rhetoric and the public sphere

Habermas's discussions of the public sphere are enormously interesting to me, partly because his model provides a paradigm with which I can conceptualize the "place" where I meet others in mind and spirit, and how there are "memes" that run through conversations among members of a society. But his model also invites a lot of questions, and these are what I'll focus on now.

He expresses concern about the job of public relations, those who selectively release information from corporations into the public. But don't we all have little public relations nanobots working in my head? Certainly I craft what I say according to my audience, and I do not divulge all.

In Erkki Karvonen's introduction to these discussions about the public sphere, he describes (a very brief) history of democracy and its connection to the public sphere, beginning in Athens, that good ole birthplace of democracy and politics. But Athens was also the birthplace of rhetoric, a fact that Karvonen and Habermas don't address here (but perhaps they do elsewhere?). Rhetoric is the art of crafting words for an audience--really a form of old-school PR. And it was essential to Athenian democracy and all democracies since then.

If the inevitable forces of rhetoric and PR reward those who speak loudest or most eloquently, how would it be possible for everyone to participate on par? Hierarchies and status are built into language itself, and any time we must communicate with each other through language, we judge each other's words not just for their content, but also for their style. Perhaps technology will provide us with a method for expressing ideas without fixed form in language (which will be a nightmare for would be plagiarism police and copyright lawyers!), but until then, is the idea of an ideal public sphere relegated to an ideal rather than real form?

zuboff: the value of learning

In Shoshanna Zuboff’s analysis of technology and the “informated organization” (from In the Age of Smart Machines), she makes a traditional social science critique of technology: it is not neutral. But she doesn’t end there, which is why I kept reading.

Like Lessig in Code, Zuboff argues that technology constrains choices. It makes new things possible, thereby altering our horizons, and it affects more than just the managerial class or the worker class. In fact, Zuboff points out that these classes are very hard to distinguish from one another in the informated organization. Yes! She’s willing to admit that the picture of technology and work is complicated and cannot be driven into simple categories.

She invokes Arendt’s vision of the future, where everyone surrenders their critical judgment to the system and becomes docile and unable to resist that system. Zuboff notes that in taking the path of least resistance, technology tends to favor those currently in power. This reminds me of the idea that there are no evil people in the world; everyone does their job, and when something bad happens in a system as complicated as ours, there are so many cooks in the kitchen that no one in particular has spoiled the soup. Zuboff warns that unless technology is harnessed for its equalizing possibilities, it may indeed perpetuate current hegemony, as other theorists have suggested.

The way out of this technological passivity and reproduction of current power systems is through learning. The informated organization sounds pretty nice in this characterization; learning is productive, in fact, the main source of productivity for one of these organizations. It is in the organization’s best interest to educate its employees, or to give them space to educate themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice if this were true for all jobs? While I’ve enjoyed learning from jobs, I have often found that management prefers a limit to my learning. And also, I wonder: what happens when employees switch jobs every 6 months? That’s often the case in high-tech sectors now. But then, perhaps cross-organization learning is to be valued in employees. While organizations may know they can’t hold on to an employee like this for longer than a year, the experience they come with (once purchased with an appropriate salary) is free.

pondering the possibilities of a panopticon prison

Foucault has been faulted for being sloppy with his history. But ideas, paradigms, and groundbreaking ways of looking at the world, have been far more important contributions from him. So I won’t poke at his lack of definitions for “antiquity” and “classical times.” Instead, I wonder: if our society is a panoptic one, why haven’t we installed the panoptic prison?

It may seem quite cruel, but prisons now are certainly not places of comfort. Our prisons now are places where crazy things happen when guards turn their backs. And the personal relationship allowed between inmates and guards can cause problems—for instance in the case of Richard McNair, the con artist who’s escaped from prison three times in the last 20 years and has been able to charm guards and police alike once he’s in contact with them.

