Robins, Kevin and Frank Webster (1999) Times of the Technoculture. New York: Routledge.

Introduction: main theses: overview of book
key issue: continuity/discontinuity
R&W open by eliciting sense of Great Transformation, new networked society,
new cyberculture, a whole new era -- ergo seeming discontinuity - dominant
claim of cyberculture

BUT they deny this thesis and stress continuities-- esp c4

DK: dialectic of continuities and discontinuities

they also argue that technology doesn't just solve problems... it offers instruments that can be used in a variety of ways, but also creates problems

one should not have blind faith, trust, or belief in technology to solve problems, must address problems yourself, devise solutions; they affirm humans over technology

technology: social instruments deployed in social relations; used for domination, control, exploitation as well as benefits;

But R&W have no notion of retransformation and restructuring of technologies, of democratizing and empowering practices; rather their focus is primarily on critique of current information/communication technology and deflation of extravagent claims for their goodness....

Compare Feenberg whose writings are on our website

R&W stress connections between new technologies and economic base, military origins, and political guidance; good contextualization of origins and development of new technologies

but they fail to grasp relative autonomy of technology -- they tend to be determinists, primarily economic determinists [though they would probably deny this....]

economic determinism: primary of economy, capitalist relations of production
technological determinism: primacy of technology in shaping new economy and culture
dk: dialectic of economy and technology....

[R&W see determinism as red herring, criticizing Feenberg for attacking technological determinism -- but both economic and technological determinism are real problems:

RW border on economic determinism
McLuhan, Kevin Kelly and others border on technological determinism
Castells is good balance

key distinction for R&W:
real experience in space and time/VR and cyberspace
territoriality/ deterritorialization
R&W valorize the former
dk: overcome dichotomies!!

R&W open with good historical contextualization of the changing technoscape
microchip/silicon as start of information/computer revolution; Silicon Valley
microelectronics and computer revolution -- chips, transistors, boards, and smart machines

ICT=information and communication revolution-email, www, Moos and Muds, cybercommunities, etc

In short, the Internet revolution Network society [Castells] and information superhighway [Gates: broadband, multimedia, the Highway....]

1990s: VR

R&W ignore postHumanism and biotech revolution -- concern of Bill Joy, last issue of Wired that I'll send to FYI and list-serve....

good historical contextualizing in political-economic context:
80s: concern about jobs; deindustrialization, Rustbelt, downsizing, postFordism, and more positively the leisure society
90s: globalization; worries about US falling behind, competitiveness, and also concern with information have and have nots -- still an issue; e.g. digital divide

today, R&W assert, the new information agenda is entirety pragmatic: adjustment, adaptation to global economy, connecting, now survival, etc

Clinton and Blair: education [echoed by Bush]
Blair: make Britain the knowledge capital of Euopre
both pro-globalization and new technologies
New Realism
Engel: New Barbarians....

R&W call for a broadening and accumulation of agendas and perspectives and provide sharp critiques of limited perspectives
i.e. they provide historical, economic, political, social and cultural critical perspectives on new information technology and technoculture
they especially criticize widespread idealism: technological revolution; new cyberculture and VR; virtual communities; "electronic agora," New Athens;

new identities-- cyberpunk
new economy: Gates and Kelly

R&W broad scope: history, social theory, and political-cultural critique and overcome disciplinary fragmentation
connections: technological, economic, political, cultural, military
educational and social dimensions of new technologies

p. 3 goal is to describe the process as one of broadening and accumulation of agenda and perspectives... "we have sought to bring together as many of these agendas as we could, and we mobilize a range of discourses--economic, political and cultural; they provide a political economy of information society and cultural politics of the virtual society

bridge the gap between political economy and cybercultural discourses
develop critical discourse in spirit of critical interrogation....

they make a good argument that much discussion of new technologies focuses either on narrow technical issues such as the history of technology, a narrow discussion of technical effects, and the narrative is usually one of progress;
Or, there is a narrow economic focus on how new technologies is creating a new economy with new possibilities for profit, power, and success.

R&W: Instead it is important to theorize new technologies in broadest possible social and political terms, to see how they are connected in social relations, with politics and cultural, and everyday life.

