THEORIES ON MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY
AND SOCIETY
Professor Leo Van Audenhove
New Media and Society in Europe
2019-2020
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
,Table of Contents
Theories on media, technology and society – Introduction ................................................................................................ 4
Movie 1: Ericksonn: ............................................................................................................................................................... 4
Movie 2: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1960s) ............................................................................................................................... 4
Theories on the Information society ...................................................................................................................................... 5
Theories on media, technology and society – Theories on information society: Webster .................................................. 6
Introduction text Webster: .................................................................................................................................................... 6
Two argumentations in theory .............................................................................................................................................. 7
Categorization: ...................................................................................................................................................................... 7
Technological ........................................................................................................................................................................ 8
Economy ................................................................................................................................................................................ 8
Occupation: ........................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Spatial: .................................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Cultural .................................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Quality ................................................................................................................................................................................. 10
Quality – discussion about the role of ideas ........................................................................................................................ 10
Quality – what is information .............................................................................................................................................. 10
Information and being informed ......................................................................................................................................... 10
Information quality.............................................................................................................................................................. 10
Theoretical knowledge ........................................................................................................................................................ 10
Theories on media, technology and society – History and early approaches: Innis and McLuhan ..................................... 11
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................... 11
History and communication ................................................................................................................................................ 12
Bias of communication ........................................................................................................................................................ 14
McLuhan: Notes on reading and writing ............................................................................................................................. 18
The medium is the message ................................................................................................................................................ 20
McLuhan (short video):........................................................................................................................................................ 20
Theories on media, technology and society – Information economy and post IR: Bell and Duff ....................................... 24
Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................................... 24
Neo- Evolutionism ............................................................................................................................................................... 27
Separate realms .................................................................................................................................................................. 27
Post-Industrial society ......................................................................................................................................................... 28
Role of information.............................................................................................................................................................. 29
Communal society ............................................................................................................................................................... 34
Intellectual conservatism..................................................................................................................................................... 34
A critique on PIS................................................................................................................................................................... 35
Services and Manufacture ................................................................................................................................................... 36
1
,Theories on media, technology and society – Innovation, Techno-economic paradigm: Perez ......................................... 37
Carlota Perez ....................................................................................................................................................................... 37
Schumpeter ......................................................................................................................................................................... 37
Innovation ........................................................................................................................................................................... 38
EXAMPLE: inventions ........................................................................................................................................................... 39
EXAMPLE: innovations......................................................................................................................................................... 39
EXAMPLE= unsuccessful inventions ..................................................................................................................................... 39
Important sentence from the text ....................................................................................................................................... 39
Innovation trajectories ........................................................................................................................................................ 40
New technology systems ..................................................................................................................................................... 40
Technological revolutions .................................................................................................................................................... 41
Five Meta-systems ............................................................................................................................................................... 42
Structure of technological revolutions................................................................................................................................. 43
Main industries and infrastructures .................................................................................................................................... 43
Techno-economic paradigm (TEP) ....................................................................................................................................... 44
Resistance and assimilation ................................................................................................................................................ 44
Theories on media, technology and society – Network society 1990: Castells .................................................................. 45
Castells: ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 45
Advanced theoretical debates ......................................................................................................................................................... 45
Network society (=social theory) ..................................................................................................................................................... 45
Network ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 45
Information flows ............................................................................................................................................................................ 46
Internet is a distributed network ..................................................................................................................................................... 46
Networks in organizations ............................................................................................................................................................... 47
Network society NOT information society ....................................................................................................................................... 47
NO information age ......................................................................................................................................................................... 48
Informationalism ............................................................................................................................................................................. 48
Technological paradigm .................................................................................................................................................................. 49
3 distinctive features of technology ................................................................................................................................................ 49
Rise of the network society .............................................................................................................................................................. 50
Link between spheres? .................................................................................................................................................................... 51
A global society ............................................................................................................................................................................... 51
Value in the network society ........................................................................................................................................................... 52
Work, labor and class ...................................................................................................................................................................... 52
Fordism and network enterprise ..................................................................................................................................................... 53
Network enterprise .......................................................................................................................................................................... 53