Perhaps the problem here is the complete dissociation between the seer and the seen, as Foucault describes. If we set inmates out as perpetually watched, they may go crazy. Does the panopticon prison allow for rehabilitation? Do prisons need to rehabilitate, or simply sequester deviants into a safe place in society? Is there a human need to be able to watch others? To have some degree of privacy? The latter is almost certainly removed from our current penal system anyway, and while we’re at it, the military, too.

lasch: man vs. machine

OK, so I don’t necessarily think that technology is neutral. It’s created and coded by people with certain perspectives, it’s rolled out according to who has the resources to obtain it, and so it’s not equally accessible to everyone. HOWEVER, it’s also not inherently evil. I revisited Kumar in my last post because Christopher Lasch’s argument in “The Degradation of the Practical Arts” strikes me as quite parallel. Here, again, we should be wary of technology because it disempowers certain people, or here, humanity in general. Lasch traces the current tech boom to Taylorism and the optimizing out of skilled workers. As I mention below, I have no love for the preservation of jobs for no reason other than to keep people busy. This isn’t to say that I’m an elite, managerial type who can’t wait to dominate an underclass of unskilled workers; I think there’s a middle ground here.

Lasch, in the interest of preserving humanity in manufactured goods and production, fails to note several of the important benefits of production that were around at least in 1987, when he wrote his article. When he cites Piore and Sabel’s critique in The Second Industrial Divide, he points out the limitations of their “yeoman democracy” model that will permit participatory democracy as a result of flexible production and technology. But he fails to critique the other element he cites about Piore and Sabel’s work: the inherent goodness of flexible specialization. This mode of production reminds me of the economic concept of the “long tail,” but it also brings to mind the abundance of commodities that we enjoy as a result of mass production. Does Lasch only wear handsewn shirts and decorate his house with carpenter-crafted furniture? I highly doubt it. Mass production has made many more things available to the average consumer. No whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen, but Lasch is missing this essential critique in his discussion of Piore and Sabel.

He notes the importance of keeping humanity in technology, or at least the dangers and hubris of removing it. He characterizes engineers as upper-class straw men: for them, “[i]t is not simply the defense of their class privileges that makes them resist demands for worker participation, but the belief that human intervention can only distort and subjectify the beautiful objectivity of the machine” (p. 294). First of all, I know no one who would describe a machine as “beautifully” objective, although many may say it is necessarily so. Lasch strikes me as a man who has never encountered the bias of human service workers, or at least, as someone who hasn’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Human judgment is faulty, subject to racism, bias and vulnerable to rash decisions and rhetoric. Why wouldn’t we want automation to fix some of those problems that perpetuate privilege in our society? Machines won’t love you like humans will, but they won’t hate you, either.

kumar: who's professional?

Krishan Kumar’s skepticism about the “information revolution” brings a healthy moderating voice to discussions about the promises of technology. In “From post-industrial to post-modern society,” Kumar claims that if this really were a revolution, we’d see some social changes as well. We are seeing those social changes, but only as an intensification of the post-industrial society—workforces are becoming deskilled and feminized and further from the centers of power. And all of this is a result of technologies of control, to keep pace with a faster lifestyle.

So, besides the fact that I resent to coupling of “feminization” with “deskilling,” I think Kumar’s critique falls a bit short. He notes the problems with this scenario of the extinction of middle managers and skilled workers, which are substantial. But he offers no real alternative. If he implies an argument against the implementation of washing machines as they put washers out of work, then should we slow technology in order to keep people at work? The jobs that are being optimized through machines are perhaps jobs no one ever dreamed of when they were growing up. The jobs that remain—nurse, personal assistant, lawyer, hairdresser—are perhaps more desirable jobs. I’m strongly opposed to the idea of curtailing technology in order to preserve jobs that people are perhaps better without in the first place. The solution is not to keep unskilled workers in their unskilled jobs, but to emphasize education to give them skills. Or to look at other skills “unskilled workers” have, such as language facility, home repair, etc. No one is “unskilled,” of course. And while I may be setting him up as a straw man here, Kumar’s characterization of plumbers and store managers as sham-professionals indicates his own isolation in the ivory tower. I’d like to see him fix his own bathtub or schedule a slew of part-time workers! Perhaps then he would be convinced that even those outside of the new “knowledge economy” help to keep it going.