DK: This is what R&W fail to do: they theorize technology in an overly narrow optic of how the logic and system of how corporate capital use, control, shape, and administer technology for extending capital hegemony. An epic of capitalist domination, they downplay resistance, struggle, contradiction, ambiguity, and possibility

Compare Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cybermarx. Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism; Univ of Illinois Press, 2000

Also critical pedagogy: from critique and deconstruction to hope and possibility

DK: democratization and reconstruction

R&W tend toward economic reductionism and technophobia
Luddism and pessimism are their master tropes

R&W seem to reject "the prevailing tendency" to judge new technology according to "the simple and binary measure of 'optimism' versus 'pessimism," and attack Bill Gates and other defenders of cyberculture for their optimism and claim that their own seeming "pessimism" is social analysis and critique but at times they valorize pessimism and are clearly pessimistic and negative

dk: beyond optimism and pessimism: combine critique and hope; focus on what can we do with new technologies? projects, uses, reconstruction

R&W miss the contradictions
realism/idealism
commerce/democracy
emancipation/domination

no activism....good at indicating where the information society and revolution actually came from: "control revolution"
continuities with past [see c4]

Luddism and pessimism
Luddism: p. 7 fighting against enclosure movements; rational resistance; global network society in turn exhibits "forward march of the enclosure movement"

R&W use categories from earlier industrial revolution to characterize current developments; continuity adequate optic?

themes in various chapters: control revolution; administration and management; global panopticon; surveillance scientific management and taylorism
social technology of control and surveillance
propaganda
military control and development of technology
development of command and control systems throughout society
epic of domination
downplay resistance and activism...

Republic of technology; Postman's technopolis replayed from the Left and with critical social theory!

triumph of information technology
total triumph of capital and technology, technocapitalism, although they do not use the term...
irrationality of capitalist and technological rationality
model of technology and society derived from logic of capital; antiscience, technology and industry as tools of capital and military
neoFrankfurt School
new enclosure movement

231 subjugate more and more of life to a logic of rationality and control
intensive/extensive
rather than from a closed to a more open society

Part I Visions

C1 on Humphrey Jeffreys and Pandamonium; the British documentary filmmaker as critic of technology; combining modernist surrealist technique with documentary description; art and film
chance, coincidence, and accidental juxtaposition produces illuminations
similar method to Walter Benjamin's montage, juxtaposing of particulars for illumination, wrenching them out of their context for new meanings

Pandamonium project: study impact of industrial revolution, explosion of science, technology, and industry on everyday life, culture, consciousness of individuals and groups; also participated in Mass Observation, a project that would observe masses in everyday life, role of science, technology, and media in everyday life in contemporary British society
combining subjective description with objective observation; a more positivist colleague Harrison stressed the latter while Jennings tried to combine the two...

1936-7 after abdication crisis... defamiliarisation, breaking the force of habit and rekindling the social imagination...cultivation of imagination crucial....does new technologies cultivate or inhibit imagination?
pamphlet on Mass Observation prefigures the analysis of Pandaemonium in outlining the historical transformation of art and science as forms of cognition under the impact of industrial capitalism: science and technology have prfound cultural implications: "the steam railway, the spinning jenny, electric power, photography, have had so great an impact on mental and physical behaviour that we are barely conscious of it."

McLuhan will take up this program brilliantly...anticipated McLuhan and cultural studies: did Jennings influence McLuhan's and British cultural studies?

social theory and technology have also had unfortunate social and cultural consequences resulting in a "widespread fatalism among the masses about present and possible future effects of science" and in "the sway of fatalism in the midst of science."

scientific study of human social behavior will help eradicate supersitution and fatalism: science as emancipation and science as domination, dialectical account anticipated both McLuhan's analysis of impact of media and technology and British cultural studies that studies text and audience, artifact and activity, culture and everyday life in ordinary settings.

merges science and technology with culture, showing the effects on imagination, on cultural forms, displacing of poetry, triumph of rationality and abstraction; anticipates both McLuhan and culture and society tradition; replay of walter benjamin,...

Ernst Bloch: discovery of the future in the past... hope and possibility Brecht defamiliarization

curiously, Jennings cultivation of imagination, nurturing of hope and possibility, is exactly what is lacking in R&W's account

c2 on Luddism

Luddism has generally taken on negative significance that everyone opposes; British labor movement periodically mobilizes anti-Luddite discourses; defenders of technology villify critics as "Luddites"

define: Luddites and Luddism as historical movement-- 1811-16

R&W: Luddites, however, were not against technology per se but capitalist uses of technology and social forms and relations through which technology was imposed; in fact, labor has always opposed technology that takes away its jobs...

