certainty, a circumspect understanding that ignores the fact that more information often creates more uncertainty. The idea that more information could reduce uncertainty is also reflected in the assumption of'perfect knowledge/information.'Although perfect information is an untenable ideal in economic theory, the possibility that people could actually possess the 'perfect knowledge' assumed by the theory seems more viable in an age of information abundance. As one analyst remarks, people will have "all the information ... they need to make informed,

rational decisions about which goods or services to purchase in the marketplace" (Wigand, 1997, p. 13). The libertarian economist Frederick von Hayek rejected the assumption of perfect information because of what he perceived as its totalitarian overtones, i.e. the illusions of George Orwell's central brain responsible for the storage and diffusion of all the world's knowledge, and argued that markets were important because they fostered decentralized flows of information and increased the likelihood of better knowledge in an economic system based on incomplete knowledge. Hayek (1945) approached information economics by defining prices as information and markets as communication systems. In his terms, a catalaxy of informational networks equipped individuals with sufficient information to complete economic exchanges but prevented any individual from controlling information and, hence, prices and markets. While Hayek's efforts to put information and communication at the centre of information economics, as well as his rejection of the delusion of perfect information, are intriguing, William Melody (1987) and Robert Babe (1995) criticize his perspective on the grounds that it only addressees the minimum of information needed to complete an economic exchange, while ignoring the deeper relationship between information, economic institutions and society. In particular, they argue that Hayek's narrow view of information as prices emasculates the unique qualities of information, although such a conception makes it easier to analyze information as bundles of discrete bits that can be measured and assigned economic value. As such, Hayek's view not only recognizes the role of information in markets, it furthers the commodification of information by stripping it of non-economic aspects. Hayek's approach highlights the importance of networks and information flows to market economies. In some ways, his view of the market as a constellation of networks has been transposed onto visions of telecommunications networks as electronic marketplaces. In essence, markets are not so much commu34

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nication systems as communication systems are markets. Thus, controlling communication systems is a means of controlling markets, hence the unprecedented scale of attempts to gain strategic control over the means of communication that are now accompanying the rise of the so-called new media and electronic commerce (this point will be returned to below). Yet, in contrast to strategies of control, the contemporary focus has been on designing Open Network Architectures (ONA), Open Systems Integration, and so on, as the foundations of open markets and open societies. Thus, in the United States, the introduction of competition in telecommunications was initially conceptualized as a problem of designing new network platforms that would support competition and the diverse supply of information services (Mansell, 1993). The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) similarly argued that ONA would "increase competition, choice and efficient supply, and stimulate the development of competition in local, long distance and enhanced services" (CRTC, 1994, p. 42).l According to the CRTC, ONA could effectively constrain the former monopolists from "discriminating] against other content providers or in cross-subsidization from monopoly service customers" (CRTC, 1994, p. 52). In essence, North American regulators believed that competitive markets and freedom of expression values could be explicitly designed into the fabric of new ICTs. These ideas were also reflected in American proposals for a national information infrastructure in 1993 and, a year later, the global information infrastructure (Gore, 1993; 1994). In both proposals, open access, seamless interconnection and interoperability were key principles, alongside private ownership, reliance on markets and flexible regulation. In Canada, the old monopoly telephone companies-cum-advocates of open systems, directly quoting from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Mitch Kapor and the pages of Wired, argued passionately that "open systems foster critical thinking, activism, democracy and quality while closed systems

seem to breed consumerism, passivity, crassness and mediocrity" (p. 11). By the mid1990s even the Secretary-General of the ITU, Pekka Tarjanne (1994) had embraced such ideas and pushed them to their logical end: "the principle of open access ... is one of the main reasons why information technology is perceived to be a 'technology of freedom" (p. 6). Thus, within a few short years, the design of open technologies was prescribed as a vital determinant of competition in the marketplace and diversity in the realm of ideas on a global scale. The apotheosis of such claims is the view of cyberspace as a global free market - free of taxes and inequality, fully competitive and unencumbered by government intervention. As Microsoft chief Bill Gates (1995) concludes, the information revolution will bring about "the realization of Adam Smith's ideal market, at last" (p. 4), although it is precisely Microsoft's efforts to leverage control over its proprietary systems to create closed standards and networks that spawned the antitrust investigation of the company by the United States Department of Justice in the first place. Putting this aside for the moment, however, it is clear that cyberspace represents a perfect economic space where business cycles disappear, economic growth is continuous, inflation collapses and unemployment rates fall. As the executive editor of Wired, Tim Kelly (1997) argues, the "new economy represents a tectonic upheaval in our commonwealth, a social shift that reorders our lives more than mere hardware or software ever can. It has its own distinct opportunities and its own new rules. Those who play by the new rules will prosper; those who ignore them will not" (p. 1).

New Media, Uncertainty and Risk Societies There is no doubt that open communication systems, like open borders, political systems and markets, offer a compelling vision that is preferable to closed systems. However, views of open systems overlook the reality that networks are often used to gain informa35

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tional advantages, not erase them (Mulgan, 1991, p. 31). They also ignore the fact that uncertainty and risk are the corollary to information abundance and that this, in turn, contributes to the spread of monopolization strategies, surveillance and technological design as methods to reduce uncertainty, manage risk and influence the evolution of new media and the information society. In other words, "new communication technologies simultaneously bring enormous enhancements of control to governments, corporations, consumers and voters, and a quite new order of chaos and uncontrollability which brings, in turn, a sense that control is unachievable" (Mulgan, 1991, p. 4). From this perspective, technological innovations generate risks and this, in turn, accelerates strategies of control and places a premium on trust and expertise as stability and certainty prove persistently elusive (Beck, 1994; Bogard, 1996). According to Beck, the perceived certainty of industrial societies is declining in the face of increasing turbulence and uncertainty, a change he attributes to the rise of what he calls "risk societies." The emergence of 'risk societies' highlights the elusiveness of 'prefect information' and turns our attention to a broader concept of information and the more complex sociocultural foundations of communication networks and the new media. This broadening of perspective can be accomplished by considering a more heterogeneous conception of information (Babe, 1995) and by looking at how cultural norms, social networks, trust and the unintended uses of new media influence all communication systems and markets. William Melody (1987) expands the definition of information through his notion of economic transaction. The concept of transaction highlights the fact that economies are embedded in social relationships and penetrates deeper into the political, power and cultural dimensions and social rules that structure all markets and institutions (pp. 1325-1326). This idea also helps illuminate the unique qualities of information, giving us a richer view of it than offered by the

notions of perfect information, exchange and the reduction of uncertainty. Unlike commodities in general, the use of information by one person does not diminish its availability to others. In fact, the value of information often depends on how widely it is shared, rather than scarcity. In turn, the wide diffusion of information as a source of value is reinforced by the unique economic qualities of information that define it as a public good, i.e. the cost of reproducing information rapidly falls towards zero after the first copy of information - whether a video, television programme, software programme or story, etc. - is made. Moreover, the value of information depends on its quality, meaning to users, and the context within which it is presented, not sheer quantity or scarcity (Webster, 1995; Babe, 1995). Finally, no other commodity is so intimately tied to ideas of freedom and democracy, hence the privileged status of information and communication rights in national constitutions and international human rights documents. Of course many economists see such issues as irrelevant to an analysis of emerging media markets, but such dismissals collide with growing awareness that trust, cultural norms, social networks and other 'soft factors' powerfully influence all economies (Castells, 1996, pp. 57-59; Putnam, 1993, pp. 163-181). All societies are based on a combination of economic and socio-cultural capital. Robert Putnam (1993) illustrates this by pointing out how markets rely on "pre-existing social connections between individuals ... to help circumvent problems of imperfect information" (p. 169). From this view, formal instruments and informal values combine to ensure that a "lack of mutual confidence" does not retard technological, economic and socio-cultural development (Arrow, 1972, p. 357). Some have taken this into account by exploring how social networks and power interact to structure all economic activity and technologies, a factor that helps us comprehend, among other things, why cities remain so vital as meeting places at a time when many declare the "death 36

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of distance" and how even complex telecommunications systems still constitute networks of social interaction (Mosco, 1999; Samarajiva & Shields, 1997; Cairncross, 1997). People's attachment to their online identities and the practice of Internet communities to establish behavioural conventions and cultural norms to govern their members are good examples of how social capital works in cyberspace. The ultimate balance between different kinds of capital in cyberspace will turn on whether or not open networks or closed proprietary systems prevail. In the first instance, people's social capital will exist independent of particular providers and be transportable, regardless of where one enters cyberspace, and community norms will carry more weight than proprietary ones. Should proprietary networks triumph, identities, just like telephone numbers now, will be the property of those controlling the gates to cyberspace and community-based socio-cultural norms will be subordinate to the 'acceptable use' policies developed by ISPs such as AOL, Sympatico, Microsoft, and so on (Branscomb, 1995; Developments - The law of cyberspace, 1999, pp. 1600-1605). In short, the balance between different kinds of capital and network architectures will influence the social and cultural character of cyberspace. This overlapping of technical, economic and social networks invites an analysis of how new technological systems are structured by formal rules, in the form of legislation and the design of technologies, for example, as well as by the expectations of their users. On the one hand, this is revealed by the growth in regulatory regimes around the world, the discourse of deregulation notwithstanding (see ITU, 1998, for details on the world-wide expansion of regulatory regimes in communication),2 and the emphasis on technical standards in international and regional agencies. On the other hand, communications history and contemporary uses of the Internet demonstrate the extent to which new media develop in unintended ways as they enter the social world of users (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996). This flexible adaptation and incorporation 37

of new technologies into the routines of daily life coincides with the logic of open networks. Yet, conversely, uncertainty also contributes to the creation of closed systems where the illusion of control and greater certainty can prevail.

Complexity, Uncertainty and the 'New Media9 Economy New media seldom follow their anticipated path of development. This is apparent today as enormous investments in ICTs fail to translate into economic growth, i.e. the so-called productivity paradox, and as the introduction of new means of communication confronts sluggish demand among the general population. On the surface, this latter point seems to be confounded by the vast resources being allocated to the Internet, electronic commerce and ICTs in general. The tripling of Canadian household's spending on communication, cultural and media technologies and services in the last three decades, to reach $4.4 billion in 1997, is a case in point (Statistics Canada, 1973a; 1980a; 1984a; 1998a; 1999a).3 In general, households have significantly increased their spending on telecommunications and computers and the number of those subscribing to the Internet tripled from about 7% in 1996 to 23% in 1998 (Statistics Canada, 1997c; 1999c). Business and government spending on ICTs is even more dramatic, rising from $3.3 billion in 1982 to over $30 billion in 1998 (Statistics Canada, 1999b). In general, the ICT sector in Canada grew four times as fast as the rest of the economy during the 1990s and by 1997 accounted for 6% of the entire economy (Industry Canada, 1999, pp. 3-4). Similar patterns are evident in the United States where the Internet is used by a quarter of all homes and forecasts suggest that the Internet access market will grow from $6 billion (USD) in 1997 to $38 billion in 2002 (OECD, 1999, p. 42). Overall spending on computers and information services in the United States, between 1990 and 1996, increased between 20% and 40% per year, to reach over $210 billion (Jorgenson & Stiroh, 1999, pp. 112-113).