the digital divide

Last year, I did a project where I interviewed a number of people in my age group who were at varying levels of comfort with technology. During one of my interviews, a woman noted that she felt cheated, not only because her little brother got better access to the computer, but also that her time in the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe really screwed her in terms of catching up with technology. So when Pippa Norris describes the social and the global divide, I think I know what she's talking about.

It's always hard to evaluate or comment on an argument when it's heavily edited, as Norris's intro on the Digital Divide is in the Information Society Reader, but it does make me wonder just how we're doing now. She laments that non-industrialized countries are failing to "catch up" to industrialized ones in terms of use of technology. She wrote the book in 2000, but is this still the case now, in 2006? Certainly tourism and outsourcing are thriving, partly based on internet connectivity in industrious countries like India.

I do see the "digital divide" as a problem, and I'm particularly interested in the gender divide, which Norris only mentions briefly here (but again, with the editing, it's possible she addresses it in depth in the full work). But I also wonder, is this "lagging behind" paradigm the most useful one in order to view the situation? The language seems to reify positions. What if, instead, we looked at the types of uses of networking in various societies? So perhaps Malaysia's not going to come up with the next amazon.com, but perhaps there's a use of the internet that would be far more pertinent to its political, social and religious issues. We live in a capitalist society, and it's easy to view everything through that lens, but I'm not sure that it gets us very far.

THE CORPORATION

Herbert Schiller's "Data Deprivation" brought to mind a documentary I watched a few months ago, The Corporation, in which the filmmakers traced the increasing privatization of what we would normally think of as public goods. Like Schiller, they brought up the legal identity of the corporation as as individual, and demonstrated how that identification could result in the deprivation of actual individual rights.

I buy a lot of the argument, and certainly feel the fear of ClearChannel and other media conglomerations. But I still read the New York Times and other corporate media.

I think that the internet has allowed a bit more diversification of media outlets, but I can see that the main players in print and television media are still the main players in internet news, perhaps with the notable exception of google, which really just collates the news from other corporate sources.

Even though Google exists, I think we still lack good sorting mechanisms. The information may be out there, but how do I even know what to search for? As Schiller suggests, if information is disappearing, how do I know? Would an ideal search mechanism be a kind of amazon user reviews of news, tailored specifically to my tastes and interests? And then, what if I should know something I don't want to know? And can we trust an algorithm for our information?

missing the dot.com boat

Zook's book made me speculate a lot about my own travels through life during the late '90s and early '00s. Mostly I wonder: why didn't I get a job at a dot.com in San Francisco, rather than working on my teaching certification? That calamitous climax of capital called to me as I finished up my undergrad degree, but I chose another path. There were good reasons for me to do so--there always are--but I could have used a wild and speculative experience like that in my relative youth. Eventually, I found my way into technology in the year 2000, although this was in the software rather than the internet industry. I'm certainly less behind the times now than I was before 2000, but once you miss the boat with technology, it's hard to catch up. Perhaps this is similar to what Zook describes with the venture capitalists; once you have funding, it's easy to get more, but when you need it, it's tough to get it.

geography of the internet industry, part 1

I'm finding Matthew Zook's Geography of the Internet Industry a refreshing change of pace from all of the highly theoretical stuff we've read about abstract "spaces of flows" etc. Sometimes I feel this visceral reaction to those abstract theories, and I wonder: how does that work in practice? What does that really mean? And then I wonder whether asking those questions means I absolutely belong in grad school, or whether I'm not built for it at all.

