[Week4_2] Networked societies.

When Castells talks about the 'Information Age', he refers mainly to the networked nature of social forms. One of the most important unique claims he makes is that "the communication between networks and social actors depends increasingly on shared cultural codes". And to think of it, shared cultural codes are derived from communication between networks and social actors. Thus the role of communication becomes more and more important in a information society. Information is not only a form of new 'goods', but the essential bond that holds this kind of society together.

He continues his argument of the networked society in his second piece, that the role of networks emphasize the new economy, and the city becomes even more important as the social unit. Networks are on the rise, but personal isolation and loss of shared meaning occurs as well. The remedy he suggests is a more networked society (as illustrated in his example of Europe), where values are shared among people. Well, if that kind of 'sharing' proves to be economically profitable, it will be solved sooner than expected. However, Castells seems to separate the economy functions and the social process a little too distinctly.

Garnham considers Castells' explanations as a form of dominant ideology of today. Being an ideology does not necessarily mean that it is false, but it implies that it is a kind of interpretation with its specific intentions rather than the naked truth. And in this ideology that puts information-communication technologies as its main engine, it is taken lightly that the networked society is an extension of the previous capitalist society. That's a valid argument, but I can't help but think that Garnham underestimates the role of communication structures - networks - in our daily life and social behavior. ICTs are in some aspects merely reproducing and enlarging existing communication patterns, but in other aspects they build new forms of social communication as well. It is not a either-or quetion, but what elements are introduced and what their specific roles are.

[RN_Week4_1] On Labor

This week's reading deals with the role of 'labor' in the post-industrial age. Bell argues that in the economy the labor issue will remain, but the sociology and culture will behave otherwise (p.102). True, in a 'information' society where one easily forgets the actual labor issues that go on the way it has always been. However, I think that the interest in community as Bell has hopefully put it is not a genuine one but a mere distraction from the existing class conflicts. The 'post' industrial age still has its feet deep in the industrial age.

Krishan Kumar talks about the continued Taylorism. New technology builds on new division of labor, striving for efficiency. In his sense, information is also a part of the produced goods in the capitalistic system. I agree to the point that the Information society is not a stand-alone ideology, but an extension of (industrial) capitalism with all its social practices. Not only extension, but intensification.

Urry argues that what is viewed as the shift from the industrial to the post industrial is in fact the same old manufacturing society but dislocated by globalization and fragmentation. Labor still has its place, but is somehow put into nostalgia. Those arguments lead me to one important question: Why are people made to believe in the novel post-industrial age, while quickly forgetting the same kind of labor pattern that constitutes one's own life and society? Who are the ideologues and what kind of people are benefitting from this? Moreover, why do the ones that do not benefit from it also easily agree with them? Classic hegemony theories could be of some help, but I'll have to think things over.

[Week3_2] On 'Code' (2/2).

The second half of CODE deals with the real-world cyber issues that we encounter, such as copyright, privacy, free speech and sovereignty. Regulations are being implemented in all those issues via code, and the resistance against it should be also made through opening of the code, in Lessig's view. And being a practical person, he has concrete solutions on hand: (creative) commons, P3P and open access.

However, it is not clear on how he adresses the boundaries of the individual nations and the Internet as an international entity. Law and policies are enforced by each nation, but the net code is regulated in an international standarization process (or, is it really international, with ICANN being a private organization in California?). Also, the root domain name servers are located mostly in the US. And ECHELON, the urban legend that proved to be real, deals with intercepting communication from all over the world. I don't mean to say that the US sets to conquer the world , but that code-counteractions to resist the regulations need to divided into more dimensions. For example smaller online communities, bigger services, nationstate, and international. Only then will the solutions actually work on all levels of the cyberspace life.

[Week3_1] On 'Code' (1/2).

Lessig is coherent with previous week's reading on Webster, in that he asserts that the cyberspace (which is easily regarded as the literal symbol of the information age) is not a completely new and optimistic thing. Here he focuses on the fact that the cyberspace can be regulated just as much as, and even far more than the previous real world. technology(architecture), markets, laws and norms in combination limit and guide people's behaviour and the system itself. At the same time, markets, laws and norms decide the architecture, in the form of 'codes'. And it requires a lot of active actions to deepen the liberal aspects of the Net, and he proposes it can be done by opening the "Code".

I couldn't agree more with Lessig's point that the cyberspace is the result of regulation, weighted among the players and institutions of the various sectors (I wonder what views Lessig holds on the mess that is ICANN ). And I also admire his continuous efforts on Creative Commons, to achieve what he has manifested. However, his concepts of a liberal cyberspace only works when there is already an established liberal social system or norm. For example, one can't expect to have freedom of expression on the Internet, in a society where freedom of expression is not granted in the offline world... I mean, look at the Internet in mainland China. Ideally, the liberal nature of the cyberspace will drip down to make the real world liberal as well, but normally it is the other way around. Even the concepts of Creative Commons or Copyleft only work in societies where Copyright laws are firmly established. I wished that Lessig would talk more about how to modify the larger structures of the 'East Coast Code' of the offline world, so as to make permanent progress feasible.