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other" things (p. 110). Among other things, companies are substituting computers and information technology for labour power on a massive scale. Although stock markets reward firms for such actions, this does not diffuse the benefits of informatization throughout society or structurally change the economy. This is because innovators are internalizing the benefits of ICTs, which helps account for the growing disparities between rich and poor and the rise of a 'winner takes all' society (Jorgenson & Stiroh, 1999, p. 114; Niece, 1998, pp. 5-6). While advocates of the new economy argue that governments should abdicate any regulatory responsibilities, whatsoever, the fact that the benefits of information technology are not being widely diffused reveals a continuing need for state intervention to promote the society and economy-wide benefits of ICT (Jorgenson & Stiroh, 1999, p. 109). The whole idea of a new economy overlooks the fact that recent innovations in telecommunications and computing are secondary to a cluster of far-reaching innovations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: electricity, the internal combustion engine, petrochemicals and the first wave of electronic media (e.g., telegraph, telephone, film and broadcasting) (Gordon, 1999, p. 127). Viewed from this perspective, new ICTs are derivatives of this cluster of innovations and extend the trend for capitalism to become stretched across greater spans of time and space and to become mediated by all sorts of new modalities, such as contracts, the corporation, capital markets, advertising, and so on. The increasing reach of capitalism is illustrated by the intensifying commodification of information, although this process goes back to the invention of copyright in 16th century and, more importantly, to the late 19th century when the communication industries became organized more strictly along capitalist lines (Winseck, 1998a; Boyle, 1996). Running alongside this steady expansion of commodification is another historical parallel: namely, the recognition that the public good qualities and economies of scale associated with communication

While the economic and social impacts of new ICTs are often assumed to be self-evident and unequivocally beneficial, a more qualified view is needed. For example, the worldwide growth of electronic commerce to $43 billion (USD) in 1998 obscures the reality that most of it is business to business (Economist, 1999a, pp. 21-24; Economist, 1999b, pp. 1920). Business has embraced telecommunications and computing technologies and services, while citizens' adoption of new media has been tempered by a reluctance to augment spending on ICTs and by concerns with trust, confidence and privacy (as discussed below). As a result, consumer-based electronic commerce is a more modest $8 billion (USD), or less than 10% of sales revenue generated through 1-800 services, one-third the annual sales of WalMart, and "microscopic compared with the trillions of US dollars per day traded over the SWIFT banking network" (ITU, 1997, pp. 45-46). A more perplexing phenomenon is that economic growth has been weakest in the last decade, just as the diffusion of computers and computer networking became greater than ever. In short, there is a large gap between the economic benefits promised by the communications revolution and existing evidence (Gordon, 1999, p. 123; Jorgensen & Stiroh, 1999, p. 113). Where there is economic growth, it is concentrated in particular sectors, such as computer manufacturing, and in specific firms, such as Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Dell Computers, AOL, and so on, but making computers still accounts for a tiny portion of the economy and the fortunes of specific firms do not necessarily benefit society as whole (Krugman, 1998, p. 2). What is good for Microsoft is not necessarily good for North American citizens, to put a slight twist on an old adage. Of course, this does not mean that there are no noteworthy changes whatsoever. Jorgenson and Stiroh (1999), for instance, conclude "that the story of the computer revolution is one of relatively swift price declines, huge investment in IT equipment, and rapid substitution of this equipment for 38

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networks and information require policies that constrain market power and ensure that information is distributed as widely as possible, rather than complete government withdrawal from the 'new economy' (Krugman, 1998, p. 3). Reflecting the fact that governments still possess numerous policy options, Campbell and Stein (1999) summarize two ideal types of governments in an age of globalization and information: handmaidens of capitalism or inclusive society builders. The state in Canada is following the former role as it promotes the expansion of markets while doing little to ensure that the benefits of ICTs are widely shared, curtail the abuse of market power, or to promote the widest possible distribution of information and access to ICTs. The marketoriented bias of communication policy is apparent in initiatives that expand commercial broadcasting while contracting the role of the CBC, revisions to copyright legislation that augment protections for information property while curtailing its public good qualities, and proposed privacy legislation whose principal reason for protecting personal information is "to promote electronic commerce" (Canada, 1998). In this scenario, privacy is not recognized as an intrinsically valuable human right, but a prop for electronic commerce. The handmaiden role of the state is also highlighted by approaches to Internet access. Overall, two-fifths of homes own a computer and about one-quarter are connected to the Internet, although the richest twenty percent of Canadian families are nearly five times as likely to have a computer and an Internet connection from home than the poorest twenty percent (Statistics Canada, 1999c). The Canadian government's goal of "making Canada the most connected nation in the world" appears to address these inequalities, but, in reality, the instrumental conception of the 'connectivity agenda' narrows and redefines what access means (Canada, 1997). Instead of referring to the availability of the Internet to people in their homes, which is how universal service was always measured for the 'old' media, con-

nectivity takes an individual user as an index for an entire household and refers to any location of use, be it the household, work, school or library. Recent studies reveal the abuses of the concept as they claim that 40% to 50% of Canadians now regularly use the Internet (Dickinson & Sciadas, 1999; Tuck, 1999, B5). On the march to measuring the number of citizens hardwired to the information infrastructure, connectivity adopts a weak standard of access and obscures the meaning people attach to new media, depending on whether they are used for communication, pleasure or work. These strategies neglect the fact that some people do not want to use the new media4 and that there is uncertain demand among those who do. Among other things, these realities highlight the fact that the media economy is based on finite resources of time, money and attention and, given that these cannot be easily expanded, 'new media' often cannibalize the revenues of 'old media' (Mulgan, 1991, p. 15; Baldwin, McVoy & Steinfield, 1996).5 In general, people have been reluctant to commit additional resources to the consumption of conventional media and new ICTs, at least to the extent needed to finance broadband infrastructures capable of delivering multi-media services and relative to the massive growth in business and government investment in new technologies and services. This is indicated by the fact that household spending on conventional media6 has grown slowly or not at all during the 1990s. The greatest growth was in telecommunications and computers. As a result, even though spending on media, culture and ICTs rose from $2,656 to $3,779 per household between 1982 to 1997, or 42%, this paled in comparison to business and government investment and still accounted for a modest 8.2% of household expenditures (Statistics Canada, 1973; 1980; 1984; 1998; 1999a)7. These trends are shown in Figure 1. Significantly, the media economy grew slowest in those areas where advocates of multi-media and information highways are pinning their hopes, i.e. cable television, video39

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Figure 1. Spending on ITCs, Culture and Media in Canada by Business, Government and Households

on-demand, pay-per view, and so on. Consequently, the economic viability of a universal information infrastructure in Canada, which is estimated as costing between $27.3 billion and $54 billion,8 is questionable. Even advertisers recognize the uncertain demand for some of the new media, as the negligible value of advertising on the Internet attests.9 The consequence of this has not been to cede control over the Internet to its noncommercial origins, however, but attempts to harness it to conventional models of the mass media based on advertising finance and corporate control. Reflecting this, Proctor and Gamble began hosting annual conferences among the world's leading advertisers, marketers and information technology firms in 1998. According to Proctor and Gamble's vice president of global advertising, the aim is:

ized solutions and new benefits for consumers and that is free and accessible to everyone, everywhere .... We have a vested interest in making the Web the most effective marketing medium in history ... (Beausejour, 1998, p. 8).

The surprising thing is that, at least for now, the dreams of Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, McDonalds, Coca Cola and so on to commercialize the Internet have not overcome people's resistance to a view of cyberspace as just another adjunct to the old media. As one study concludes, developments in the new media are "a long way from being a consumer driven phenomenon and revenues appear insufficient to justify the large and risky investment necessary to achieve full convergence" (KPMG, 1996, pp. 4-5). In short, people's expectations regarding the new media deviate from the script prepared for them by industry and governments. This shows up in people's reluctance to expand the amount of resources committed to the new media, their prioritization of socio-

... to accelerate the development of the digital media into the next mass medium and possibly the most global medium ever. A medium that the consumer loves and trusts ... that offers interactive, personal40

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cent bid by Viacom to buy CBS exemplified this latter point when it claimed that "owning ... programming and distribution networks" would help the new media behemoth deal "with the increasing uncertainty in the media business" (Mifflin, 1999, p. Al). In the face of these trends, the early 1990s consensus around open networks and transparency is eroding as monopolization strategies become more prominent means of regulating the development of new media and access to markets, distribution channels, audiences and information. Robin Mansell (1999) defines monopolization strategies as "not... monopoly as such, but ... the activities of firms (usually dominant ones) who are seeking to build up, or maintain, a position of market power" (p. 159). Monopolization strategies determine the balance between consolidation and competition and take on a myriad of forms, including ones that seem to be opposed to one another, such as vertical integration and vertical disintegration. Vertical integration is apparent throughout the 'new' and 'old' media. It is evident in the amalgamation of broadcasters with those who control programme production and libraries, such as the merger between CBS and Viacom, Disney's acquisition of ABC, and moves by Canadian broadcasters to own production houses such Nelvana, Atlantis Alliance, Cinar and so on (Saunders & MacDonald, 1998, p. C12). Another example along these lines includes the joint venture between Microsoft and NBC, MSNBC, and Microsoft's aggressive thrust into cable television and cyberspace through its acquisition of WebTV, a 20% stake in Comcast, the fourth largest cable system operator in the United States and a similar investment in Canada's largest cable operator, Rogers Communications, the launching or acquisition of new content sources for the Internet, such as Slate, iNews, MSBET and so on. Altogether, for the several years prior to 1997 Microsoft spent $4-5 billion acquiring interests across the spectrum of new and old media, leveraging its dominant position in computer operating systems into key inter-

cultural values of trust, privacy and confidence over the narrow thrust of the electronic commerce agenda, and a resistance to the commercialization of cyberspace. Yet, instead of trying to explore these interests further, or embedding them in the design of ICTs and appropriate communication policies, attention has focused on the need to change people's behaviour as a means of accelerating the transition to an information society (Wigand, 1997, p. 4; Baldwin, et. al., 1996). A report for the Canadian government reveals this social engineering impulse when it proposes that "it may be psychology - not technology - that will enable Canadians to take advantage of the emerging information highway .... Canadians mustpsychologically adjust to the changing economy" (emphasis added, quoted in Shoesmith, 1995, p. 12). In Europe, the Bangemann (1994) report also stressed the need to "secure widespread public acceptance ... of the new technology. Preparing Europeans for the ... information society is a priority task" (p. 6). In these scenarios, people are things to be cajoled and transformed to fit the needs of the information society, rather than actors who will shape the information society through democratic processes. In each of these cases, uncertainty strengthens the role of states as the 'handmaiden of capital.' However, the long-run legitimacy of the information society might still depend on the social and cultural foundations of the 'new economy.' In fact, recent studies show that Canadians with and without experience using the Internet are apprehensive about the opaque nature and lack of trust in cyberspace (Tuck, 1999, p. B5; Ekos, 1998).10 Given that trust and other cultural values are not so easily manufactured, the viability of the information society and new media may depend on adequately addressing these issues. Monopolization strategies. These attempts to promote greater use of ICTs have been joined by the communication industries' use of monopolization strategies, surveillance and technological design to anticipate and exert greater influence over the advent of new media and reduce uncertainty. The re41