Power in the network ...................................................................................................................................................................... 54
Communication and power ............................................................................................................................................................. 54
Switchers ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 54
Three historical processes................................................................................................................................................................ 54
Space of flows .................................................................................................................................................................................. 55
Time ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 56
2
,Theories on media, technology and society – 4IR: Schwab............................................................................................... 57
Impressions of the text ........................................................................................................................................................ 57
Economy .............................................................................................................................................................................. 59
Business ............................................................................................................................................................................... 62
National and global ............................................................................................................................................................. 63
Society ................................................................................................................................................................................. 64
Individual (idem society)...................................................................................................................................................... 65
Theories on media, technology and society – Immediacy and speed: Tomlinson and Wajcman ....................................... 66
Tomlinson – The culture of speed ........................................................................................................................................ 66
Wajcman – pressed for time (book from 2016) ................................................................................................................... 73
Theories on media, technology and society – Data Colonialism: Couldry ......................................................................... 77
Impressions on text ............................................................................................................................................................. 77
Introduction: ........................................................................................................................................................................ 78
Definitions ........................................................................................................................................................................... 80
Cloud empire ....................................................................................................................................................................... 81
What is data colonialism? ................................................................................................................................................... 82
Human freedom .................................................................................................................................................................. 82
Data-driven logistics ............................................................................................................................................................ 82
China ................................................................................................................................................................................... 83
Order the social world ......................................................................................................................................................... 84
Theories on media, technology and society – Surveillance capitalism: Zuboff .................................................................. 86
Impressions on the text ....................................................................................................................................................... 86
Quote:.................................................................................................................................................................................. 86
Starting from ‘big data’ ....................................................................................................................................................... 86
Immediacy ........................................................................................................................................................................... 87
Computer mediation ........................................................................................................................................................... 87
Division of learning .............................................................................................................................................................. 88
Hall Varian (economist who worked at Google).................................................................................................................. 88
Data, extraction, analysis .................................................................................................................................................... 88
Monitoring and contract ..................................................................................................................................................... 90
Monitoring and contract: the big other............................................................................................................................... 90
Monitoring and contract: surveillance ................................................................................................................................ 90
Personalization and communication ................................................................................................................................... 91
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................... 91
3
,Theories on media, technology and society – Introduction
Movie 1: Ericksonn:
- Film is biased
• They want to show you what they want and maybe push you to buy goods
(naive view on the future)
- We are moving from an internet that started very slowly, after TOD COM
crisis everything changed rapidly
- This movie looks into the future: currency: not necessarily true (Facebook;
Libra), sensors (smart cities; collecting data about a lot of aspects in
society), education (leave the classroom and do it at home; vision of education moving
online has not yet been achieved)
- Talk about two types of societies:
• Connected society more democratic (this connected society is believed to be very
democratic, leading to direct democracy -> we are now far removed from utopia that
was predicted 10 years ago (with Donald Trump, Brexit, far-right movements)
• network society
ð It is materializing, but not as rapidly as the movie predicted (a lot of these
theories are predicted, but not as fast as they want it)
- IMPORTANCE of course: relationship of society and technology -> do we actually live in a
fundamentally new type of society based on technology and what would be the current
debate (internet security, artificial intelligence (which learns from behaviour or pictures),
algorithms, robotics connected to work (what if lot of manual labour can be replaced by
mechanics and what does this mean for the workers?)
Movie 2: The Gutenberg Galaxy (1960s)
- New electronic media (radio, telephone, television) or gadgets: world becomes more
available to our minds and connects people with each other (thanks to electronics, it is no
longer alone; you engage in conversations, projection of movies)
- Global village: McLuhan (mainly looked at the medium): homogenization of the world
(world becomes a place as like in a village, we all experience the same) -> believes unified
media would lead to global village, world becomes smaller
ð -> in the past: only one gadget (the book): only way of getting information
(private experience; you do this alone; linear medium -> you mainly start at the
beginning and work your way towards the end)
- McLuhan: was forgotten in 1980s but his theories resurfaced in the 90s when internet was
making its first steps => idea of hyperlinks
- Surveillance society: Zuboff
- Data colonialism (extremely contested)
4
,Theories on the Information society
- Theories on the information society
• First theories of the information society 1950s and 1960s
• Based on observations of growing amount of information
• Based on observations of growing workforce using information
- Theories relation technology – social change
• Much earlier – going back to industrialization
- Modern theories on the information society
• 1873 The Coming of Post-Industrial Society – Daniel Bell
• Since 1990s – Rise of ICTs and the Internet
• Theories become mainstream
- Many of current discussion of media and technology
• Framed within conceptualizations of information society
• Even if theories themselves do not refer to information society
5
,Theories on media, technology and society – Theories on information society:
Webster
Webster chapter 1: Introduction
- Sociologist
- Born in 1950
- Worked at universities in UK
- Gets interesting when he starts categorizing
Introduction text Webster:
- When Webster analyzes theories, he always starts from information
• Others start from other starting points or different types of information
- Different types of information (goes from concrete towards abstract)
• Data (distinctions when we talk about data: structure and unstructured data)
• Information
• Knowledge
• Understanding
• Insight
• Wisdom
- He pinpoints that we might move to ‘the end of work’, the advent of a ‘leisure society’, the
totally ‘automated factory’ in which robots did everything (ex. Car factories where humans
were replaced by robots to do their work)
- Information superhighway and cyber society: data, interconnected networks, artificial
intelligence, smart cities
• In a lot of those new areas, there are a lot of hypes: i.e. books that present these hypes
- Current edition: refers to social media (was a set-up discussion)
• ‘Theoretical’ starting point:
- Aims:
• Demonstrate that the social impact approaches towards information are hopelessly
simplistic and positively misleading: Too much optimism that social impact was
positive
• Show that social theory, combined with empirical evidence, is an enormously richer:
Social science is much richer in understanding what is new
- As an author, Webster takes a clear position -> takes dualistic approach (might not agree
with the theories, but they learn me a lot about a tool to understand what is going on in
society) => important to formulate your own opinion and sometimes even disagree, but in
a rational manner
• Theories
• Theories that say nothing has changed (information became much more important,
but still live in economic societal that still exploits some groups of people)
ð Lot of modern theories are somewhere in the middle:
- Castel: information society/
6
,Two argumentations in theory
- Emphasis on newness
• Post-industrialism (Daniel Bell and a legion of followers)
• Postmodernism (e.g. Jean Baudrillard, Mark Poster, Paul Virilio)
• Flexible specialization (e.g. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, Larry Hirschhorn)
• The informational mode of development (Manuel Castells)
- Emphasis on continuity
• Neo-Marxism
• Regulation theory
• Flexible accumulation
• Public sphere
• Reflexive modernization
ð Dualistic approach
ð Divisions: helps us to think about the theory that is about to come, but doesn’t like
that different theories are put together
Webster Chapter 2: what is an information society?
