Blogs: Spaces For Capital?

For years now there has been overheated talk about the revolutionary impact of information and communications technology - including the internet - on every facet of society. To read some commentators (I'm thinking of people like Castells here) you would think that the very future of humankind is harnessed to the promises of ICT. We are told endlessly - by policymakers, business leaders, scholars, activists, bloggers - that we have already entered a new age, driven by the transformative power of information. The possibilities on offer in this brave new world are seemingly without restriction, presaging a new way of living and a qualitatively different social world.

Most academic and policy commentary on the informational age turns, naturally, on its significance for the so-called "new economy" and the magic bullets of innovation, technology, knowledge accumulation and networked enterprises. But the ICT exuberance goes much further than this. All is flux: from democracy and identity to power and social space, from personal freedom and individual lifestyles to collective security and the public sphere. In the more utopian readings of these processes, a global civil society has been spawned that spins new webs of connectivity and contestation. It seems that we can all reap the rewards of burgeoning information and, at the same time, reshape the concepts, political imagination and agendas of the new age.

I think the time is ripe for a much more sceptical reappraisal of these claims - raising some hard and critical queries about what is really happening, and that is what I propose to do over a series of posts in the coming weeks. To me, at least, there is a great deal of tendentious nonsense in circulation. Most of it is intellectually slight and analytically inept on nearly every count.

Let's consider for a moment the claims of a new "informational democracy" appropriate to the networked age. Some of these claims are relatively modest and plausible. The relative ease of access to new information for some is a reality. Internet connectivity is an important tool for campaigning on issues that may not otherwise possess their contemporary prominence. Blogs offer spaces for a real exchange of ideas and have expanded, marginally, the public sphere of debate. I would accept all of this without demur.

But when we come to some of the more grandiloquent claims of the "internet galaxy" then I think that we should pause for thought. Castells has argued that "the power of flows takes precedence of the flows of power". According to information society utopians like him, the logic of being networked, being connected, being switched on, trumps the specific social interests and structural power expressed through the networks. This then underpins what Castells sees as a powerful surge of new "resistance identities" which provide the basis for networked political contestation, of which blogs are an exemplar. Empirically, at the very least, this is premature. Even beyond the self-evident digital divide - billions of people are obviously switched off - what actually characterises much of the public sphere of debate is what Herbert Schiller long ago called "manipulative garbage information". At the same time I think we should be cautious about attributing even modest politicial or policy change to the spirit of informationalism or the technology of connectivity.

But there are more substantive objections to this kind of utopianism. The partially networked, informational society is not a new form of transcendant capitalism without an identifiable capitalist class, as Castells would have it. Nearly twenty-five years ago Herbert Schiller had this to say about the political economy of information:

Long prevailing imperatives of a market economy remain as determining as ever in the transformations occurring in the technological and informational sphere.

What was true then is even more the case today. The primacy of business imperatives constitute the overwhelming logic of information and its attendant technologies. Capitalist businesses themselves recognise this logic and adapt accordingly. A lot has been written recently of so-called corporate blogs. And the headline of an FT article ealier this week says it all: "Advertisers can no longer resist blogs". This doesn't seem to me much like a new politics of resistance. Rather it is about finding a space in the interstices of the system. Now many may argue that this is better than nothing or that such a self-limiting political project is all that is possible. Fine, and then that's all internet utopians should claim.

Under the deluge of technocratic commentary it is seems important to me to "bring capitalism back into the equation" - as a necessary starting-point for thinking seriously about what kinds of politics is emerging and what this portends for progressive struggles. At the moment I remain deeply sceptical that very much at all has changed. The use of the new information technologies, and the proliferation of blogs of which they are a part, do not in themselves mean that citizens are actually deciding about the shape and course of their social existence. I doubt, too, that anything like a real, rooted community exists via the internet. It is far more likely that the new information networks are also, and at the same time, structures of capitalist control that channel and coerce people's lives into delimited forms of market dependence. But, as I said earlier, this kind of criticism of technological fixes should not be the end point of debate but the start of new thinking about possible political alternatives. If much of what passes for the so-called information society today has emerged from deliberate policy choices in the interests of capital, then just as surely they can also be challenged.