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become even tighter with the amalgamation of MCI and WorldCom in 1997 and the impending combination between MCI/ WorldCom and Sprint. Moreover, AT&T's acquisition of TCI and MediaOne, two of the largest cable systems in the United States, has allowed AT&T to reclaim a dominant position in local communication (Holson and Schiesel, 1999; Raghavan, Lipin & Keller, 1998, p. B6; Peterson & Lipin, 1998, p. B6; Consumer Federation of America, 1999). Even at the global level, there are indications of a telecommunications cartel consisting of four key strategic alliances: World Partners (AT&T plus several mid-sized telecommunications companies); Global One (Sprint, Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom; Concert (BT and MCI/WorldCom); Cable & Wireless (Chen, 1999, p. B2; Cairncross, 1997, p. 32). Telecommunications carriers are also seeking to leverage control over their networks into dominant positions in new areas, including media content and the Internet. In addition to striking alliances with Hollywood and other content providers, telecommunications carriers have established a greater presence on the Internet after balking at this new medium prior to 1995. After this initial period of hesitance, they aggressively took over or secured exclusive relationships with the largest ISPs in North America and Europe. Some examples to illustrate this point include the establishment of Sympatico in 1995, the largest ISP in Canada, by the former monopoly carriers. In the United Kingdom, the largest ISPs, Pipex and Demon, were bought-out by MCI/WorldCom and Scottish Telecom, respectively, in 1997 and 1998. In the United States AOL is aligned with MCI/WorldCom and AT&T has preferential ties with the high speed Internet access service, @Home, and the portal, Lycos, while UUNet and BBN were absorbed by MCI/WorldCom and GTE, respectively, in 1997 (OECD, 1999, p. 49; Winseck, 1998b, pp. 360). As a result of this consolidation in Canada, four ISPs Sympatico, @Home, PsiNet, AOL - now control around one-third of household Internet subscribers, while the top 10 ISPs went from

faces between consumers and media content, such as cable networks, set-top boxes, Internet browsers and so on (Newman, 1997, pp. 4-9; Mickey, 1997, p. 2). Thomas Baldwin, et. al. (1996) point to similar trends in telecommunications and, in particular, to the "alignment of all of the RBOCs with Hollywood: Disney with Ameritech, BellSouth and SBC; Creative Artists Agency with Bell Atlantic, Nynex and Pacific Telesis; Time Warner with US West" (p. 288). At the same time, Hollywood film companies have all but eliminated their production facilities in favour of functioning as financiers, packagers and distributors, in short, as intermediaries, of films produced by independents (Lash & Urry, 1994). This strategy has also been adopted by the BBC and CBC at the behest of policy-makers intent on enhancing the capacities of domestic programme production, in part, by insuring that they have access to domestic distribution facilities. The dialectic between competition and concentration is also apparent in telecommunications, the Internet and online information services. In Canada, competition has developed in long-distance and a range of other services in a handful of the largest cities, but has also been accompanied by an unprecedented scale of amalgamation. Thus, within 1998 and 1999, Telus and BCTel merged, the four maritime telecommunications companies amalgamated into one regional powerhouse, Ameritech obtained a 20% stake in Bell Canada and similar acquisitions were made by AT&T in MetroNet, in one instance, and Microsoft in Rogers Communications, in another (Surtees, 1999, p. B5; Hamilton, 1999, p. Bl). In the United States, a series of eight or so mergers and acquisitions worth over $500 billion (USD) have transformed telecommunications and cable communications beyond recognition in the wake of the Telecommunications Act of1996.n In the course of this unprecedented consolidation, only four of the eight regional Bell operating companies (RBOCs)12 formed after the AT&T divestiture in 1984 remain. The already tight oligopoly in long-distance communication has 42

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accounting for about one-half of all household Internet subscribers in 1997 to approximately two-thirds in 1999 (Evans, 1999a, p. Dl; Evans, 1999b, p. D6; Evans, 1999c, p. Bl; Convergence Consulting Group, 1999, p. 3).13 Although there are still hundreds of ISPs in Canada, the trend toward dominance of Internet service provision by a handful of corporate players is clear. Amalgamation among telecommunications companies and their thrust into Internet has steadily eroded the open systems view. Although regulators have adopted rules giving competitors' access to the networks of incumbent monopolists in order to foster competition, these have been resisted by the former monopolists (Bolter, 1997; Owen & Noveck, 1999). Incumbent telephone and cable system operators have also engaged in a panoply of monopolization strategies to hamper the longterm viability of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), ISPs' access to high speed broadband distribution networks, and Internet telephony. In some cases, these efforts have been successful while in others they have been thwarted by regulators. Ever since the incumbent telephone companies in Canada were permitted to provide Internet and information services in 1994, ISPs have faced obstacles to obtaining access to network equipment on terms comparable to that offered by the incumbents to their own Internet providers (CRTC, 1994, pp. 32-51; Johnson & Buchanan, 1995; CRTC, 1996). Telephone companies and cable operators have also balked at providing access to highspeed digital subscriber lines (xDSL) or their cable equivalent, while aggressively cultivating new markets and capturing customers along the way. In Canada, these monopolization strategies are bolstered by a policy regime that privileges construction of new competitive infrastructure over access to existing networks (CRTC, 1997). Advocating for closed networks and multimedia systems, Richard Stursberg, president of the Canadian Cable Television Association, argued against giving independent ISPs access to high speed facilities on the grounds that

... you ... want to encourage ISPs to be facilities based. I think that one of the things that we learned from the long distance markets is that a resell opportunity is not really much of an opportunity at all. What it is at best is a short-term opportunity that allows you to build some revenue while you are building facilities, which is why I think that the logic of the local telephone decision was so good to limit the period of time while unbundled facilities were available to incent [sic] people to build. My own view is that that is probably a good thing as well from the point of view of ISPs, that ISPs should be incented [sic] to build facilities, (quoted in Grieve, 1999, p. 4).

Recognizing that they shared the same interests with respect to their own high-speed services, Telus and BCTel reiterated aspects of the cable position by arguing that they did ... not agree with CAIP that the members of the Canadian Cable Television Association ("CCTA")... should necessarily be required to provide access to their underlying telecommunications facilities .... The most efficient policy is to require unbundling of those facilities for a time-certain period. By providing for a time-certain period, such as five years ..., the Commission will preserve all of the incentives necessary to promote facilities-based competition. Failure to provide for a time-certain period will diminish the incentives for facilities-based competition and entrench monopoly or significant market power in the facilities market. {emphasis added, Grieve, 1999, p. 4).

In essence, cable system operators and telecommunications companies proposed that ISPs should build their own networks rather than be given access to existing facilities, a requirement that would lead to the demise of all but a handful of ISPs and which ignores the fact the ISPs are service providers rather than carriers. The only difference between the telecommunications companies and cable operators is that the former want the ISPs to gain access to cable systems in the short run, but neither to their own nor the cable systems in the long run. While this follows the logic 43

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of communications industries and those bent on seeing the transition to an 'information society' occur as quickly as possible.15 North America telecommunications providers have also tried to emasculate ISPs by mounting regulatory challenges based on claims that their Internet services overload the telephone network, that Internet telephony skims traffic and revenue away from the public network and harms ordinary telephone subscribers, and by pressuring regulators to increase access charges. A study by Selwyn and Laszlo (1997), however, refutes these arguments on the grounds that they contradict the telcos' own foray into Internet services, are weakly supported by evidence, and overlook the fact that Internet services provide the telcos with new sources of revenue, most notably, second lines and their own Internetbased services. By and large, North American regulators have been more willing to side with the ISPs in this case, refusing to block either Internet telephony or to raise the level of compensation they pay to network providers, unlike the position adopted with respect to network access referred to above (Rowan, 1998, p. B27). Internet telephony also reveals other ways in which incumbents can respond to the perceived threat of competition and what some see as an impending 'crash in the price of bandwidth.' Incumbents can either work to thwart the threat through regulatory means, as has been done in North America, join in and explore the frontiers of Internet telephony as in Japan, Finland and Germany, horde bandwidth as is done on many international routes, or jettison the cost of bandwidth as the criteria of communication prices altogether (ITU, 1997, pp. 39-41). As technological advances drive the cost of bandwidth toward zero (Cairncross, 1997, p. 6), some anticipate that telecommunications operators could give away bandwidth for free, much along the same lines as computers are sometimes given away "free" today, and instead focus on advertising or 'quality of service' as revenue sources. The extension of advertising into telephony is being experimented with in some hotels, where

established by the decision to introduce local competition, in 1999 the CRTC did force cable providers to open their networks and has indicated that telecommunications operators might be expected to do the same with respect to DSL (CRTC, 1999). However, the cable companies could continue to refuse to comply, as they have done with respect to similar decisions in the past, and the regulator indicated that this was an interim solution that could be withdrawn once network competition exists between the telecommunications and cable companies. The FCC is currently facing the same situation in regard to AT&T's acquisition of TCI and Comcast and its exclusive control over access to the high speed @Home cable Internet service. So far, courts in Portland, Oregon have upheld cities' right to require open access in return for municipal operating licenses (AT&T, et. al. vs. Portland, Oregon, et. al, 1999).14 Numerous citizens groups are also pushing for open access as the only means of preventing the entrenchment of local cable monopolies and averting "the greatest threat to the liberating influence of the Internet" (Consumer Federation of America, 1999, p. vi). For its part, AT&T has revived arguments previously used to support the 'natural monopoly' doctrine to argue that exclusive control over the network and services are essential to provide it with the economic incentives needed to develop broadband multimedia systems and to foster competition with existing local telephone monopolies. Citizens groups, on the other hand, respond that granting the model desired by AT&T would necessitate giving exactly the same rights to build closed systems to the RBOCs, resulting in local duopolies across the country and the demise of open systems as the basis of new media altogether. To date, the chair of the FCC has supported and advocated on behalf of AT&T's position (FCC, 1999). This prospect of an unregulated duopoly of closed multimedia systems in North America reflects the demise of the early 1990s consensus around competition, open systems and diversity of information in favour of the special interests 44

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callers listen to advertisements during their calls in return for 'free' long-distance service (Leibovich, 1999). The other model would give away access to the network for 'free' but without any service quality guarantees, thus bringing about a risk of dropped calls, interrupted Internet connections, corrupt data transmissions and so on. In this scenario, network providers leverage control over service quality to obtain high fees for installation, encrypted data and voice communications, low waiting times, enhanced privacy protection and guarantees regarding the fidelity of communicative transactions (ITU, 1997, p. 39). This discussion indicates that there are inadequately restrained impulses to build closed systems which, in turn, are legitimated as a means to obtaining the information age's "holy grail:" broadband information infrastructures. In fact, key telecommunications and Internet providers have consistently argued that consolidation among a few large players is an effective way of deepening and stabilizing new media markets. Microsoft, for instance, deferred Department of Justice proceedings for years on the basis of claims that its deep pockets would help "expand the market for online services" (Kehoe, 1995, p. 14; Newman, 1997). Similarly, Jeff Mallett from Yahoo, a leading Internet portal, has argued that "a few major brands can be good for a market," just as "the big three television networks" were for broadcasting (Swisher, 1999, p. Bl). Overall, then, these trends reveal that the developments in the new media are following the well worn path from 'methodless enthusiasm' to 'consolidation' that has structured every new innovation in electronic media for the last 150 years (Winseck, 1998b, p. 359). Crucially, these rationalizations help transform the open-ended possibilities of the new media into the more certain model of the conventional mass media, a model based on capturing audience attention and delivering it to advertisers. In retrospect, the idea that open systems and 'perfect information' could prevail was delusional for, as was pointed out earlier, networks are always used to gain information advantages, not erase them. The

next section takes this analysis a step further by discussing surveillance and the translation of surveillance capacities into technologies that both erode and claim to protect privacy. Surveillance. The communication industries' attempts to control risk are emblematic of the long term rise of surveillance as a defining feature of capitalism and the modern nation-state (Giddens, 1990; Lyon, 1998). Monopolization strategies reflect an obsession with reducing perceived inefficiencies in organizational control through surveillance or, in other words, the systematic process of "directing flows of authority and communication" (Bogard, 1996, p. 1). As such, they are basically attempts to internalize markets and new technologies as a means of anticipating and exerting influence over the evolution of new media. Although, as Bogard (1996) notes, such 'fantasies of power' are often elusive, they accelerate the momentum of surveillance nonetheless. As telecommunications carriers' plans for broadband infrastructures confront uncertain demand they will need to find new sources of revenue to justify their investments, such as transaction generated information (TGI),16 although this will extend surveillance of the public telecommunications network (Samarajiva, 1997). In addition, the proliferation of media channels is decreasing the effectiveness of conventional mass media, making it harder, but more advantageous, to 'know the audience.' Knowing the audience has always been difficult and not very accurate (Ang, 1991); however, new technologies allow for more fine grained audience analysis. Today, refined methods of measuring audiences are emerging, especially since agencies such as Neilson's and Arbitron moved into cyberspace in 1995 with the promise of second-by-second analysis of clickstreams and other precise measurements as opposed to cruder methods based on mere exposure to an advertisement, telephone surveys, diaries and so on. This trend toward the scientific management of consumption is also reinforced by the rise of loyalty marketing, more stress on the symbolic aspect of goods (Lash & Urry, 45

