Information Society Studies 0.1

July 2000

Edited by
Richard Rogers (rogers@chem.uva.nl) - University of Amsterdam

With the arrival of the Internet in the early 1990s, especially American commentators looked forward to a bright, digital future. Virtual communities would breathe new life into real, dying communities; virtual identities would free people from the humdrum of everyday life; virtual libraries would put the world’s literary resources at everyone’s immediate disposal; and information would be free and perfect. Nowadays sobriety has set in. The bright, digital future that was foreseen has not grown naturally from the technology; rather, it is increasingly understood that the future must be carefully crafted.

The term “Information Society” perhaps best refers a complex of issues faced by people, organizations and governments in the Information Age, or what Jeremy Rifkin refers to as the Age of Access. Grappling with the technical, economic, social, cultural, legal and historical issues will allow societies to take advantage of the new opportunities with well-considered plans and policies. It also will allow them to manage societal expectations.

The works listed below provide one primer for both seizing and coping with the Information Society. For example, there are works that put the expectations on the table, at either end of the buoyancy spectrum. Mitchell’s e-topia both unpacks and meticulously builds upon digital futures foreseen by the likes of Negroponte (Being Digital, 1995) and Gates (The Road Ahead, 1996); conversely, Borgmann’s Holding on to Reality puts the enthusiasm for digital life and ‘information on tap’ in critical perspective. Where virtual bodies and indentities are concerned, for example, Stone’s classic War of Desire and Technology reveals the fragmented, confusing and sometimes spicy lives we may lead with the Internet in our living rooms and bedrooms, whilst Garfinkel’s Database Nation reminds us that that information traces we leave on-line about ourselves may not be innocent.

Below the broad area of “Information Society Studies” (for the lack of a better umbrella term) is subdivided into the following subareas, and books are recommended by subarea.

Architecture (includes urban planning and community networks)
Business and Management Studies
Cultural Studies (includes anthropology, enthnography and sociology of the online world, especially virtual bodies, virtual communities, virtual identities)
Historiography of the Internet and Electronic Media
Information Science/Computer Science (includes library science)
Law (largely privacy issues)
Media Studies (includes literary studies, medium theory, new media, TV/news/journalism; some overlap with cultural studies and historiography)
Political Economy of Cyberspace
Philosophy of Cyberspace
Social Theory

Mitchell, William: e-topia
1999, MIT Press, Cambridge, 192 pages, ISBN 0262133555
Building on the highly successful City of Bits and his more careful “City of Bits Thesis” in Schön et al.’s Technology and Low-Income Communities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), e-topia is both erudite and accessible, not to mention more up-to-date. Leaving behind the digital future divide of the utopians and the dystopians, it treats and reflects upon the implications of developments in information appliances, wired homes and schools, online meeting places, e-democracy, telecommuting and the teleserviced city.

Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul: The Social Life of Information
2000, Harvard Business School Press, 336 pages, ISBN 0875847625
The book may be compared to other paradigm-shifting works in the past such as Piore and Sabel’s The Second Industrial Divide (1984), which argued that we are moving from a mass production to a new kind of craft age. Similarly, Brown and Duguid argue we are moving from the information age to the knowledge age. The book doesn’t bother with guru hype of information technology; instead it takes up how social knowledge networks and work practice must be understood before new information technology systems are implemented.

Rochlin, Gene: Trapped in the Net: The Unintended Consequences of Computerization
1997, Princeton University Press, 310 pp., ISBN: 0691010803
The book takes up the challenging subject of working in complex information environments, like nuclear power plants, battleships, and air traffic control towers. In well-reasoned, readable prose, Rochlin first critiques the in-situ effects of automation and then makes a case for user-centered design. Fascinating.

Hayles, N. Katherine: How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
1999, University of Chicago Press,336 pages, ISBN 0226321460
In the difficult field of posthuman studies, peopled by the likes of D. Haraway, A.R. Stone, and R. Braidotti, Hayles’s work stands out. Her new book first treats our conventional understandings of the ‘human’ (consciousness, self-determination, etc.), and then shows how they are challenged by the “informational patterns” that flow between our organic bodies and their prosthetic extensions. It is a sensible and theoretical work for those engaged in posthuman cultural studies.

Stone, Allucquere Rosanne: The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age
1995, MIT Press, 224 pp., ISBN 0262691892
A book-length version of her justifiably famous piece in the Bendict’s edited volume, Cyberspace: First Steps (1991), the work contains possibly the most well-known “characters” of cyberspace, including Julie, the cross-dressing psychiastrist whose virtual “death” resounded in the real lives of the members of the list who experienced it on-line. Beginning with her experiences at Atari and her research group’s ability to fool the rest of company into believing that a virtual person chairing a conference call meeting was real, Stone subsequently details the virtual lives computers and people may lead, and the implications virtual identities have on ourselves and others ‘in the real’. Very difficult not to recommend; something of a classic.