Historical Luddism: an alternative political economy and morality to capitalism -- different values and goals....
Luddites against Fetishism of Progress
uncontrolled Change
unfettered development
unlimited Progress

latter valorized more rational evolutionary development, directed use of science, technology and industry; planned change [difference from Tony Blair who they mock?]

With proponents of capitalism and new technologies, capitalist social relations and technology are naturalized, seen as force of nature, progress as natural outgrowth of science and technology, expressing rational imperatives

fetishism: abstraction: celebrates abstract characteristics
hypothesizing: dead traits taken as living
reification: human qualities reduced to things; e.g. labor power
reversal of subject and predicate: machines, technology, labor process has the power, is the subject, worker, living labor, is the object....
this is a process of alienation, equated with progress

Luddites opposed this political economy, had better values... actually Marx opposed it with more rational socialist movement that would use science and technology as forces of emancipation and, yes, progress!
they are valorizing luddites over Marx!
for a critical theory of technology and society, yes!

Luddism? no.... too much baggage.... wrong response....

The Capitalist Mobilization of Society
technological efficiency is mechanism of control and domination

Gordon: quantitative efficiency: augmenting use value, reducing labor time
qualitative efficiency: increases capitalist control and power; e.g. assembly line and taylorism
Jean-Paul Gaudemar, La mobilization generale... helps theorize the major qualitative transformations in the trajectory of capital

Absolute mobilization in era of absolute S V: enclosure acts; factories; labor discipline; conscription relative mobilization in era of relative S V: discipline in factor, taylorism and fordism; Keynesianism

55 but there is always labor's countermobilization, resistance
early Luddism resistance to capitalist mobilization -- breaking machines and withdrawing labor...
Later 19th and early 20 century; sabatoge and direct action; why don't they stress strikes more?

current form of Luddism: hackers' attacks
FTAA hacker attacks

labor's mobilization, self-valorization, Negri, "to withdraw from exchange value... and to reappropriate the world of use values."
exactly the model for technology!!

Luddism Now

Wallerstein... world capitalist system is not evidence of human progress but breakdown in the historic barriers against this particular version of an exploitative system

Luddites attacked to check brutal capitalist exploitation, always the heros for R&W, what of anarchist, socialist and labor movement?

today "globalization" is a further escalation in the war, in "imposing the right priorities on a recalictrant world" (Chomsky)

William Robinson: global mobilization as a "world war" of the global rich and powerful minority against the global poor.... Humanity is entering a period that could well rival the colonial depredations of past centuries... barriers to unrestrained exploitation are being assaulated on a historically unprecedented scale... demonize globalization... a capitalist plot... yet there is resistance led by Luddite forces!

p. 60 "In many cases, the new technologies of the Internet has itself become the means to distribute dissent... campaign against MAI- Multilaterial agreement on Investment a highly problematical treaty to facilitate transnational investment by ensuring that governments treat all foreign and domestic firms similarly-=-has been strongly resisted by so-called 'network guerrillas' using the World wide web. Example are legion now. And they are examples of a new readiness to take on global businesses and national governments alike.

These are all examples of a new spirit of Luddism-- and one for which, judging from media responses, there is a broad sympathy and even affection. its really social movements not a spirit of luddism!

p. 60 "In many cases, the technology of the Internet has itself become the means to distribute dissent. e.g. anti Multilateral Agreement on Investment movement; recent assault on FTAA sites; today: anti- wto, World Bank, ImF and anti-globalization movements are all using technologies to advance their goals

R&W are too anti-globalization, too one-dimensionally anti-tech, and do not have dialectical position...

Evolution in anti-globalization movement:
1) first, just anti-globalization;
2) then, against corporate globalization and certain policies and institutions and for another globalization, globalization from below.

One might note that there aredifferent forms of neo-Luddite politics...
Unabomber... Kirk Sale's Rebels aginst the Future environmental sustainablity... opponents of technophilic propaganda... environmentally sensitive way of life requires people to subordinate themselves to the natural order... long war of the technosphere against the biosphere... for Luddites today the problem is industrialism and the technosphere as such... forms of anti-modernity..

highly conservative political project, defending organic community from industrial modernity... connect with traditional ways of life...but guys, this is luddism!