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1994) and fragmentation of mass audiences. Gandy (1996) and Samarajiva (1997) see the management of consumption as heightening surveillance and augmenting advertisers' ability to discriminate between those audiences they value and those they do not - a factor that helps explain the under-representation of minorities in media and advertising content alike. Samarajiva (1997) also notes that these practices are affecting the design of new communication networks, as they are configured to gather more information about users. Furthermore, he suggests that while new communication networks can offer high levels of privacy protection, such capabilities are often suppressed because they block the production of a valuable new commodity, TGI, and interfere with telecommunications companies' efforts to market new call management services, such as Caller Line Identification Display, number forwarding and so on.17 Surveillance technologies and strategies are also proliferating in cyberspace in the form of Web site and discussion group monitoring, cookies and techniques that gather information about people's Web site visits, their use of online advertising, the types of Internet browsers and operating systems used and so on to build up detailed behavioural and psychographic profiles of users (Lyon, 1998, pp. 96-98; Gandy, 1996, pp. 105-115; Riordan, 1998, p. C9; Chartrand, 1998, p. C8). In essence, uncertainty about the economics of new media, new technological capabilities and fragmentation of the 'mass audience' are creating an environment where there can be no expectation of privacy, despite people's desire for "complete control" over personal information in cyberspace (Caruso, 1998, p. C4; Cavoukian, 1998, p. 5; Ekos, 1999; Tuck, 1999, p. B5). Similar principles apply to the workplace where, as Vincent Mosco (1988) has shown, surveillance is being embedded in computer systems as part of the long-term drive to exert greater control over the labour process. As several recent incidents involving the Canadian Department ofNational Defense, Compaq

Computers, Intel and others reveal, organizations use network surveillance to monitor employees use of company computing and networking facilities to ensure that they are not loafing off, organizing unions, downloading pornography or visiting unauthorized Web sites. Recent studies indicate that these are far from isolated incidences, and that between one-quarter and two-thirds of private companies regularly monitor employees' uses of company computing facilities (Developments - The law of cyberspace, 1999, pp. 1629-163 3; Lyon, 1998,p.96;McMurchie, 1999, p. 14). Court decisions have not been helpful, either, finding that companies own the information generated over their computer systems and that employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy when using company communication facilities (Gandy, 1996, p 109). To reinforce this standard of'no reasonable expectation,' some information technology lawyers advise corporations to adopt policies that explicitly ... say who owns the data. [This] gives the employer unequivocal rights to go in and look at an employee's e-mail .... If the expectation is that there is no privacy, then there is no problem for employers to go in and look" (Alan Gahtan, quoted in McMurchie, 1999, p. 14).

Systematic surveillance of workplaces and audiences has tightened the yoke between new media and the imperatives of control and commercialization. It also threatens to chill freedom of expression and amplify people's angst, given the uncertainty about who can access online conversations, whether conducted in Internet groups such as DejaNews, whose records are retrievable by anyone, or networks that can be automatically monitored by employers. Design and technologies of personal choice. The design of technologies of surveillance has increased the sense of risk and, consequently, placed a premium on mechanisms for dealing with the growing loss of control over personal information in 46

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cyberspace. In the technical realm, a host of technologies and industry standards are being designed to equip people with tools to control personal information, such as the so-called privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) of encryption and cryptography, secure signatures (e.g., VeriSign, Entrust), privacy standards-setting agencies (e.g., WebTrust, Etrust) and content control technologies and standards (e.g., V-Chip, NetNanny, SafeSurf, Platform Information Content Selector (PICS) and the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi) standards being promoted by Apple, AOL, DEC, IBM, Microsoft, Time Warner, AT&T, among others, for content filtering, etc.). Many civil liberties advocates see the elimination of controls over access to PETS as a pressing communication policy issue. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, and the Electronic Privacy and Information Centre (EPIC) have been vocal critics of policies that restrict access to encryption technologies and have, sometimes successfully, challenged proposals that would allow security agencies to intercept private communications over the public telecommunication network. The Clipper Chip initiative in the United States and its global counterpart, Echelon, are recent examples that have been at the hub of civil liberties issues in cyberspace (Cavoukian, 1998; Agre & Rotenberg, 1998). The new twist being put on ICTs by some analysts is that we need to distinguish between privacy invasive and privacy enhancing technologies (Agre & Rotenberg, 1998). Simply put, the technological juggernaut driving surveillance must be seen as a doubleedged sword, potentially putting a screen between people and would-be information scavengers. As William Bogard (1996) observes, computer "[sjcreens don't 'watch' people or 'invade' their privacy; increasingly, they are their privacy" (p. 131). Bogard's point illustrates the fact that new information technologies not only invade privacy, they create it by allowing people to screen themselves off from others through technological

means, i.e. using PETs such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), encryption, cryptography, and so on, and to strategically manage who knows what about our communications with others. A major axis in the politics of communication is emerging on the frontiers of technology and information services design (Mansell & Silverstone, 1996). The examples here are numerous, including Lotus' plans in 1993 to market a software programme to small and medium-sized retailers containing consumer profiles on more than six million American households (Lotus Marketplace), the embedding of'identifying signatures' into software programmes, such as Microsoft Word, that allow the authors of documents to be identified, Intel's decision to embed user identification numbers into its Pentium III chips, ostensibly to facilitate electronic commerce, the design of telecommunications networks to capture and deliver TGI to third parties, as well as numerous private sector privacy standards being established for online communications in the absence of significant legal standards in North America. The fact that many of these design choices were either withdrawn (e.g., Lotus Marketplace) or altered (e.g., CMS, Pentium III chips) in response to public criticism and regulatory interventions indicates that participating in the politics of technology design is useful (Agre & Rotenberg, 1997; Samarajiva, 1997). While attempts to liberate technologies that enhance people's privacy and efforts to have surveillance capabilities designed out of instead of into the public communications network are laudable, solely focusing on such aims risks turning public communication into an exercise in technology-based management of personal information. Doing so would disenchant communication and information like never before, robbing them of their pivots in experience, democratic theory and the public domain. PETs are a technological fix to a sociological problem and an example of what Beck (1994) calls 'forced individuation.' That is, PETs depend on each person making a choice about whether on not to adopt these technolo47

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Technologies of choice also rationalize moral values and culture against standards set by what is technologically viable. This is evident in the allied area of content filtering and blocking software, where, as Jonathan Weinberg (1997) argues, the illusion of personal choice threatens to "leav[e] viewers little to surf but mass-market commercial programming" (p. 239). This is because techniques such as the Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi) standard developed by Microsoft, TCI, Time Warner and others, and which is now being advocated as an international standard by the Global Business Group for the Development of Ecommerce, require Web site providers to self-rate their sites. While these are voluntary standards, they are coercive and of dubious consistency. The soft-hand of coercion is visible in the cost of non-compliance, since browsers using the RSACi simply "block all unrated sites " not just those with unacceptable ratings (p. 237). In the end, virtuous technologies are not neutral; they embody the biases and structure of a controlled communications environment as a whole. Rather than focusing on efforts to liberate technologies of choice, it is more important to address the absence of adequate legal protections for personal information. Thus, although the European Union introduced strong legislation protecting personal information in 1998, the United States has refused to do so and Canada's much touted legislative initiative in 1998, Bill C54, never passed (Canada, 1998). Both countries have private sector privacy standards, but these are ineffective (Flaherty, 1998). In North America, only Quebec has legislation that effectively covers the private and public sector. An example of the ineffectiveness of private sector codes is provided by the Terms and Conditions of Sympatico's Internet service, an arm of the regional telephone companies such as Bell, MTS, BCTel and so on, who have signed the Canadian Standards Association's Model Code on the Collection and Uses of Personal Information:

gies as part of their armory of protecting personal information. This is consistent with the strong libertarian streak that permeates the Internet and creates a real choice that is better than none at all. The problem, though, is that PETs ignore the fact that communication is based on interaction between two or more parties and mutually agreed conventions, tacit knowledge of social rules as well as cultural norms. Rather than conceiving of network spaces as social spaces and rationalizing them according to a human rights-based standard of privacy and the socio-cultural conventions that govern everyday interactions, PETs implement a technocratic approach to managing personal information. Under such conditions, privacy negotiation becomes a precondition to communication and to accessing network marketplaces. One can hardly think of a better way to distort communication then by requiring participants to check the technology-enabled privacy status of would be communicative partners. In addition, PETS introduce another dimension of social hierarchy into cyberspace, not one that aggravates the gap between the information rich and poor, but between those with the technological savvy to assert their personal preferences and those who do not possess such expertise (Niece, 1998). Consequently, the human right of privacy becomes dependent on particular technologies and the ability to use them. Focusing solely on PETs also fails to grasp how power shapes the agenda and overall context in which struggles over technological design occurs. In the end, the focus on PETs ignores the decisive fact that technologies are now explicitly designed to cull information about users. Although privacy advocates seek to reduce the collection and use of personal information as much as possible, those designing telecommunications networks and online services seek to do exactly the opposite. An over-emphasis on PETS leaves the surveillance imperatives being designed into information infrastructures unscathed, while fostering particularistic struggles over the design of technologies.

MediaLinx has the right to monitor the Sympatico Site electronically from time to 48

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privacy in favour of the telephone companies' marketing strategies. Only two years later did the CRTC revise its decision to make callblocking available for free on a per-call basis, although it still refused to allow call blocking to be set as the default condition (CRTC, 1990; 1992).

time .... MediaLinx cannot insure or guarantee privacy for... users. It is recommended that this service not be used for the transmission of confidential information .... You authorize MediaLinx to collect from any party and to retain all relevant information relating to your use of the Sympatico Site, and you hereby authorize any party to provide us with such information .... If you are dissatisfied with the Sympatico Site ... your sole ... remedy is to discontinue using the Sympatico Site (Sympatico, 1998, sec. 2-7).