Miller, Daniel and Slater, Don: The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach
2000, New York UP, 224 pp., ISBN 1859733891
This anthropological book about the rise of the Internet in Trinidad is placed in the historiography section largely because it presents a kind ‘other history’ about how the technology has emerged and been applied - far away, culturally and aesthetically, from the dominant Californian ideology. It is also an interesting publishing event for the simultaneous publication of its resource archive on-line: http://ethnonet.gold.ac.uk

Peters, John Durham, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
2000, University of Chicago Press, 293 pages, ISBN 0-226-66276-4
This is the kind of book that one reads and rereads. Falling into the emerging category of the history of technocultural ideas, Peters book discusses the eternal human longing to communicate. "My emphasis on the debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange ethos is intended as a corrective to a truism that is still very much alive: that the expansion of means leads to the expansion of minds." Peters, the hermeneuticist reinterpreting communication thought from Socrates to Shannon, traces the tragic history of communication failure, from dead letters to dead phone lines. The continually dashed hopes to fully and authentically communicate (i.e., be each other) opens up opportunities for the communicator to be responsible to the audience. A beautiful work.

Information Science / Computing Science

Borgman, Christine L.: From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing)
2000, MIT Press, 340 pp., ISBN: 026202473X
Whilst not a nuanced theoretical work, the book critically examines the idea (to quote from the introduction) “that technologies of creation, distribution, and preservation will undergo dramatic transformation, as will information institutions such as libraries, archives, museums, schools, and universities.” The following are chapter headings: The Premise and the Promise of a Global Information Infrastructure; Is It Digital or Is It a Library? Digital Libraries and Information Infrastructure; Access to Information; Books, Bytes, and Behavior; Why Are Digital Libraries Hard to Use?; Making Digital Libraries Easier to Use; Whither, or Wither, Libraries?; Acting Locally, Thinking Globally; Toward a Global Digital Library: Progress and Prospects.

Garfinkel, Simson: Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century
2000, O’Reilly&Associates, 312 pp., ISBN: 1565926536
Simson Garfinkel, journalist and computer security expert, describes new advances in invasive technology that collect and chart personal information. Coupled with database sharing (and personal profile sharing), invasive technology can put a person’s privacy at serious risk. The absence or abrogration of privacy laws, policies and regulations seriously comprises personal freedoms and rights, i.e., “the right to digital self-determination” and “the right to informational autonomy”. An excellent read.

Lanham, Richard: The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts
1993, University of Chicago Press, ISBN: 0226468852
From the Cyberculture Resource Center, University of Maryland: “The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts is a worthy successor to McLuhan's Understanding Media and Ong's Orality and Literacy. Lanham's book stands with these as a classic of substantive speculation on which great theory-building utterly depends and as an original, dazzlingly realized portrayal of communication's central evolutionary role in human experience.” A publisher would do well to consider shortening the original work, in collaboration with the author.

Borgmann, Albert: Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium
1999, University of Chicago Press, 288 pp., ISBN: 0226066258
Borgman is no friend of cyberspace, but, unlike C. Stoll (with his Silicon Snake Oil), the author does not merit any description that ends in “phobe” or “Luddite.” His self-proclaimed “toposphilia” (love of his Montanan locality) echoes throughout a book that makes illuminating distinctions between natural, cultural and informational realities and concludes with a plea to hold onto the natural.

Schiller, Dan: Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System
1999, MIT Press, 294 pp., ISBN: 0262194171
Hard-nosed, well-researched critique of e-commerce.

Rifkin, Jeremy: The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience
2000, Putnam, 312 pp., ISBN: 1585420182
Whilst “popular” and always first off the mark, Rifkin is ever the critical scholar in this work that sets out to define the slippery idea of buying and consuming “access” and “experience” in our new “weightless economy.”

Slevin, James: The Internet and Society
2000, Polity, 265 pp., ISBN: 0745620868
This is the first book that squarely ties the Internet into a social theory perspective. Standing on the shoulders of Giddens and Bauman, Slevin adroitly takes apart the arguments of the first generation of Internet thinkers (as Turkle and Reingold), arguing for a society (with the Internet), peopled by human intelligent agents with a cosmopolitan outlook. Carefully reasoned.