R&W: real luddites oppose social relations of capitalism that distort technology...

c3 The Hollowing of Progress

widespread agreement that we are now in a post-something society
shift from emphasis on information technology--it--to information-communication technology--ict

Gore: information superhighway
Gates: the Highway

64ff information and communication technology;

70s and 80s: wild, speculative futurism, usually utopian, against more measured and critical discourses... not central issue, at least in Europe

p. 66 clear that R&W are too Britcentric...resurgence of technological utopianism in the 1990s: technoboosters consider interactivity, multimedia and global connectivity to be the "most powerful juggernaut in the history of technology." technological utopianism: coincides with a certain strand of postmodern thinking that considers identities in terms of choices and options;
1) technological sublime;
2) fusion of biology and machines, cyborgs, posthumanism
3) chaos and complexity theory, self-organization, biology and nature read into the economy; naturalizes capitalism; Kevin Kelly pro-information superhighway discourses rule; need for critical discourse assumptions of technoboosterism:
1) technology is benign
2) spectacle -- appearing from marvelous places, Silicon Valley, or Microsoft,, and producing miracles
3) neutral -- tool to be used
4) inevitability -- must be adopted
5) futurism... dismissing all critics as nostalgia and romanticism while

offering New Golden Age of prosperity that in a sense brings back dreams of better age...., future in the past....return to McLuhanism, a neoMcLuhan Renaissance: technological determinism and technology as world out of control... go along with the ride

R&W fail to grasp useful insights of McLuhan
their project: "to present an alternative, more socially and historically sensitive, approach to informational and technological change...

75 Transformative Power of information

new epoch, new type of society

75-77 critique of Robert Reich on globalization who priviledges information, symbolic analyzsts, highly educated and flexible; knowledged based corporations, horizontal, to meet challenges of "transformation of corporations into networks" (Castells)

Peter Drucker, Postcapitalist social theory; land, labor and capital are clipsed by "knowledge experts," whose knowledge is key to success; knowledge as central resource of the system

Toffler, Powershift, highbrow firm as the corporation of the future... owes success to intelligence it invests in goods and service... cognitariat dominate as we shift toward the knowledge society novel contribution of knowledge/information, Britain, Tom Stonier, Wealth of information, 1983

new centrality of information: Fred Block and Larry Hirschorn... workers provided cybernetic feedback, information provides increase in production and productivity; spiraling cycles

New Labor, Tony Blair, emphasis on education...

78 Lash and urry, reflexive accumulation, intensified design

R&W critique:

1) Reich et al stress role of new occupation, knowledge workers, rather than technology as such thus undercutting technological determinism; though Castells does both....

DK: much of the hype of information superhighway makes it a function of technology alone, fails to see restructuring of capitalism and how it embodies contradictions of capitalism and set of inherent ambiguities

2) question novelty, size and significance of information "Renvironment" for contemporary capitalism: while there is increased emphasis on information it is the market that is the primary force, symbolic analysts are still the tools of capital, they are not a new ruling elite may be true but there is a new class of entrepreneur, there is a revenge of the geeks and a restructuring of capitalism, new role for knowledge workers, information technology and geeks, and design specialists; something like a new class

3) Giddens helps question novelty and rupture: intensified reflexivity in late modernity, not a novel era

4) likewise, Daniel Bell stresses primacy of service industry, not information workers

Bell argues for growing importance of codified knowledge in economy and politics; true that specialized and professional knowledge is more important; true that today information technology is playing greater role; that symbolic analysts are assuming more power imprecision of various concepts of knowledge and information: need more precise analysis...

84 still doesn't lead to new order...there is no question we are in a new global economy with information and communication technology playing a dynamic role, a very dynamic sector, although it is still part of capitalism |
how to characterize the new economy, role of new technologies, whether it is positive or negative, costs and benefits, contradictions

critique of technoutopianism, that knowledge economy, information

superhighway, takes us beyond capitalism; has not represented or resulted in "the metamorphosis of capitalism itself."

rest of book will focus on growth of advanced capitalism

DK: paraellel to Frankfurt School in the 1930s
state and monopoly capitalism
culture industries
S&T as domination
rise of consumer society
new stages: technocapitalism
new culture industries: information and entertainment industries merging...nbc and Microsoft; Time Warner, Abc and Disney... now Time Warner and aol...
new roles for science and technology
new forms of business and consumption: e-biz and e-buying...
shifts to new cultural spaces, forms etc
new public sphere

Part 2: Genealogies of information

C4 History of Information Revolution
first industrial revolution -- extension of physical power
second industrial revolution-- mental power...