Democracy? So far this article has argued that the prospects of information abundance and open systems generate their own antithesis: the fear of uncertainty, greater risk, and fantasies of control that aim to exert influence over the evolution of new media. This final section argues that tensions between the potentials of the new media and the realities of risk societies also permeate the political culture of established democracies. On the one hand, the potential contribution of new media to the extension and deepening of democracy are reinforced by the emergence of 'critical citizens' but, on the other, they are confronted by a persistent culture of secrecy and information control in government bureaucracies. Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, written by Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth and Alvin Toffler (1996), eloquently states the case that the new ICTs will enable democracy: "new information technologies are ... 'demassifying' our institutions and our culture. Accelerating demassification creates the potential for vastly increased human freedom" (p. 297). On the one hand, these claims do resonate with the qualities of new ICTs and, more importantly, with world-wide evidence that citizens are becoming more politically active and savvy vis-a-vis traditional systems of authority and politics as usual, a trend linked to what Lash and Urry (1994) call 'reflexive modernization.' In North America, and elsewhere, citizens and social movements are consistently challenging the impervious style of partybased representative democracy and attempting to establish new ways of setting the public policy agenda (Clarke, et. al., 1996; Norris, 1999). On an even broader scale, the

Canadian regulators have been loathe to prioritize the privacy rights of users over the economic and freedom of expression rights of telecommunications companies and direct marketers. Decisions by the CRTC in the 1990s to approve a new class of services, the so-called call management services (CMS), help illustrate this point. CMS services such as Caller Line Identification and Display (CLID) were positioned by the telephone companies as a tool that enhanced subscribers' privacy by giving them the ability to screen incoming calls. However, health professionals and shelters for battered women, among many others, argued that forwarding telephone numbers would hinder their ability to control the release of personal information and to maintain their confidential relations with clients. For the critics, then, these new services were seen as degrading privacy, not enhancing it. Although the issues were constructed as narrow relations of power between the privacy rights of called versus those of the caller, this frame ignored the telephone companies' interest in marketing new services and the economic value of TGI. It also ignored marketers' and other third parties' stake in realizing the value of personal information. The CRTC initially allowed CLID and made number blocking available on an operator assisted pay-per-call basis, even though this was technically more difficult and expensive than letting subscribers block the release of their telephone number altogether (Samaraj iva & Shields, 1997). In essence, the CRTC's decision suppressed technical potentials embedded in the network that would enhance 49

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The tensions between the potentials for the free flow of information and openness, on the one hand, and the realities of closure, control and risk management, on the other, are most evident in the persistent "culture of secrecy" that continues to pervade government and bureaucratic organizations. The Canadian Office of the Information Commissioner's recent report made it clear that the government's "closed culture" was impeding citizens' access to public information and undermining democratic governance. According to the report, there was systematic failure across the government to comply with the Access to Information Act (1993) and to grant the Commissioner the autonomy, resources and legitimacy needed to conduct his work. According to the Information Commissioner (1999) government officials were still clinging to

uptake of new ICTs has coincided with a rise in the number of democracies world-wide, as the number of such countries grew from 34% to 41% from 1983 to 1997 (Norris, 1999, p. 265). According to Christopher Kedzie (1997), this is not a coincidence. It reflects a strong correlation between the availability of ICTs and countries' embrace of democratization. From this perspective, new ICTs are being fitted into a global context characterized by a revitalized civil society and a deepening culture of democracy. Simultaneously, however, the rate of democratization has been painfully slow. The vast majority of citizens still live in undemocratic countries and there is significant evidence showing that democracy is weakening in countries where it has been entrenched the longest. A clear indicator of this is the fact that less than half of the eligible population in the United States voted in the 1996 presidential election, the lowest level in seven decades (Norris, 1999, p. 258), although voting levels in Canada are higher and have remained relatively stable overtime. Cultures of democracy in both countries, however, have been weakened by people's disenchantment with the political process, feelings of apathy and a lack of confidence in their ability to affect the political process, factors which have eroded people's trust and respect for politicians, parties and core political institutions. A striking condition of modern democracy is that citizens' disillusionment with formal politics and demands to have a greater say in the political process have not been met with greater openness on the part of governments (Clarke, et. al., 1996; Norris, 1999). In fact, political restructuring has often sought to immunize governments from an excess of public demands while, at the same time, emphasizing states' role as the 'handmaiden of capitalism.' Pippa Norris (1999) summarizes these trends with the observation that the current situation is one of critical citizens and weak democracy. From this angle, ICTs are unlikely to counteract a context of marginalized citizens and a culture of democracy that has lost many of its key props.

... the paternalistic belief... that they know best, what and when to disclose to citizens .... At the very highest levels of the bureaucracy, the official line on ethics for public servants stresses their 'servant' role ... rather than their 'public' role .... The notion of ministerial accountability is, too often, taken to mean that the public should not know what public servants do ... (p. 4).

Thus, ironically, at the same time that the Canadian government has been promoting greater citizen access to communication resources, it has been stymieing the free flow of information into a political culture that increasingly demands it, transparency, and further democratization. In this sense, the potentials of new technologies confront the realities of a political system bent on maintaining limited democracy, while the government's attempts to 'build the information society,' it would seem, are mainly about garnering international prestige and fostering new markets in ICTs, information and culture.

Conclusion The advent of competition and new communication systems built on principles of open access were supposed to usher in an era of information abundance and greater respon50

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siveness to users' needs. It was also supposed to shift the axis of media evolution from the long-term planning authority of government agencies, such as the now defunct Department of Communication, and monopoly providers toward a system based on open markets, open technologies and respect for fundamental values such as freedom of expression, privacy and trust. In some ways, this has happened. Yet, the hoped-for shift to open markets, technologies and political cultures seems to have been truncated by grandiose projects that have smuggled in many of the earlier principles: building information societies and rapidly deploying new information infrastructures. In many ways, these equally technocratic visions of media evolution and social change have been underwritten by the delusion that perfect information would serve as the basis of free markets and a culture of democracy, a vision fuelled by the ill-conceived definitions of information offered by mainstream economists, policy-makers and social theorists alike. As this article has suggested, these plans confront the realities of a media economy where, at least at the level of citizens, there is a reluctance to radically increase spending on ICTs and unmet desires for trust, confidence, privacy and other 'soft factors' that must eventually define the good information society, at least if that ideal is still in the offing. Equally important, the juxtaposition of the 'risk society' against the idealizations of the information economy suggest that the proliferation of risk and uncertainty will accompany rapid changes in technology and information abundance. Recognizing this should disabuse us of the notions of perfect information, transparency and perfect markets and alert us to the fact that we are more likely to see the spread of monopolization strategies, surveillance and technological designs as key factors that aim to reduce the perception of uncertainty, manage risk and influence the overall direction of new media. The notion of the risk society also, from a socio-cultural standpoint, suggests that there will be more

expectations among citizens for trust, confidence, privacy and control over personal information to counteract the disorientation instilled by a sense of a world out of control and fraught with complexity, whether at the level of everyday life or in more instrumental contacts with the new technologies through the workplace, interactions with government and so on. While PETs and technological means of asserting control over personal information and controlling the flow of objectionable content into personal spaces will undoubtedly proliferate, the technological and commercial mediation of fundamental human rights and values are inadequate. They disenchant the ideas of communication, rights and values and would be better dealt with by establishing basic social and cultural norms, and rights, for cyberspace. Instead, technologies of choice should build on a platform of legislatively recognized privacy rights and the principle that the collection and use of personal information by network and service providers should be minimized to the greatest extent possible. Finally, the democratizing potential of new communication technologies is indeed powerful. However, its realization will depend on countering the turn to closed media systems by the communication industries, and legitimated by governments as part of their strategy of fuelling the transition to an information society. Efforts will also need to focus on eliminating the culture of secrecy and control pervading states that are bent on immunizing themselves from critical citizens and their demands to democratize all political spaces, not just cyberspace. The bottom line is this: risk societies are complex and the sooner that is realized, the quicker we can recognize the illegitimacy of efforts to stifle flux and work on maintaining open communication systems and room for people to experiment with the new means of communication over the long run and to participate in the processes of carving visions of the good life out of confusion.

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Notes nies sought regulatory reform in the early 1990s have subsequently disappeared in favour of concentrating broadband facilities and high speed Internet access in a dozen to two-dozen of Canada's largest and most affluent cities — Calgary, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, OttawaHull, Quebec City, London, Kitchener-Waterloo and Missisauga (CRTC, 1999b). 9. In Canada, ISPs derive about 3% of their revenues from advertising. In Canada and the United States Internet advertising is about $100 million and $1.5 billion (USD), respectively, or about .5 to 1% of television advertising (Industry Canada, 1998, p. 8; Report: Online Ad Spending ..., 1998). 10. Deirdre Mulligan of the Centre for Democracy and Technology in the United States suggests that up to two-thirds of non-Internet users would get online if privacy was better protected (Awalon, 1998, p. 2). This figure seems high, although the key point about the link between trust and use of new media is significant. 11. These eight transactions include the following: Bell Atlantic and Nynex ($22.7b); Bell Atlantic and GTE ($74b); SBC and Pacific Telesis ($16.5b); SBC and Ameritech ($72b); Qwest and USWest ($50b); MCI and WorldCom ($37b); AT&T, TCI and Media One ($120b) and the proposed deal between MCI/WorldCom and Sprint ($115b) (Gruly, 1999, A4; Holson and Schiesel, 1999; Raghavan, Lipin & Keller, 1998, p. B6; Peterson & Lipin, 1998, p. B6; Milner, 1999, p. B1) 12. Includes GTE as one of the RBOCs. 13. These figures are based on the number of subscribers to particular ISPs and an estimate of just over 4 million household subscribers in Canada (Statistics Canada, 1999c). Sympatico is the provider of the incumbent monopoly telecommunications companies in Canada, although BCTel and Telus have merged and plan to sell their stake in Sympatico. The @Home service is provided in several large cities by the largest cable companies, such as Rogers, Shaw, Videon, and Cogeco, under exclusive licenses from @Home. Because the telephone companies providing Sympatico do not compete with one another, and similarly for cable firms offering the @Home service, each service is counted only once. The Convergence Group study counts each cable company offering @Home, hence their lower estimates of concentration. 14. Thus far, Portland, Oregon and Broward County, Florida have passed laws requiring open cable access for high speed Internet services. Los Angeles has indicated that it will closely monitor the situation and act if necessary, a move that prompted three of the city's Information Technology Advisory Board to resign. 15. As things now stand, the Canadian system is more committed to open networks than the United States. However, this is contingent upon the CRTC maintaining this position in the long-run and not succumbing to the idea that local duopolies will provide independent ISPs with ample access to essential facilities.