- Definitions:
• Lot of these authors seldom define what they are talking about
• Age of Data (DataPop Allience 2015)
§ Age of Data is used in the title
§ No definition nor clarification in the text itself
Categorization: Webster identifies 5 definitions (according to their theory)
- Technology
- Economy
- Occupation
- Spatial
- Cultural
ð These definitions share conviction that quantitavie changes ..
ð R&D (Research and Development) -> Role: fundamentally linked to healthcare
and advances to everything that is medical (overcome illnesses, cancers, …), also
linked to economy (whole evolution of car manufacturing, i.e. Tesla with their
electrical car; other car manufacturers are staring to build electronic cars) =>
cannot be reduced to INFORMATION!
- 6th definition: most interesting one according to Webster => character of information is
taken into account
7
,Technological
- Definition: technology is changing and due to that fact society is also changing
- Two periods:
• Mighty micro 1970s-1980s
• ICTs convergence 1990s
• From 1990s -> Artificial Intelligence, social media (It is an application and not a
technology) (fundamentally changed the internet, these types of systems allow to
rethink economic sites and processes), mobile phones, data revolution (data is
much more than simple media and communication) (much more applicable: global,
datafication and digitalization -> does not only penetrate media)
- Neo-Schumpeterian approach
- Webster objects to simple measurement to define societies (how much we have of
something, data, …)
Economy
- Fritz Machlup:
• Identification of information industries sich as education, law, publishing, media and
computer manufacture, and his attempt to estimate their changing economic worth
- Porat:
• Porat distinguished the primary and secondary information sectors of the economy
Occupation:
- Related to work of Daniel Bell
- The occupational structure is examined over time and patterns of change observed
- The end product – a bald statistical figure giving a precise percentage of ‘information
workers’ – hides the complex processes by which researchers construct their categories
and allocate people to one or another
- A consequence of this categorization is often a failure to identify the more strategically
central information occupations
ð Both Gouldner and Perkin are identifying particular changes within the realm of
information work which have especially important consequences for society as a
chole
ð To thinkers such as Perkin and Gouldner, the quantitative change is not the main
issue
ð Very much in line of Castells and partly Bell
- Critique on Webster
• Authors that have both quantitative and qualitative claims
• Webster focuses on quantitative to discard theory
8
, Spatial: where concept of interconnection and network kicks in
- Major emphasis is on information networks which connect o-locations and in consequence
can have profound effects on the organization of time and space
• Nowadays: information networks have become prominent features of social
organization
- Increasingly, we are all connected to networks of one sort or another
- Popular idea: the electronic highways result in new emphasis on the flows of information
(Castells, 1996), something which leads to a radical revision of time-space relations
• In a ‘network society’ constraints of the clock and of distance have been radically
relieved
- Individuals may now connect with others to continue real-time relationships without
physically coming together
• But: why should presence of networks lead analysts to categorize societies as
information societies?
• => we encounter once again the problem of imprecision of definitions
Cultural (is perhaps the most easily acknowledged, yet the least measured)
- There has been extraordinary increase in the information in social circulation
• Television been enhanced to incorporate video technologies, cable and satellite
channels, and even computerized information services
• PC’s access Internet and the palm-held computer testify to unrelenting expansion
here
- Implies: new media surrounds us, presenting us with messages to which we may or may
not respond
• Truth is: informational environment is a great deal more intimate, more constitutive
of us, than this suggests
- Contemporary culture: more heavily information-laden that predecessors -> we exist in
media-saturated environment which means that life is quintessentially about symbolization,
about exchanging and receiving – or trying to exchange and resisting reception –
messages about ourselves and others
• Many writers conceive us having entered an information society (thanks to this
acknowledgement)
- Paradoxically, it is perhaps this very explosion of information which leads some writers to
announce the death of the sign
• Blitzed by signs all around us, designing ourselves with signs, unable to escape
signs wherever we may go, the result is a collapse of meaning: ‘There is more and
more information, and less and less meaning’ (Baudrillard)
- Signs come from so many directions, and are so diverse, fast changing and contradictory,
that their power to signify is dimmed
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