THE MYTHOLOGY OF PROGRESS

Communication breeds democracy
Whatever Al Gore’s claims to inventing the internet, neither the technology nor the ideology surrounding it are new. Already, in the 1950s, a whole mystique of electronic progress was being put in place, which had to do with the advent of a post-industrial society and the end of ideologies and political commitment. We were being told of a coming global society that would be informed and structured by communication - and of a future that would belong to American democracy and market forces.

By Armand Mattelart

The IBM publicity machine told us, not at the height of the internet explosion, but way back in 1977, that it was now generally accepted that we had entered a new post-industrial era in which the decisive factor was the ability to use information. The new age would, it said, be known as the information age.

Factories for producing ideas and images around the notion of information as a new immaterial resource were already working to capacity. The new technologies were high on the agenda in the world’s major industrial economies, and the notion of the information society began to feature in the research programmes of governments and international organisations - by 1975 it had appeared in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and four years later in the European Union.

With the boom in deregulation and privatisation, the myths of the information age crossed paths with those of the age of globalism. In March 1994 Al Gore, then United States vice-president, announced his project for information highways - the Global Information Infrastructure - the glittering promise of a new Athenian agora for the "great human family". In that same year governments first began talking about the "new economy". Then in February 1995 a meeting of the world’s richest countries in Brussels (the G-7) endorsed the notion of a "global society of information" and began to free up the world’s telecommunications markets. And at this May’s European summit in Lisbon, the Fifteen decided to make the internet the linchpin of Europe’s economic development policies. How did all this come about?

During the second world war intelligent machines were built for breaking enemy codes, controlling ballistic missiles and manufacturing the atom bomb. At the end of the war, scientists were excited by the idea that these technologies might be converted for civilian use in peacetime. Already, in 1948, the father of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, saw information technology as a way of preventing humanity from plunging back into "the world of Belsen and Hiroshima" (1). But if the various "means of collecting, using, storing and transmitting information" were to function properly, information had to be allowed to circulate without restriction. And that was where money and power made their presence felt.

Wiener’s was too much of a sceptic to believe in the mystique of science’s infinite capacity for progress which, in 1945, had led Vannevar Bush, the inventor of the first electronic analogue calculator (1931) and chairman of the US national defence research committee, to propose a programme of massive government research funding to accelerate the advent of the "post-historical era". Such hopes were soon crushed by the realities of the cold war.

Wiener’s humanist perspective is far removed from the mathematical communications theory formulated in 1949 by one of his former students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Claude Shannon, a laboratory engineer with the Bell Telephone company (2). Shannon’s approach to information was strictly physical, quantitative and statistical. The problems involved calculating probabilities: find the most efficient coding (in terms of speed and cost) for a telegraphic message to reach its destination.

This mechanistic model, which is only interested in the process of transfer, derives from a behaviourist (stimulus-response) concept of society. The person receiving the message becomes, in a sense, a clone of the transmitter. Constructions of meaning do not figure in Shannon’s programme and the notion of communication is divorced from that of culture. As the commentator James W Carey pointed out, this way of treating communication derives from a world-view that is characteristic of American society: the concept of culture is weak and evanescent in sociological thinking (3). These were the models of communication that soon spread internationally.



The answer to everything

The notion of "information" soon turned into a catch-all that seemed to be the answer for everything. And since many social science disciplines were keen to share in the legitimacy enjoyed by the natural sciences, they willingly set up Shannon’s theory as a paradigm.

The fuzziness surrounding information also surrounded that of the "information society". It became increasingly common to see information on the same level as statistical data and to see information only where a technical mechanism is involved. Thus a purely instrumental concept of the information society began to emerge. The social "placelessness" (atopia) of the concept led to a blurring of the socio-political issues involved in a term which is, after all, reckoned to encompass the future of the world in which we live.

The cold war provided the setting for a range of ideas intended to announce, if not to explain, that humanity stood on the threshold of a new information age and, therefore, of a new universalism. This setting was created in three distinct areas: the social sciences; forecasting; and geopolitics.

The first operation was to pronounce the death of the preceding age - the age of ideology - which, according to those intent on burying it, was the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. An early move in this direction was a meeting organised in Milan in September 1955 on the theme of "the future of freedom". It was organised by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organisation set up in Berlin in 1950 and financed, apparently without the knowledge of its organisers (4), by CIA funds channelled via a private foundation.

Among the people attending were the economist Friedrich A von Hayek; Raymond Aron, the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals; and US sociologists Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset and Edward Shils. Their agenda included the end of the age of ideology, the end of politics, the end of classes and class struggle - but also the end of committed intellectuals and of political commitment. Sociological analysis was held to be sweeping away the old ideological assumptions and establishing the new legitimacy of the figure of the "Western liberal intellectual".



The age of managers

Another recurrent thesis, first posited back in 1940 by the US philosopher James Burnham, breaking with the (trotskyist) Fourth International, was based on the notion of the managerial revolution and the irresistible rise of "organisation men". These would be the bearers of a new society - the managerial society - which prefigured a convergence between the opposing poles of capitalism and communism.

A community of thought was emerging. As Daniel Bell described it two decades later, a number of sociologists - Aron, Shils, Lipset and himself - were beginning to see the 1950s as characterised by the end of ideology (5). In 1960 Bell, also an ex-trotskyist sympathiser, wrote a book called The End of Ideology. Between 1965 and 1968 he chaired the Commission on the Year 2000 set up by the American Academy of Arts and Science and, within that framework, he worked on the concept of post-industrial society.