1. The CRTC did not adopt such a view for cable system operators, a problem that retarded the advent of new specialty cable programming services that were not either aligned with or owned by one of the major cable providers in Canada - Rogers, Shaw and Videon (CRTC, 1995, p. 18). This problem also subsequently stymied Internet Service Providers' (ISPs) ability to gain access to high speed Internet facilities and the CRTC was forced to deal with such a problem during the next four years until forcing the cable companies to provide open access in 1999 (CRTC, 1999). This point is returned to below. 2. The ITU (1998a) points to the development of 115 new telecommunications laws and the creation of a wave of new regulatory agencies throughout the world during the period from 1992 to 1997 (p. 7). 3. All figures are in constant 1992 Canadian dollars, unless stated otherwise. The definition of media, culture and ICTs is based on the categories covering communication (basic, long-distance and enhanced telephone and Internet services), home entertainment equipment (cable television subscription, purchase of televisions, vcrs, radios, etc.), computers (software and hardware), reading materials (newspapers, books, magazines, etc.) and cultural events found in Statistics Canada's Family Expenditure Survey. 4. For example, in Statistics Canada's 1998 Household Internet User Survey, over one-quarter of respondents who did not use the Internet claimed that nothing would induce them to do so (Dickinson & Sciadas, 1999, p. 3.17). 5. Mulgan (1991) refers to this as the 'law of relative constancy' (p. 15). 6. Conventional media is defined to include three categories in the Family Expenditure survey: home entertainment, e.g. television, cable services, video rentals, etc., reading material, e.g. newspaper and magazine subscriptions and book purchases, and attendance at cultural and spectator events. 7. Business and government spending rose by nearly 32% per year and over 800% in total from 1982 to 1997, compared to increased consumer spending of about 9% per year and 42% overall. Residential spending on telecommunications, which is far more significant than spending on broadcasting, and computers grew 38% and 1017%, respectively, while the corresponding figures for home entertainment and movie attendance were 26% and .07%, respectively (Statistics Canada, 1999; 1984). The amount of time allocated to television viewing in Canada has also stayed relatively fixed and even fell slightly between 1995 and 1997 (OECD, 1999, P. 127). 8. Figures are based on 18.2 million subscriber lines in Canada and a cost of connecting each subscriber to broadband networks of between $1,500 and $3,000 per subscriber, although some are much higher at around $5,000 (USD) (Comgate, 1991, p. 83; Gaz, 1995, p. 17). In fact, most discussions of information highways that were so prominent as the telecommunications compa-

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ILLUSIONS OF PERFECT INFORMATION 16. Transaction Generated Information (TGI) was first defined by Thomas McManus (1990) as the "information generated by telephone usage and transactions related to telephone service" (p. 41). 17. A recent exemple is Ameritech's new service, Privacy Manager, a service that diverts calls that do not carry

caller-identification information. Yet, as a Consumer Utilities Board representative noted, "It's almost like the protection racket. The same company that comes up with more and more ways ... [to] invade your privacy now comes up with protection against these invasions" (quoted in Van, 1998, sec. 3, p. 1).

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CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE Dyson, E., Gilder, G., Keyworth, G. & Toffler, A. (1996). Cyberspace and the American dream: A Magna Carta for the knowledge age. Information society, 12, 295-308. Economist (July 24, 1999a). The new economy: Work in progress, pp. 21-24. Economist (June 26, 1999b). When companies connect, pp. 19-20. Ekos (1998). The electronic market place: the information highway and Canadian communications household study [Online]. Available: http://www.ekos.ca/ecom.htm Evans, M. (Sept. 28, 1999a). BCE Emergis sells TotalNet to PsiNet. The Globe & Mail. Evans, M. (Oct. 1, 1999b). Bell poised to take control of Sympatico. The Globe & Mail. Federal Communications Commission. (1999). Amicus Curiae brief of the Federal Communications Commission in AT&T et. al. v. City of Portland and Multnomah County. In the United States Court of Appeals, Ninth District [Online]. Available: http://natoa.org Flaherty, (1998). In P. Agre & M. Rotenberg (Eds.). Technology and privacy: The new landscape (pp. 1-29). Cambridge, MA: MIT. Gandy, 0. (1996). Legitimate business interest: No end in sight? An inquiry into the status of privacy in cyberspace. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 77-137. Garcia, D. L. (1997). Networked commerce: Public policy issues in a deregulated communication environment. Information society, 73(1), 17-32. Garnham, N. (1990). Capitalism and communication. London: Sage. Gates, B. (1995). The road ahead. New York: Viking. Gaz, D. (1995, September 17). The local loop. Communications Week International, p. 20. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University. Gordon, R. J. (1999). U.S. economic growth since 1870: One big wave? In American Economic Review, 89(2), 123-128. Grieve, W., Vice-President Regulatory Affairs, BCTel/Telus. (June, 7, 1999). Correspondence witih Peter E. Vivian, Executive Director Telecommunications, Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission regarding the Canadian Association of Internet Providers-Part VII Application relating to Access to Higher Speed Internet Services [Online]. Available: http://www.crtc.gc.ca/ telecoms/ Jorgenson, D. W. & Stiroh, K. J. (1999). Information technology and growth. In American Economic Review, 89(2), 109-115. Hamilton, T. (April 3, 1999). Welcome to the new Bell. The Globe & Mail, p. B1. Hayek, F. (1945). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35(4), 519-530. Herman, E. & McChesney, R. W. (1997). The Global Media. London, UK: Cassell. Hickey, N. (1997, Dec. 12). The Microsoft millennium. Guardian, 2-7. Holson, L. M. & Schiesel, S. (October 4, 1999). Duelling bids emerge for Srpint. The New York Times, p. A1. Industry Canada (1999). Information and communication technologies-Statistical review (1990-1997). Ottawa: Indsutry Canada. 54

International Telecommunications Union (1998). General trends in telecommunication reform, 1998 - World (Vol. 1). Geneva: International Telecommunication Union. International Telecommunications Union (1998). Challenges to the network. Geneva: International Telecommunication Union. Johnson, & Buchanan, Solicitors. (1995). Correspondence to A. J. Darling, Secretary-General, CRTC, re. Internet Service Providers vs. Bell Canada: Application for interim and final relief [Online]. Available: http://www.angustel.ca Kedzie, C. (1997). The third waves. In B. Kahin & C. Nesson (Eds.), Borders in cyberspace (pp. 106-128). Cambridge, MA: MIT. Kehoe, L. (1995, August 9). Microsoft undercuts rivals with new online service. Financial Times, p. 14. Kelly, T. (1997). New rules for the new economy. Hereof [Online], September, 1-12. Available: http: www.wired.com.wired/ 5.09/newrules_pr.html KPMG. (1996a). Public policy issues arising from telecommunications and audiovisual services - main report. Brussels: European Commission. Krugman, P. (1998). Entertainment values: Will capitalism go Hollywood? [Online]. Available: http://www.edu/krugman/ www/values.htm Lash, S. & Urry, J. (1994). Economies of signs and space. London: Sage. Lyon, D. (1998). The world wide web of surveillance. Information, Communication & Society, 7(1), 91-105. Mansell, R. (1999). New media competion and access: the scarcity-abundance dialectic. New Media & Society, 1(2), 155-182. Mansell, R. (1993). The new telecommunications. London: Sage. McManus, T. (1990). Telephone transaction-generated information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Centre for Information Policy Research. McMurchie, L. L. (1999, January 15). Email opens Pandora's box of vulnerabilities. Computing Canada, p. 14. Melody, W.J^987). Information: An emerging dimension of institutional analysis. Journal of Economic Issues, 21(3), 1313-1339. Mifflin, L. (1999, September 7). Viacom to buy CBS, forming 2nd largest media company. The New York Times, p. A1. Mosco, V. (1999). New York.Com: A political economy of the "informational" city. Journal of Media Economics, 12(2), 103-122. Mosco, V. (1988). Introduction. In J. Wasko & V. Mosco (Eds.), The political economy of information. New Jersey: Ablex. Mulgan, G. J. (1991). Communication and control: Networks and the new economics of communication (pp. 1-32). New York: Guilford. Neice, D. C. (1998). ICTs and dematerialization: Some implications for status differentiation in advance market societies. Spru Electronic Working Paper Series, No. 20 [Online]. Available: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/ Newman, N. (1997). From Microsoft word to Microsoft world [Online]. Available: http://netaction.org/msoft/world/ msWord2World.htm Norris, P. (1999). Critical citizens: Global support for democratic governance. New York: Oxford University.

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Office of the Information Commissioner. (1999). First impressions [Online]. Available: http://fox.nstn.ca/~smullloy/ are98_9b.html Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (1999). Communications outlook. Paris: Author. Owen, D. K. & Noveck, B. S. (1999, April 26). FCC gains upper hand over local telephone companies. The National Law Journal, p. B5. Petersen, A & Lipin, S. (1998, July 31). Where's the money? Telecom investors ask. The Globe & Mail, p. B6. Pool, I. (1983). Technologies of freedom. Boston, MA: MIT. Poster, M. (1995). The second media age. London: Polity. Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Raghaven, A., Lipin, S. & Keller, J. (1998, May 11). SBC and Ameritech near $55-billion merger. The Globe & Mail, p. B6. Report: Global online ad spending to hit $15 billion by 2003 [Online]. Available: http://www.internetnews.com/ Riordan, T. (1999, February 2). Patents: A dangerous monopoly? Paying computer users to read Internet ads. The New York Times, p. C2. Samarajiva, R. (1997). Telecom regulation in the information age. In W. Melody (Ed.), Telecommunications reform (pp. 421-44). Denmark: Technical University of Denmark. Samarajiva, R. & Shields, P. (1997). Telecommunications networks as social space. Media, Culture & Society, 19(4), 535-555. Saunders, D. & MacDonald, G. (1998, June 6). Television players prepare for wave of merger mania. The Globe & Mail, p. C12. Selwyn, L. L. & Lazslo, J. W. (1997). The effect of Internet use on the nation's telephone network. Boston, MA: Economics and Technology. Shoesmith, J. (1995). Infobahn study demands change. Computing Canada, 21(2), 1.

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Silverstone, R. & Haddon, L. (1996). Design and the domestication of information and communication technologies. In Mansell, R. & Silverstone, R (Eds.), Communication by design (pp. 44-74). London: Sage. Statistics Canada (1973a; 1980a; 1984a; 1998a; 1999a). Family expenditures. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. Statistics Canada (1999b). Cansim Series D15418, D16273; D16290; D16294. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. Statistics Canada (1997c; 1999c). Household Internet user survey. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services. Stentor Telecom Policy Inc. (1994). Stentor's vision statement. Ottawa: Author. Surtees, L. (1999, May 27). MetroNet investors approve merger. The Globe & Mail, p. B5. Sympatico. (1999). About Sympatico: Terms and conditions, advertising, services [Online]. Available: http:// wwwl .sympatico.ca/ Swisher, K. (1999). For other Internet players, a scramble for shelter. Wall Street Journal, p. B1. Tarjanne, P. (1994). Regulating the international information infrastructure [Online]. Available: http://itu.int/ Van, J. (1998, September 23). Ameritech service to fend off unwanted calls. Chicago Tribune, sec. 3, p. 1. Volkmer, I. (1997). Universalism and Particularism: The problem of cultural sovereignty and global infomration flow. In B. Kahin & C. Nesson (Eds.), Borders in cyberspace (pp. 48-83). Cambridge, MA: MIT. Webster, F. (1995). Theories of the information society. London: Routledge. Wigand, R. T. (1997). Electronic commerce: Definition, theory and context. Information Society, 73(1), 1-16. Winseck, D. (1998a). Reconvergence: A political economy of telecommunications in Canada. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Winseck, D. (1998b). Pursuing the holy grail: Information highways and media reconvergence in Britain and Canada. European Journal of Communication, 13(3), 337-374.