In particular, I find the street-by-street maps Zook includes here to be saying something important. Our cities aren't dying at all; they're simply consolidating power, and in the same old places as always. So perhaps all those "futurologists" (how would you like to put that on your business card?) are wrong in predicting that tech people would move out of the cities because they no longer needed them to do work. But Zook isn't naming the end of a trend; he's simply showing where domain names and internet industry are now (or at least, in the late '90s and early '00s). I can't see cities dying because there's just too much tangible, physical goodness about them--stuff that smart of techie people like, such as good restaurants, theater, bars, shops, other techie or smart and interesting people, etc. But what about suburbs? Those only exist as hatching grounds for city-workers' children. Really, what are the advantages of suburb life over mid-sized cities such as Madison? If workers are no longer required to commute to work, they can live where they want (provided they can get good connections, which is nontrivial) and raise their children in the relative safety of non-metropolitan areas. And if this is true, does it just mean that childless or young or older people will dwell in cities? I seem to remember hearing a story on NPR about the disappearing demographic of children in cities. But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself here in being a futurologist myself!

the body is obsolete?

I don't think it's going to happen. I know Donna Haraway and other cyborg theorists think this is TEH FUTURE. But I just don't see how people will reject their bodies. I know the success of the World of Warcraft may contradict my assertion, and I know that virtual commutes and remote workplace logins are the way we're headed, but I can't buy into the mid-90s vision of the cyborg body network thing that Anne Balsamo describes from the novel Synners. Several key trends that show we won't forget the body:

• specialty bath products
• renewed interest in alternative medicines and healing practices like yoga and massage
• the cult of Whole Foods and eating pleasures
• SEX

That's right. Even if the rest of them are just trends, sex will keep us grounded and in our bodies. Cybersex, as much as Mark Foley has made it part of our world recently, just isn't the same.

so you wanna be a symbolic analyst?

Robert Reich's succinct desciption of the three jobs of the future is a refreshing break from the overthought theory of Urry and others. Not that thinking is a bad thing! The tongue and cheek job description list I've seen before, but as a former "Administrative Assistant" and "Research Specialist," I have to admit that I still find it amusing.

But I wonder... What about all those who are not employed by transnational corporations? I like the three categories of jobs that Reich outlines, but with the doggedly determined presence of small businesses, I know not everyone has a stake directly in this economy. Of course, it's all related but... And education still follows the old-school promotional system, in public schools as well as in university settings. Isn't education still somewhat local, while everything else is somewhat global? Maybe I'm just looking for counter-examples.

imagine a spherical cow...

When John Urry describes some of the assumptions of the "old" sociology in "Mobile Sociology", I am reminded of that joke about scientists--that they can figure out anything just by rounding the corners a little bit, making just a few, light assumptions. Of course, if you calculate anything based on spherical cows, your results are likely to be...ahem...manure. I can't buy his critique that sociology thought of societies as bounded before, but must see them as fluid now. Haven't trade routes and places of cultural contact been the staples of sociological study for ages? If sociologists had always calculated their studies based on the spherical cows of bounded societies, without adding any kind of nuance, I can't imagine how the field could have survived this long. Of course, I'm not a sociologist.

I think that our society is changing rapidly, and there is a kind of "global flow" or whatever coinage each theorist tries to promote to describe that phenomenon. However, Urry's claim that society doesn't really exist because everything flows and has such indistinct boundaries--well, I don't get it. Of course things must be simplified to talk about them, but then one needs to add the legs back into the cow in order to get any real picture of what's going on. Even complexity theory is a necessary simplication. But we shouldn't throw out paradigms and theories because they're simplified. Instead, we need to acknowledge their simplicity and interpolate from there.

Incidentally, I think the question of whether Urry is concentrating only on business and economics is a brilliant one. How does art function in this societyless-society? He admits that certain cultural rituals such as flag waving point to a national identity. But what about the cultural products of art? And, haven't humans always had a society with "inhuman" objects with which they interact? Think horses, wheels, fire, trains, etc. Since these objects are refractions of human society, or at least, they are so when they're used by humans, do they really disturb Berger and Luckman's claim that humans and society mutually shape each other?