Free Culture (Presentation by Lessig)

If you've liked what you read in Lessig's book (Code)... Here's what he tries to build on the grounds that he set out (Free Culture).

http://lessig.org/freeculture/free.html (presented in the classic 'Lessig style presentation')

[Week2_2] Doing what they've always been doing

The main premise of Webster and Robin is that the information society is nothing new, and rather a extension of the industrial capitalism society. I completely agree with this view. Most of the early optimistic, even utopian views on the democratic and subversive potentials of the Internet were raised before everybody was online, when the cyberspace was more or less a ghetto of liberal intellectual geeks, so to say. They simply did what they had been doing in the age of analog libraries, only to a greater extent: developing a collaborative and open network of information (the reference list and footnotes of academic journal articles were the primitive forms of 'hypertext'). First, the non-geek users came in and thought in high hopes that this atmosphere was due to the technological /media features of the net. But then the merchants came in and did what they had been doing: painting ads all over the place, screaming to gain more money and so on. Governments came in and tried to eavesdrop everything and bring regulation (in worse cases, censorship) as they always did elsewhere. Hate speech, non-sensical trolls in the forums, winner-takes-all competitions and every other communicative patterns that were present in the real world appeared in the cyberspace. Amplified, because the cyberspace is a world of pure interaction, thus making 'communication' more salient. The so-called problems of the information society are nothing more than the problems of modern (I hate the misleading term 'post-modern') brakeless capitalism.

[Week2_2] information fetish

Roszak's mention of 'Data glut' reminds me of Umberto Eco's famous anecdote quite some years ago: "...Years ago, when I needed to write a paper on Israel, I went to the library and pulled out about a dozen of references from the selves. I read them carefully, developing thoughts and wishing to have more material. now that everything is digitalized, my wishes came true. I typed in the keyword in the search engine. it gave me 11000 search results. I gave up writing that paper." Indeed, information fetish can be misleading from the true goals of why they were created in the first place. Reflecting on this, it should be noted that the information technologies are not evolving at the speed of the evolution of the circuit integrating density (such as the ever-exploited phrase 'Moore's Law'), but at the speed of what the humans and their society can adjust themselves to. The development of the 'information society' itself is controlled by the patterns of the present society.

[Week2_2] Information has always been...

Reading notes on Langdon Winner's piece. Though I agree with Winner's conclusion that a democratic populace should explore new identities and the horizon of a good society in the cyberspace, I can't quite grasp why this paper was classified on the 'con' side. Sure, he says that what's important is not technology itself, but the utilization of it as social means. But then again, the boost of thechnologies that were centered on information and communication technologies have been about building social networks, from the beginning on. information never was generated by itself or by machines. People produce them, endow specific values on some of them, and communicate it to certain people in the way they intend (or do not intend but turn out to be done anyway). He may be a con to the 'post-' but still 'industrial' society, but IMHO he seem to be laying most of his hopes in the information society in its own meaning. The one who is sticking to much to technology perse is maybe Winner himself.

{Week2_1] Viva capitalism?

A couple of hundreds years ago, the native Americans did not live with the concept that "land can be owned". But the settlers did, and then they came to own all the land through their own set of rules. Similar things are happening with 'information'. Some people come up with new ideas on how to possess (that is, buy and sell) them. Others who are not capable of catching up with those rules fall hopelessly behind.

In the three pro-information age readings, the premises are remarkably simple. "We have found a new way to carry on, even expand with our way of brake-less capitalism! Hurray!"(exaggeration inside). On first look it seems that they are advocating a new era that is completely different from the previous industrial age, but a careful reading reveals that they are in fact celebrating the new powerful capitalism and the social system that is built upon it. It is no wonder that Masuda's categorization uses terms such as market, product and intellectual 'industries' frequently.

Leadbeatter argues that information society will provide a solution to the problems of the market and the community at the same time, and Dyson et al. are discussing about how the institutional systems should be modified to adapt the change. Their goal is to overcome the limits of the present 'industrial' capitalistic society by changing their main products, which happen to potentially enable collective, decentralized aspects. I don't means to say that industrial capitalism is neccessarily wrong, but that the fundamental capitalistic social problems such as unquality, political brainlessness and consumerism don't simply disappear by changing the main product from this to that.

[Week1_2] "Fine. Now, where's the other half?"

Judging from the introduction, The Information Society reader is a vast ambitous project to cover the various social aspects of the so-called information society. Indeed, the editors are doing a good job in laying out the pros and cons, changes with existing social structures, and also manage to bring up issues that are specific to the information-oriented society such as surveillance. If the individual chapters are as good as introduced, this book will be an invaluable read.
However, it should be noted that it looks already a little outdated. The problem sets leave out some of the prominent aspects such as flexible social networks (enter Myspace), collective knowledge (enter Wikipedia), social discourse production (enter citizen journalism and blogs) and over-reliance to information (or information addiction, as some call it), among many others. In short, the book focuses on the macro level where the society is read as a whole, but leaves out insights to the meso and micro level where the lives of actual people are. I hope that this area can be discussed via the other readings and possibly the group presentations...