Software Industry, Religious Nationalism, and Social Movements in India: Aspects of Globalization? Ramaswami Harindranath

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cant aspects of contemporary India: the rise and political legitimation of religious fundamentalist nationalism, the growing popularity (if not influence) of social movements, and the much celebrated software industry which is emblematic of the apparent 'forward thinking' entrepreneurship riding on the crest of the Indian government's economic 'reforms.' Linking these apparently disparate spheres, it will be argued, is the orthodoxy of neo-liberalism; in other words, interpreting such developments is well nigh impossible without taking into account theories of global economy and the power relations within contemporary global society engendered, among others by information technology. As Gill (1990) has pointed out, "the prevailing orthodoxy of the ruling forces is based on the doctrine of economic liberalism, with its stress on efficiency and competition and the primacy of the private sector in economic and social life" (p. 292). Such a "transnational historic bloc," he argues, "is rooted in material as well as ideological structures which have global reach, and which are strongly associated with the political programme of transnational capital" (p. 293). Given the conditions of contemporary global capitalism, classical theories of imperialism appear anachronistic, and need to be modified to take into account the transnational nature of the capitalist interests. This is not the place to enter the debates concerning the role of the nation-state, whether or not it can be said to play any meaningful role in a globalized world. To discard the

ost theories of globalization have as their point of reference experiences in the developed world, thereby confining the debates to time-space compression or distanciation for example, or to quarrels about whether the world is becoming homogenous or heterogeneous. Such theoretical efforts are indicative of both the preoccupations of metropolitan academia, and also the lack of a cohesive theoretical thrust from the leftist intellectuals which takes into account developments in contemporary forms of global capitalism. The sometimes contradictory ways in which the diverse effects globalization are experienced or utilized in different parts of the developed world have come to academic and theoretical attention only very recently. Considering that the majority of the established canon of literature on the subject has been written by academics in the West, this is perhaps not surprising. However, as indicated in the assumption that globalization is merely an extension of Western norms of modernity to the developing world, the almost total absence of any attempt to tackle the longstanding relationship between the West and the rest is worth noting, as is the similar neglect of social movements in several parts of the contemporary world which question the values underpinning aspects of globalization, and by doing so challenge the legitimacy of Western dominance (Marfleet, 1998, p. 69). This article is an attempt to begin the process of addressing this theoretical lacuna by bringing into sharper focus three signifi56

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arguments, however, a caveat: the phenomenal growth in IT training and software development in India is treated here as indicative of the changes in Indian economy and society resulting from the economic 'reforms' of the early 1990s. In other words, while the following section explores the dimensions of the information technology revolution in India within the context of globalization, it is to be considered as symptomatic of the transnationalization of capitalism and its consequences such as international division of labour, polarization of local populations into those who are part of global capitalist development and the majority of the population in the South who continue to be marginalized, and the creation of a global elite which calls into question older forms of analysis which split the world into imperial powers and exploited regions.

notion of imperialism completely however, is to miss the point, as well as the opportunity to engage with issues such as for whom is the world shrinking? How does one address the constitution of the global elite, those who champion the cause of and benefit from the "pathways of global capital" (Dirlik, 1994, p. 63), those with the freedom of movement across national borders, a state of affairs which makes Bauman (1998) claim that "rather than homogenising the human condition, the annulment of temporal/spatial distances tends to polarize it" (p. 18). The questions which require to be addressed, as a pre-requisite to revising classical theories of imperialism, include those more relevant to the theme of this conference: mainly, what are the relations of power within information-society, inherent in its relations of production? and what are the social, political and economic repercussions of information capital for those in the margin, especially in the developing South, who are not participants in or members of the information society? Apart from the links between global capitalism and separatist movements, this theoretical venture will seek to contribute to debates concerning cultural imperialism, or what is sometimes known as neo-imperialism, which at the moment are mostly restricted to opposing camps supporting either the notion of ownership and control of media technology, or the idea of the semiotic democracy of audience consumption and interpretation. I have argued elsewhere for a reassessment of the criteria of this debate (Harindranath, forthcoming). This essay will seek to reinforce the argument that a proper investigation of cultural or neo-imperialism must include an estimation of the 'local' sites of economic and political power within the context of global capitalism. In many ways the present essay constitutes preliminary attempts at connecting the (disparate) material and political conditions of the developing world (in this case, India) with the global spread of neo-liberal ideology. The argument therefore should be considered as work in progress, more speculative than final. Before going into the main

Software Development and Disorganic Capitalism In recent years India has become one of the centres for software development, an industry actively encouraged especially by regional governments in the south of the country, with its own 'Silicon Valley' in Bangalore. It has been noted (Heeks, 1996) that the much vaunted Indian software industry is geared more to meet export demands than to contribute to the domestic market: "there has been an overwhelming preoccupation with software exports to the detriment of a viable domestic software industry" (Kohli, quoted in Heeks, p.72). The major growth in the industry took place in the period between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, when, according to government of India economic surveys, the balance of payments deficit remained high despite (or because of?) economic liberalizations. The effects of liberalization on the software industry itself is mixed: the loosening of import restrictions, for instance contributed to the increase in net foreign exchange outflow during the late 1980s, although the net software export earnings grew steadily subsequently, closing the gap in the deficit in software trade (Heeks, pp.78-79). 57

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such transitional gains are at the "expense of balanced social and economic growth, since lopsided investment concentration in exportoriented sectors necessarily involves withholding investment from areas of domestic economy that might enhance mass purchasing power" (p. 45). This can be seen in the phenomenal growth of the economic and social power of a newly emergent middle class in India, while the rural population and the urban working class continue to be neglected. The social consequences of this have been enormous, as will be discussed later in this article. To Sivanandan, capitalism in the periphery is 'disorganic,' resulting in increased poverty and repressive regimes; and capitalism in the silicon age compounds these ills. "They [the peripheries] have not emerged into capitalist production but been flung into it.... Whereas, in the centre, the different aspects of capitalism (economic, cultural, political) have evolved gradually, organically, out of the centre's own history, in the periphery the capitalist mode of production has been grafted on to the existing cultural and political order" (Sivanandan, 1982, pp. 157, 158). The consequence of this unnatural, unorganic 'superimposition' of capitalist culture and economy therefore, is 'disorganic development.' By his reasoning, the economic struggles in the peripheral regions confuse the formal lines of class, manifesting in other forms of mass movement, sometimes religious, at others secular, not necessarily class revolutions. We will have occasion to return later to mass movements in India. On one level, it is difficult to disagree with Sivanandan's attempt to understand the present conditions of global capitalist production, and the relations of exploitation generated by new technologies. His basic premise is that it is a continuation of colonial forms of exploitation, intensified by recent technological revolutions, and by labour migration between peripheral regions themselves. The crucial point to note here is that it is no longer necessary for capital to import labour, since "it can move to the labour pools of the Third World, where labour is captive and plentiful -

Two aspects of the software trade ought to be noted here, both identified by Heeks (chapter 2). Firstly, given that a significant proportion of India's export of software development is carried out 'onsite' for the client, rather than offshore in India (75 and 25 percent respectively), contributing to an international locational division of labour. Providing work onsite has the advantage of not having to deal with expensive hardware, but discourages the building of a technological infrastructure in India. Secondly, a majority of customer services provided by Indian companies is relatively less-skilled programming, rather than systems analysis or design, creating an international skill division of labour, which inhibits the development of higher skills or product innovation in India. The nature of the relationship with the overseas client (often compounded by the fact that several Indian software companies rely exclusively on the contracts of one overseas company) makes Indian software workers susceptible to changing labour laws and political climates. The locational and skill-based division of labour, is expressly maintained by multi- and transnational companies, drawing labour from the peripheries and in the process creating a labour force across developing countries competing for work. As Sivanandan (1982) explains, the labour polarization and migration is an extension of imperialist relations: "multinationals had already moved into these countries [in Far East and South Asia] by the 1970s and some industrialization was already under way. What accelerated that movement, however, was the tilt to cheap labour, as against a developed infrastructure, brought about by revolutionary changes in the production process" (p. 150), changes engendered, among others, by new information technologies. Ironically, the emphasis on export facilitated by the economic 'liberalization' in countries like India, under the auspices and active encouragement of international institutions such as the World Bank, has resulted in the concentration on goods and services driven by low wages, as for instance in the case of India's software industry. As Ahmad (1996) notes, however, 58

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and move from one labour pool to another, extracting maximum surplus value from each, abandoning each when done" (Sivanandan, 1998/9, p. 8). Sivanandan's argument echoes Amin's (1977) thesis that the principal site of capitalist exploitation of labour has moved from the centre to the periphery, and that consequently the site of class struggle has also moved to the periphery, "where capital is at its rawest and most extravagant, the struggle may not be just class but mass" (Sivanandan, 1998/9, p. 8). As an argument for the consideration of the present stage of global capitalism in terms of the structures of unequal or uneven development in the peripheries, Sivanandan's thesis is an impressive demonstration of the continuing validity of the centre-periphery distinction. It provides the foundation for the analysis of the political and social aspects of global society, and with it, the role of new technologies of communication in the legitimation and maintenance of neo-liberal ideology. As Ahmad (1999) notes, however, Sivanandan's thesis - perhaps as a reaction against the emphasis on the 'semiotic' by Stuart Hall and others - is almost exclusively predicated on the economic: "Technological change facilitates, but it does not determine. The economic is surely the base, but the actual balance of force among contending classes and class forces, in any given 'conjuncture,' is determined not merely by the economic but politically and historically" (p. 14). Secondly, in emphasizing the continuing exploitation of the peripheral regions, Sivanandan reproduces earlier conceptions of imperialism. Is it still valid to think of Europe and North America as the capitalist 'centre' benefiting from the exploitation of the other parts of the globe, especially in the context of the "'decentering' of capitalism nationally," the "transnationalization of capital [whose consequence] may be that, for the first time in the history of capitalism, the capitalist mode of production appears as an authentically global abstraction, divorced from its historically specific origins in Europe" (Dirlik, 1994, pp. 49, 51)? 59

Within the confines of the themes of this essay, the essential features of the software industry in India, and the various divisions of labour and global - local relations it highlights, can, on the one hand be considered in the context of global economy, in which multinational companies have the pick of low level skilled programmers across the globe. On the other hand, in order to locate these developments in broader social and political contexts it is necessary to firstly, address the issue of nationalist politics and secondly consider the various oppositional movements which seek to challenge both the national elite as well as global forces.

The Politics of Ethnic Nationalism Globalization theorists who depict neo-liberalism and economic reforms as enabling the free flow of capital - and by implication, the free reign of the market - perceive the resulting economic forces as having the power to erode traditional inter-state boundaries and borders (Ohmae, 1995). Such perceptions of the power of market forces to weaken the nation-state are not confined to those celebrating liberalism, but also includes those who are broadly critical of the ideology of the market, and to whom the powerlessness of the state, especially in the South, is further indication of the inexorable logic of global capitalism and further cause for concern. To the latter, the spread of transnational corporations, in tune with global institutions, has contributed to the restriction of policy options of national governments in the developing world. As Weiss (1997) argues, such "globalists therefore predict the convergence on neoliberalism as an increasing number of states adopt the low-taxing, market-based ideals of the American model" (p. 4). Whereas Weiss wants to present an alternative, more optimistic argument highlighting "the adaptability of states, their differential capacity, and the enhanced state power in the new international environment" (Weiss, 1997, p. 4), I want to present two theses with different explanations for the rise of ethnic nationalism particularly in Asia and Africa. These expla-