In the 1960s it became acceptable to imagine that there were objective methods for exploring the future. In 1973 Bell wrote The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, where he joined his earlier thesis of the end of ideology to the concept of post-industrial society (6). This society - known as the information or knowledge society - would be free of ideology. Bell was in the business of forecasting, hence the subtitle of his book: A Venture in Social Forecasting. Extrapolating trends that were already visible in the US, he draws up an idea of an ideal society. This society is characterised (a) by the growing power of elites whose power rests on the new "intellectual technology" directed to decision-making; and (b) by the pre-eminence of the scientific community, a charismatic community which is universalist, disinterested and without ideology. This is a hierarchical society, run by a welfare state that is centralised and involved in the planning of change (hence the stress on the role of "monitoring" and "assessment" of technological change). It is allergic to networked thinking and to the notion of "participative democracy", brought onto the political agenda in the US by the advent of cable TV.

In this society, where the economy is tending to provide more technical and professional services, growth is linear and exponential. The prevailing nexus of history-modernity-progress conforms to the model of mathematical information theory and to the model of development outlined by Walt W Rostow in 1960 in his Stages of Economic Growth (7). According to his theory, progress would come to so-called backward countries via the spread of the values of countries that were seen as "grown-up". The name of this transition, coined by sociological modernisation theory, is westernisation.

Uncertainty about the prospects for growth, combined with the "crisis of governability in western democracies", was soon to sap the foundations of this initial schema for the information society (8). But who cared about the contradictions? The fact was, this scientistic vision successfully planted the idea that the science of organisation was taking over from politics. This is a society which is functional and runs according to the principles of scientific management. It is no accident that Bell’s pantheon of predecessors includes Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, FW Taylor, and Robert McNamara, former head of the Ford Motor Company, architect of the rationalisation of the Pentagon in the early 1960s and future president of the World Bank.

The production of forecasting scenarios became big business. "Professional prognosticators" were offering their services to governments and companies, who were hungry for advice and willing to pay. This was how the public first came to learn of the new era of info-technology.

We also had Herman Kahn and his Hudson Institute predicting in 1967 (in the context of the Commission on the Year 2000 chaired by Bell) that in post-industrial (and post-scarcity) society, people would work no more than five to seven hours a day, four days a week and 39 weeks a year.

Then came the independent consultant Alvin Toffler, author of the best-selling Future Shock (1970) and The Third Wave (1979), whose brief, according to Time magazine, was to "bring futurism to the masses" (9). This ex-marxist was clear about the functional purpose of social forecasting. In order to avoid the trauma of "future shock", people needed to be encouraged into a desire for the future. The horizon of expectations that he opens up includes interactive democracy, a "demassification" of the media, production geared to consumer needs, pluralism, full employment and flexibility. It also includes an end to the "dangerous anachronism" of the nation state, and conjures up a new split - between the old and the new - which would take over from the split between the rich and the poor, between capitalism and communism.



Network diplomacy

"Interactive democracy" now refers to the projects for wired towns that think-tanks have been proposing, which are to be the experimental testbenches for the new techno-communitarian ideology. As it happens, Nicholas Negroponte, prophet of the cyber-era, author of Being Digital (10) and a shareholder in Wired, the magazine for surfers, was working on these kinds of urban perspectives for the Rand Corporation before he set up MIT’s media lab in 1979.

From the late 1960s the geopolitical substructure which legitimated the notion of the information society as a global society became explicit in the analyses offered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, specialist in problems relating to communism and future national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, on the international consequences of the convergence between informatics and telecommunications (11).

His central thesis was as follows: thanks to its mastery of worldwide information networks, the US has become the first global society in history, the one which communicates the most; the model of global society represented by the US prefigures what will happen in other countries at a later date; it is inevitable that the new universal values will radiate outwards from the US and will capture the imagination of the entire world, leading people to copy them. His conclusions were: the end of gunboat diplomacy; the end of notions of imperialism, Americanisation and pax americana; and long live network diplomacy!

Three decades later the political commentator Joseph S Nye and Admiral William A Owens, advisors to the Clinton administration, were saying more or less the same thing when they proposed the idea of "soft power" as the basis of the new doctrine of global security: "Knowledge, more than ever before, is power. The one country that can best lead the information revolution is the United States. The information edge is equally important as a force multiplier of American diplomacy, including "soft power"—the attraction of American democracy and free markets" (12).

Global information society has breathed new life into the ideal of westernisation, which many thought obsolete after the failure of strategies inspired by the ideologies of development-plus-modernisation. In his Post-Capitalist Society, Peter Drucker drives the message home: the educated man of tomorrow must expect to live in a globalised world which will be a westernised world. As a theoretician of management, he argues for a grand alliance between managers and intellectuals, as the necessary precondition for the success of the planetary project, led by the knowledge industry. Their points of view are opposed, he says, but they are opposed "like two poles that are inseparable and non-contradictory": each of them needs the other (13).

Class on Networks/visualization of Networks

Resources for complex visualization of networks
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

java open source data visualization applet
http://www.touchgraph.com/

Enron scandal
http://jheer.org/enron/

They rule from Futur Farmers
http://www.theyrule.net/2004/tr2.php

A visual thesaurus
http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Marc Lombardi
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1487185