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The Information Society: Flow, Networking, and Automation
Although transportation and communication remain fundamental components of contemporary postindustrialized nation-states, the emergence of an ‘‘information society’’ has clearly challenged modern definitions of production, representation, and now even space itself. The term information society, widely attributed to the social scientist Fritz Machlup, stems from his comprehensive accounting of informational ‘‘wealth’’ in the United States, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962). Machlup’s study was the first to recognize the growth of information services in the economic sphere and to attempt to legitimate such production in terms of measurements such as the gross national product (GNP). Machlup thus set out to measure information production in education, the emerging computer and data industry, and other information-based sectors such as law and insurance. Although Machlup’s work is still widely respected today, his limited ‘‘measured’’ economic approach to information and knowledge production has come under intensified scrutiny. In Frank Webster’s (1995) survey of the information society and its theoretical foundations, for instance, knowledge production is defined by increasingly more pervasive technological innovations such as the economic growth of the information sector, the changing dynamics of work and occupations, the collapse of spatial barriers, and the cultural impact of new technologies.
Speaking to the changing conventions in television programming, the British cultural theorist Raymond Williams perhaps unintentionally offered a defining characteristic of the coming information age. Williams recalled that the most striking aspect of American culture was the overwhelming preponderance of television commercials (or adverts in the British vernacular). Such program interruptions were initially considered by Williams (1974) to be highly fragmented and disjointed products—much like the components prior to a Taylorist assembly.On consideration, though, Williams soon considered such texts to be highly organized units in the wider televisual economy. Focusing on the beginning and end of programs, Williams (1974, 89–96) began to detail the numerous devices used by television programmers to construct a sense of continuity or flow. The object of such a strategy was to maintain audience share. The insertion of a voiceover (on top of a concluding program’s credits) reminding viewers to ‘‘stay tuned for . . .’’ was the most obvious example of such flow techniques. Williams also considered the very continuity of programming from evening to the late hours in the night to be a source of continuity itself (television in the United Kingdom was at that time largely limited to the evening).Today such strategies are even more pervasive: credits whiz by at very high speeds and are miniaturized and pushed to the corner of the screen while previews of upcoming programs continually roll. Advertisements increasingly take on the aesthetics and theme of the programs they are supporting (particularly big events such as movie premieres and sports specials). The networks also remind viewers of the flow of particular evenings with the promotion of themes such as ‘‘Must See TV,’’ ‘‘Saturday Night Thrillogy,’’ ‘‘Monstervision,’’ or the testosterone-laced ‘‘movies for guys who like movies.’’
Benefiting from Williams’s thoughts on television and information flow, Profiling Machines questions the techniques by which individuals are continuously integrated into a larger information economy and technological apparatus. As I discuss at length in chapter 3, a pivotal moment in profiling in the information society is the point at which human tastes, desires, and opinions are actively solicited or accumulated. Since such information must always be diagnosed and cross-referenced with other data (see chapter 4), profiles are also actively constructed through a network of information technologies and databases. Introducing this diagnostic element to Williams’s concept of ‘‘flow,’’ then, Manuel Castells (1996) characterizes this ‘‘networking’’ logic as an incessant process of modification and analysis. In fostering this networked economy, Castells (1996, 32) notes that
What characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and uses of innovation.
However, to argue that such networking is in some manner new or unique would be clearly shortsighted. For as James R. Beniger (1986) notes in his historical study of information technologies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, technological networks began in earnest with the industrial revolution in the mid-eighteenth century. Offering instances of administrative disorganization in economic production, such as poor transportation linkages between the northeastern hub of the United States and the south, Beniger (1986, 219) documents the rise in bureaucratic and administrative control mechanisms (engaging with sociologists such as Max Weber and Anthony Giddens). The innovation of counting machines (punched-card readers) from the likes of Herman Hollerith (soon to be cofounder of IBM) speaks to the rationalization and management of the population in the form of the census. The organization of efficient transportation and communication ‘‘routes’’ such as canals, railways, and telegraph and telephone lines likewise facilitated increased control over the larger sphere of economic production. More to the point, the growth in research techniques, particularly ‘‘feedback technologies’’ (market research, including Gallup and Nielsen polls), also introduced the views of the population into the information ‘‘loop’’ (Beniger 1986, 376–398).