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is not in spite of the efforts of local elite, but through their active participation. As Sivanandan argues, the removal of import restrictions and the privatization of public utilities free up the nation-state for the corporations: "now the national cannot call the state its own. Whatever the form of government in the Third World ... the state is in hock to TNCs and their agencies" (1998/9, p. 11). Amin (1997) makes a distinction between on the one hand, the role of the national bourgeoisie in the nation-building exercises during independence movements in the late 1940s and 50s, when the global market was international than global, and on the other, the rise of ethnic politics in contemporary Asia and Africa whose backdrop is the recomposition of national systems of production into global systems, and the "utopianism of administering the system by means of unilateral submission to the socalled regulation of the market" (p. 67). The consequences of such complicity of the national elites with transnational capital have been profound. With regard to the power of the state itself, not unlike Weiss's questioning of the notion of the retreat of the state in the face of growing globalization, Ahmad (1996) claims that the "new national bourgeoisies, like globalized capital itself, want a weak nation-state in relation to capital and a strong one in relation to labour" (p. 47). The indigenous elite, in other words, support economic liberalization and the opening up of the avenues for collaboration with TNCs, but at the same time are happy to utilize domestic conditions of production such as cheap labour and the local infrastructure. To Ahmad this structural dialectic of the penetration of capital and the simultaneous intensification of the nation-state

nations not only demonstrate the relatively Eurocentric nature of many of the globalization theories, as mentioned earlier in this article, but also underline the relationship between political and economic power in the peripheries. To return to Sivanandan for a moment, one of the main aspects of the present conjuncture in the history of global capitalism that he identifies is the "technological revolution [which] has given virtual primacy to information as the chief economic resource, freeing capital from the exigencies of labour and allowing it to roam all of the globe on the back of free market economics and neo-liberal ideology" (1998/9, p. 9). Rather than withering away, however, the state according to Sivanandan acts in concert with corporate capital - "businesses are in the business of government and governments are in the business of businesses and, together, they are killing off whole populations" (1998/9, p. 9). Under the rhetoric lies the claim that the national ruling bourgeoisie is complicit with transnational capital, acting to remove any restrictions to it. It ought to be noted here that this complicity of the national (local) elites is a crucial issue often ignored by the debates concerning cultural imperialism, which consider non-Western ethnic or national cultures as unitary and whole, and consequently the argument is confined to the influence of Western media on representative audience samples, as for example Liebes and Katz (1993). Moreover, to examine imperialism media, cultural, or technological - as restricted to ideologies and ignoring the economic aspects which underlie them is to merely nibble at the surface, and is one of the reasons why the debates about cultural/media imperialism remain split into two seemingly irreconcilable camps. What is important in the context of the present article however, is the co-option of the local ruling elites into the exclusive club of the international bourgeoisie as one of the direct consequences of globalization and the adoption of neo-liberal policies. The weakening of the power of the nation-state therefore

produces contradictory effects in realms of culture and ideology .... Those same saffron yuppies who are opening up the Bombay Stock Exchange and the computer industry of Bangalore for foreign capital organize their own lives around the fetishism of commodities bequeathed to them by advanced capitalism but are also the ones 60

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This community excludes the reserve labour force and the rural population in India (and in most developing countries). The main issue here is the increasing marginalization of the majority of the Indian population from the emergent middle class economy, as illustrated by the boom in the software sector. Does this indicate the presence of two different economies in India- one 'post-Fordist' driven by new technologies, and the other pre-capital and rural? And do these different economic systems engender differences in life-styles and value systems? Given this context, it is useful to ask, with Amin (1997) "why, in circumstances where capital is becoming increasingly internationalized, are the peoples of the world not responding to this by internationalizing themselves, that is, by affirming their class allegiance across national boundaries?" (p. 53). Amin attempts to analyze this development "from the standpoint of the movement of capital accumulation, which governs all contemporary systems, both local and global" (Amin, 1997, p. 53), and his emphasis is different from that of Ahmad's. Amin's thesis regarding the differences between industrialization of the centre and the periphery is analogous to Sivanandan's claim that capitalist forms of production was thrust upon the developing world during colonialism: for Amin, the most significant difference between the two zones is that while in the centre the more organic development of industrialization, accompanied by colonial expansion, emigration, and Fordism enabled "the historic capital/labour compromise, eased by the reduction of the labour reserve" (1997, p. 57), the Third World by contrast had none of these advantages, resulting in the nonabsorption of 'the reserve of the rural and informal economies. "This is because competitiveness today requires production techniques which make such absorption impossible, and because the safety-valve of emigration does not exist" (Amin, 1997, p. 58). Without the ideology of national liberation which succeeded in bringing together multiethnic communities during the anti-colonial struggle, the presence of an active workforce

most vociferous in propagating the discourse of authenticity and cultural differentialism in the name of ... Hinduism in order to forge proto-fascist nationalisms for the working people of their own nations (Ahmad, 1996, p. 47).

The ideologies of ethnic or religious exclusivity are thus seen to be acting in accordance with the economic interests of global capital, while simultaneously proclaiming nationality on the basis of cultural difference. The 'saffron yuppie' is evidently happy to live with the apparent contradiction between reinventing the past to recreate religious fundamentalist ideology on the one hand, and on the other a celebration of scientific and technological advances, as indicated by the euphoria caused by India's recent nuclear tests, as well as by the reiflcation of new technology. Both the nation and the state are thus necessary for capital - the former to 'wean away' the workers from progressive, anti-imperial forms of nationalism, and from forms of collective action, and the latter to ensure the organization of labour regimes, legal systems, and so on. The arrival of new technologies in India, along with the burgeoning of the software industry and those aspiring to become part of the vast skilled and semi-skilled labour force for the industry, are therefore confined to the urban elite. While economic 'reforms' and liberalization have demonstrably contributed to the growth of indigenous companies and foreign collaborations, the most significant outcome has been the rise of a new entrepreneurial middle class (as opposed to the old one comprising mainly salaried government employees) who have become part of a jet-setting international bourgeoisie - a transnational class sharing similar economic, information and cultural capital. These are the new compradors, reaping the benefits of organizing the local labour force in collaboration with TNCs. These are the members of the 'network society' or the information society, having both the economic means as well as the technology to be members of a transnational community. 61

CITIZENSHIP AND PARTICIPATION IN THE INFORMATION AGE

movements of exploited sections in the same way that the "working class movement" has been a movement of the exploited" (p. 305). To Omvedt, these social movements 'rethink Marxism,' challenging state power, and incorporating elements of both social and economic struggle. Their contributions are therefore twofold: they simultaneously confront the various dimensions of the state's complicity with transnational capital while championing the cause of local struggles. As I have argued elsewhere, the academic significance of such movements has to be acknowledged in the way they challenge existing theories (especially 'postcolonial theory') which emphasise the discursive and the semiotic over the social and the historical (Harindranath, 2000). In the context of the capital - labour relations central to globalization, in which, as argued earlier, the labour in the peripheral countries compete for employment, labour's traditional weapon of strikes appears to be weakened. This is where, according to Omvedt, single issue movements like the ones she describes provide the opportunity to challenge and in some cases, even undermine the hold of transnational companies in countries like India. Another supporter of new social movements, Sklair, echoes these sentiments: "where the TNCs have been disrupted to the extent that their hegemony has been weakened and even where, in some cases, they have been forced to change their ways and compensate those who have grievances against them, it has usually been due to local campaigns of disruption and counterinformation against TNC malpractices that have attracted worldwide publicity" (p. 299). The balance of contending forces - the dominant classes, civil society, the military bureaucracy - that has contributed to the formation of India as a bourgeois republic sets it apart from even the neighbouring Pakistan, as Ahmad (1995) argues in his critique of Alavi's (1972) conception of postcolonial state formation. The unique combination of bourgeois nationalists and peasant workers which made up the independence movements in

and an enormous labour reserve contributes to the emergence of centrifugal forces in the form of ethnic or religious fundamentalism. The national unity of the states in the peripheries is thus called into question: "In India, for example, the compradorization of the bourgeoisie ... has placed the unity of the state at risk. It has reinforced regional irredentisms, manipulated by cliques whose aim is to control local politics, and thrown into question the pan-Indian alliance of the ruling classes" (Amin, 1997, p. 70). As Ahmad (1996) argues, in India "political promiscuity has now become acceptable .... These alliances cannot give political stability since they are purely opportunistic and not based on any mutuality in ideology," as demonstrated by the bizarre alliances between political parties of different hues in the elections being held in India now.

New Social Movements Ethnonationalisms are not the only forms of collective movements in India. Along with the organized workers' movements and labour unions are more semi-organized movements and spontaneous uprisings, mostly based on one issue, from caste to the building of dams. For Amin, the alternative to capitalist globalization is the recomposition of socialist perspectives globally, not the statist form of Marxist-Leninism, but the challenge of 'new socialism' which would be internationalist, and would "contribute actively to the recomposition of regional groupings capable of opposing the internationalism of peoples to that of capital" (Amin, 1997 p. 76). The oppositional movements in active in India are, as Omvedt (1993) argues, more social with economic connotations in their demands rather than primarily economic, since unlike working class movements, the emphasis is not on wage issues, or directly against the owners of property. Following an exhaustive account of the history and development (since 1972) of anti-caste, women's, peasants,' and environmental movements, she claims that "conventional ways of looking at the movements in 'class' terms have to be considerably rethought, and that they all are essentially 62

SOFTWARE INDUSTRY, RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

riphery. India's software industry, as symbolic of economic liberalization, has contributed to the further marginalization of the traditional working class and the rural population, as labour has become globally competitive, with skills determined by new technologies of production. Socially and economically, the new 'information class' in India is closer to the international bourgeoisie than to the majority of the local population. One of the consequences of this has been the undermining of any credible progressive national identity, which in turn has facilitated the development of ethnic/religious forms of nationalism on the one hand, and 'single issue' social movements which challenge the legitimacy of the bourgeois state on the other. In terms of theory development too, such consequences of contemporary forms of global capitalism are extremely significant, calling for a revised stance from the critical left which takes on board the horizontal divisions in global society. Older notions of cultural imperialism for instance, which merely reproduced the centre-periphery paradigm of earlier critical theory, need to be reconstituted, not so much as challenging the cultural imperialism thesis itself as including within its ambit such themes as 'flexible production' and the international division of labour, the rise of fundamentalist politics, grassroots resistance movements which are not merely resistant in terms of 'reading,' and so on. What is urgently required is an inclusive critical theory which is alive to the complex and truly global dimensions of transnational capitalism.

India under bourgeois hegemony was subsequently reflected in the postcolonial state, unlike in Pakistan, where "parliamentary democracy was never secure, communism never legalized, commitment to independent development never made, precisely because the state that emerged out of Muslim separatism had neither a developed national bourgeoisie nor an organized working class" (Ahmad, 1995, p. 19). India's new social movements need to be theorized against this background, as having evolved into social movements from, or in addition to organized unions. Their genesis, historical development, and political expediency need to be balanced with their potential for facilitating genuine change. Some single-issue movements have now begun challenging the political power of the dominant classes by contesting in parliamentary and regional elections, as in the case of the Dalit movement forming a party, the BSP. In other instances, as for example the farmers' recent burning of imported foodstuffs, there have been 'grassroots' direct action against government policies. However, even in such instances these social movements and spontaneous uprisings "do not, like those of the industrial working class, take on capitalism head on" (Sivanandan, 1998/9, p. 16). For both ethnic nationalism and the new social movements what is crucial is the presence of an enormous labour reserve which remains excluded from the main working force. As discussed earlier, there are historic reasons for the non-absorption of the rural reserve into capitalist production in the pe-

References Ahmad, A. (1995). Postcolonialism: what's in a name? In R. de la Campa, E.A. Kaplan, and M. Sprinker (Eds.), Lafe Imperial Culture. London: Verso. Ahmad, A. (1996). Globalization and the nation-state. Seminar,

Alavi, H. (1972). The state in postcolonial societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh. New Left Review, 74. Amin, S. (1977). Imperialism and unequal development. New York: Monthly Review Press. Amin, S. (1997). Capitalism in the age of globalization. London: Zed Books. Bauman, Z. (1998). Globalization: the human consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Ahmad, A. (1999). Out of the dust of idols. Race