R&W question that technology is the major driving force of change, motor of contemporary history; that it is break or rupture with past; that it is necessarily progressive
stress continuities, question extent of break and rupture, whether we are in a technological revolution, and whether this is wholly positive
need for longer historical perspective
critique and distance

p. 92 information revolution has two interrelated but distinct functions
mechanism for social management, planning and administration and at the
heart of surveillance and control
knowledge/information and power are always interrelated --Foucault
can have no separation of knowledge/administration and domination [this renounces key idea of Marx's ideal of socialism that there can be administration of things that allow cultivation of realm of freedom outside of the workplace]

Planning and Control: gathering and storing of information and increased powers of control and domination -- the dark side of information revolution

94ff though R&W theorizes shifts in mode of control and domination, and increased technological powers, downplay roles of consumerism, advertising, entertainment, and media culture in producing more compliant subjects --

though they stress management of consumer demand, research, pr, etc as part of Taylorism, administration of people and things.... also do they analyze increasingly flexible modes of organization of the workplace and motivating students?

Hayek: price system and information from markets

Chandler: management: need for centralized control of information and power from invisible hand to visible hand (planning and administration)

Sklar: from "proprietary-competitive capitalism" to "corporate administered capitalism"

Frankfurt School: from competitive market capitalism to state-monopoly capitalism:

Taylorism: key moment in information revolution
workers treated as things, stuff of administration and domination
skill is located in management and workers are deskilled, though workers'
skills are appropriated and put into design of systems, giving machines and apparatus powers formally held by humans....

Sloanism: marketing as science; trade-ins, installment plan, new models, advertising, and management of consumer demand.... ibm: need for information management and later surveillance....

consumer management: need for information on consumers; increased in contemporary era

thesis: information society is extension on global scale of capitalist project of Taylorism/Sloanism, administration of workplace and things, consumer demand management, now on global scale through global culture....

R*W miss the distinction between ibm stage of big computers, modernity, and the era of pc which is more flexible, decentralized, programmable, and multimedia and valent, used for many things..... different stages of information society in which second stage, contemporary multiplicity of cyberculture, is collapsed into the sphere of information, surveillance, and control; this continues to be part of the story, ergo continuity, but not the whole story, ergo discontinuity and need to theorize what's new....

From public sphere to cybernetic capitalism
from Enlightenment and critical Reason (Habermas) to societal rationalization
need for social control in complex societies:
Lippman and Lassman: propaganda as rational
need for information specialists
technology, media and communication, and now information have taken over politics
administered politics in society of administration
again, no resistance, struggle, or contradictions--epic of domination; historical telelogy

c5 The Cybernetic Imaginary of capitalism

19th century: absolute mobilization
20th century: relative mobilization

Fordism: control of labor and leisure; system of mass production and consumption
progressive intrusion into everyday life of capitalist social relations
state intervention in management of society: benevolent economic and social policy; state surveillance and discipline, national security state, increased role of military
attempted annexation of space and time; time parcelled out and regimented
space privatized and controlled; i.e. private auto and television
regime of productivity and discipline

114 admit functionalist analysis; mobilization gives way to countermobilization
struggle between forces
information revolution is "a new and more 'flexible' logic of generalised mobilization"

significant new stage in the strategy of relative mobilisation, one in which technological domination becomes extensively and systematically used in spheres far beyond the workplace
intensification and important ways a recognifuration of Fordism as a way of life... of leisure as well as labor
our boys miss the Post, what is new and different and they miss the positive: empowering, democratizing, equalizing

Mobilization in the information society: integration of work process on the basis of ict networks
minority of 20% symbolic analysts will prosper, rest will suffer; increased surveillance
Bentham's panopticon becomes the generalized model of a society of control and discipline

Against claims that postFordist or information society is decenteralized, there are new forms of centralization: of information, surveillance, steering

120 massive extension and transformation of relative technological mobialization of power and control... of hierarchical and disciplinary machine
technological system is being constituted to ensure the centralized, and furtive, inspection, observation surveillance and documentation of activities

121 Kovel on computerization of surveillance and information

122 Mobilization of Knowledge

commercialization and systematization of knowledge and information
commodification-- they miss the decommodification and the tensions
extension of capitalist labor process and commodification
people are reduced to data
increased power of state and big corporations
[again they miss the dialectic....

pp. 126-7 Wells

In an amazing anticipation of the Internet, Wells imagined a World Brain or World Encyclopaedia that would contain all existing knowledge, projecting: an immense and ever-increasing wealth of knowledge is scattered about the world today, a wealth of knowledge and suggestion that -- systematically ordered and generally disseminated-- would probably... suffice to solve all the mighty difficulties of our age, but that knowledge is still dispersed, unorganised, impotent (Wells 1938: ).