The Information Society: Cyber Dreams and Digital Nightmares. Robert Hassan, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008.
Robert Hassan, almost like a detective, here tracks down the narratives of speed and acceleration in our digital age – how speed is built into the logic of computers, killing our leisure, preventing our ability to be thoughtful about our daily duties and our societal challenges. He would not get any argument on this from most people reading these lines, or from the person writing them. However, the author admits there is “good speed” and “bad speed”.
Hassan has studied the concept of speed in the Information Society in previous publications and his list of references notes that he has a volume entitled Empires of Speed forthcoming from University of Illinois Press.
This book’s framework of analysis places speed in a wider context. Through the lens of political economy, Hassan speaks of “three interdependent processes that have influenced and shaped our contemporary world in a most profound way. The first is neoliberal globalization, citing Klein and Anderson: ... “an economic system [that] has no serious challengers” with a logic that has become the ‘basic grammar’ that informs our understanding of how the world operates.”
Second, flowing from neoliberal globalization, is the information technology revolution, supercharged by basic research into computers that could serve the globalized economic system. Hassan claims: “The third results from the effects of the first two. Principally this has been the ‘speeding-up’ of time and the ‘shrinking’ of space.”
I will insert here some of the strengths of this book. Although the work contains a harsh evaluation of what Susan Strange has called “casino capitalism”, Hassan has listened to many different voices along a wide spectrum of analysis of our current digital dilemma. They are all here in the book: Anthony Giddens, Al Gore, Esther Dyson, Nicholas Negroponte, Dan Schiller, Jacques Ellul, Vincent Mosco, and many more. And to his credit, the author cites respectfully and extensively the extraordinary scholarship of Manuel Castells, perhaps the most masterful and thorough analyst of the Information Society in his trilogy on the subject. I have found the Castells work invaluable in my own current research on the impact of our digital culture on churches, politics, education, and the economy.
In several places in the book Hassan cites the need for more research – on the theory of the damage that speed and multi-tasking does to our problem-solving, for example. In addition, he carefully provides coverage of both digital cheerleaders and doomsayers. He urges the need for both theory and empirical data in studying digital culture. And this book is a very valuable contribution to both these streams.
In addition, his language, his prose, is rich and a pleasure to read.
There are several other themes here, in addition to speed. His chapter on “Commodification and Culture” is a rich summary of how our “casino capitalism” has turned everything from sports fervor to university education into products. He mentions that by providing their courses online, Yale and MIT have enriched their brand globally. And he relates his own personal sadness when some of his favorite teams in the UK turned to putting the names of sponsors on their players’ shirts.
Another topic explored thoughtfully is the issue of power, especially in his final chapter, entitled “Who Rules: Politics and Control in the Information Society”. Hassan notes “the private sector now makes up a growing element of the state’s capacity to project power.” He adds: “Power is still tied to knowledge, as Foucault suggested, but ‘power geometry’ is linked to the commodity and to the market.” He writes of “Google power” and the unprecedented power of corporate capitalism in the age of information. “This has meant that political as well as economic power has accreted to capital in ways that are unprecedented”.
The author’s discussion of politics has been somewhat bypassed by the election of Obama, with his digital machine, and by the cell phone photos and the Twittering of Iran’s post-election anger. However, Hassan is a thoughtful analyst of the digital challenges we face as theorists and as individuals just trying to get things done every day.
The book has an excellent glossary (much of it attributed to Wikipedia), sixteen pages of references for further reading, and a valuable Index.
Hassan is a Senior Researcher at the University of Melbourne. I, for one, will continue to track his writings in order to understand the deeper meanings and challenges of our digital culture. As Castells notes:
Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. The Rise of the Network Society, vol. I, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Blackwell, p. 46
References
Hassan, Robert (2003) The Chronoscopic Society, New York: Lang.
Hassan, Robert (2004) Media, Politics and the Network Society, Maidenhead: Open University Press.