Unit 8 Passage Two Worldwide Wedge: Division and Contradiction in the Global Information Infrastructure

Peter Golding

Two features of major corporations in the telecommunications and information sectors stand our in the late 1990s. Qne is the rash of mergers and incorporation that has taken place.The other is the diversification of activity. Both are designed to place the mega-corporations in pole position as the Interne commercialisation becomes serious.

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The corporate takeover and commercialisation of the Internet can lead easily to a weary fatalism, accepting that another potentially liberating technology ha been engulfed by the still rampant forces of the“free market” But at this stage in its development the Net represents verystarkly just those choices and contradictions which are at the heart of any political moment. Four key areas illustrate the present state of uncertainty and opportunity. Community Use or Market Mechanism?

The inherent twin properties of use value and exchange value are deeply embedded in the evolution of a communication system such as the Internet.Ever the most casual and serendipitous of surfers will not travel far around the Web without coming across examples of the seriously progressive potential of its socia evolution...

Evidence from surveys suggests that demand for information on the Web is high, and indeed exceeds the demand for entertainment. A Harris poll in 1994 found 63 per cent of consumers wanted health or government information and other public-service material. Almost three quarters wanted customised news, but only 40 per cent wanted movies on demand, and even fewer wanted interactive shopping. Why then is corporate strategy the opposite? uite simply because, as Howard Besser notes,“the industry, believes that in the long rur this other set of services will prove more lucrative”(Besser,1995:64).

What will make the Net grow, supply or demand? Consultants for the European Commission,Ovum, estimate that by 2005 the percentage of revenue from networked multimedia services in north-west Europe will derive 42 per cent from entertainment and pornography, and only 11 per cent from informatio services (Graham et al.,1996: 6).When Viacom bought Paramount many questioned why, at 510 billion, they should pay seventeen times the cash value of the company. But Paramount’s TV and movie stock provide an invaluable resource for exploitation by seeking additional distribution channels, new user fees and emended audiences for advertising...

Integration or Exclusion?

Early Net dreamers saw a wired universe, in which virtual communities would offer mutual support and conviviality in a global digital commune. The Net would be a horizontal communications strueture, quite unlike the hierarchical vertical structures of old. In the high profile debates about censorship and pornography on the Web there has been understandable focus on the exclusion of women from this latest “toy for the boys”…But possibly more fundamental has been the emergence of division and exclusion by price.

Inevitably the consolidation of a market structure is replicating patterns of exclusion and differentiation apparent in earlier technologies. To access the Net requires a reasonably state-of-the-art computer,a phone line and a modem. In the UK many poor families do not even have telephone access.The start-up hardware would cost more than they are ever likely to afford. Online costs include the monthly payment to a company like Compuserve, currently about $27, not a princely sum, but roughly a quarter of the social security, allowance for a teenage child...

….One acute analysis comes from the journal of the Association. of Chief Police Officers in the UK, which has drawn its own conclusions. In an article in May 1996 it fears the arrival of an electronic underclass,“alienated,denied access to the new society because of a lack of education and wealth”.

The emergence of new communications goods has coincided with an ever widening profile of income inequality....Pay inequality is larger than at any time since records began a century ago (the worst-paid tenth received 69 per cent of average wages in 1979, 63 per cent of average in 1993; the figures for the best paid tenth were 146 per cent rising to 159 per cent)

This is not the arithmetic of community communications.The global village has become the digital bazaar. bAs communications are driven into the market place the widening inequalities of economie fortune are translated into cultural and political disadvantage. As even columnist David Kline observed in that courier of technohype,Hotwired magazine,“The future may become a wonderland of opportunity only for the minority among us who are affluent, mobile, and high! educated. And it may at the same time, become a digital dark age for th majority, of citizens the poor, the noncollege educated, and the so-called unnecessary”(Kline,1995) ·

Diversity or Conglomeration?

Yet another dream for pioneers was the Net as the playground of the inventorentrepreneur, a place where a thousand overnight millionaires could bloom, and everyone would be producer and consumer alike. After all, the Weh was invented by a software engineer stuck away at a physics lab in Switzerland. The software which gave it its biggest boost emerged from a group of students at Illinois University, and Marc Andreesen, developer of Netscape, the most popular browser for the www,became an instant multi-millionaire in his earl twenties.

Not only that but the entry of the corporate giants has been far from smooth. By February 1996 NewsCorp and MCI’s Online Ventures was laying off staff and saying goodbye to its chief executive. AT&T is another giant that has lost a succession of senior executives in a halting and uneven entry into the new marketplace. Apple's eWorld and Murdoch’s Delphi are also distinguished in this company of stumbling Goliaths. But the point is that the giant corporations can afford to make mistakes. Watching for shooting stars on the periphery of the business they can shift risk capital into them at their point of proven take off, allowing the start-up and R &D costs to be absorbed by the small players. The so-called boutique character of the new market, stressing subcontracting and flexible small businesses, may challenge the corporate dinosaurs, but the bulk o the new markers is still ending up in their hands.

Electronic Democracy or Cyber-Individualism?

Not long ago the arrival of cable TVand the imminent coming of computer networking evoked frissons of expectation about a new golden age of“tele democracy”. Voters would have direct access to their political masters,the electronic referendum would provide a recurrent mechanism of accountability” democratic politics, and political information for citizenship would be boundless and and instantly accessible. The digital Athenian democracy this conjured up also among sceptical observers, prompted the reminder that in Athens neither women nor slaves got much of a political took-in.

So too with the new cyberdemocracy. As Clifford Stoll in his splendidly sceptical diatribe Silicon Snake Oil points out, until the golden age arrives “only the technoliterati will be enfranchised with network access”(Stoll,1995:321) The limited, and it would appear, stubbornly abating online community, will have privileged access to the political universe unavailable to the techno poor, Not only that but the character of the politics envisaged in these scenarios changes the nature of democracy in its essence. 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 ever3” issue?(ibid.33).There is here the potential for a fundamental individualisation of politics. In cyberdemocracy the role of representative and intermediary organisations-trade unions,community groups,political parties, pressure groups-is atrophied. Asa result,as Dutch analysts van de Donk andTops suggest,“representative organisations may disappear…. A direct plebiscitarian democracy becomes feasible when the demos... can come together'virtually’”(van de Donk and Tops,1995:16)

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 taken off because people want to touch, see and interact with what they are buying and those from whom they purchase it. But that will change as systems become more elaborate and secure, interactivity on the Web,far from a mechanism for democratic debate and influence, will descend, as Besser sardonically notes, to“responding to multiple-choice questions and entering credit card numbers on a key pad”(Besser,1995:63)·Thus individualisation, unequal access and disenfranchisement may be the outcome of Net politics, as much as an electronic Agora.