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 | | Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines by Mark Poster ISBN-10: 9780822338390 ISBN-10: 0-8223-3839-4 ISBN-13: 9780822338390 ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-3839-0 Paperback 2006 Duke University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Information Please advances the ongoing critical project of the media scholar Mark Poster: theorizing the social and cultural effects of electronically mediated information. In this book Poster conceptualizes a new relation of humans to information machines, a relation that avoids privileging either the human or the machine but instead focuses on the structures of their interactions. Synthesizing a broad range of critical theory, he explores how texts, images, and sounds are made different when they are mediated by information machines, how this difference affects individuals as well as social and political formations, and how it creates opportunities for progressive change. Poster’s critique develops through a series of lively studies. Analyzing the appearance of Sesame Street’s Bert next to Osama Bin Laden in a New York Times news photo, he examines the political repercussions of this Internet “hoax” as well as the unlimited opportunities that Internet technology presents for the appropriation and alteration of information. He considers the implications of open-source licensing agreements, online personas, the sudden rise of and interest in identity theft, peer-to-peer file sharing, and more. Focusing explicitly on theory, he reflects on the limitations of critical concepts developed before the emergence of new media, particularly globally networked digital communications, and he argues that, contrary to the assertions of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, new media do not necessarily reproduce neoimperialisms. Urging a rethinking of assumptions ingrained during the dominance of broadcast media, Poster charts new directions for work on politics and digital culture. | ||
Reviews | ||
Difficult but Rewarding Book In this book, Mark Poster attempts to provide a philosophical framework for understanding the significance of the rise of computers, the Internet, and the other digital technologies. His argument is that the diffusion of these new technologies results in "complex couplings of humans and machines..." ( p. 9) that calls into question some of the central ideas of our time. The discussion starts with postcolonial theory and then moves on to recent theories of empire, citizenship, identity, ethics, psychoanalysis, intellectual property rights, everyday life, and consumer culture. It is an ambitous work and difficult to read in passages, but the effort is worth it. What, according to Poster, is wrong with postcolonial theory? It "presumes a proximate relation of colonizer and colonized that obscures the transculture of new media..." (p. 31). This "transculture" produces "cultural objects (words, texts, sounds, and images) [that] are progressively removed from territorial space into physical realms of electrons, sound waves, and light pulses that are less palpable to the human senses and less subject to control by established institutions, especially the nation-state and the corporation" (p. 35). As a result, "Individuals no longer form identities exclusively through local practices" (p. 36). Poster provides examples of this in India and the Indian diaspora, where Indian employees of call centers have adopted American accents and names and the Internet is used by diasporic Indians to maintain their Indian identities and ties with one another across great distances. In the Introduction, the author tells a story about a child who imagined that telephone operators who worked the "information please" switchboards actually had the answers to important questions. In Chapter 1, he explains how an image of Bert of Sesame Street fame came to be found on a political poster in Bangladesh extolling the virtues of Osama bin Laden. The point of these two interesting stories is to highlight the potential of digital technology for promoting both enlightenment and confusion. Chapter 5 deals with identity in the digital age by focusing on a new form of criminal activity, identity theft. Poster argues that the concept of identity evolved from a notion first of consciousness (in the writings of John Locke) and then of personality (notably in the work of Eric Erikson) to the contemporary notion, embodied in laws about identity theft, that information about individuals stored remotely on computers constitutes an identity that can be stolen. According to Poster, "What's stolen is not one's consciousness, but one's self as it is embedded in (increasingly digital) databases" (p. 92). The argument is that humans and machines are merging, that cyberspace is eroding the boundaries between public and private (p. 93), and that "we might search for new configurations of selfhood that keep open spaces of resistance..." (p. 115). In Chapter 7, Poster posits that the Internet forces its users to reexamine their pre-existing ethical frameworks. Networked, digitized information media cut across territorial boundaries of cultural groups. They juxtapose differences in a homogeneous medium. They bring together individuals with common interests but divergent nationalities and traditions...They disrupt the narcissism of the familiar, the identifications with the same. (pp. 159-160) As a result, conventional or traditional notions of ethics are disrupted and Poster is hopeful that a new less parochial ethics will emerge. Chapter 8 reviews Freud's ideas on psychoanalysis and argues that these ideas have to be updated in light of the new "bodies" that are coming into existence with the more intense human-machine interactions of the digital age. Not just the Cyborgs featured in movies like Terminator and the books of Donna Haraway, but also the ordinary humans who cruise the Internet, carry cell phones, talk endlessly into BlueTooth headsets, and shop in bar-coded supermarkets. According to Poster, the body is now more plastic and less culturally constituted that it was (p. 162). Parents no longer maintain as much control over how children use and think about their bodies (pp. 171-175). Children also have their identities shaped by the "stereos, televisions, telephones, game consoles, and networked computers" (p. 175). This does not replace the influence of parents, and does not eradicate the Oedipal complex; it just makes the complex more complex (p. 180). Chapter 9 deals with the issue of intellectual property rights, especially those connected with recorded music and films, and the difficulty of defending those rights when digital audio and video content is stored on networked computers. Poster takes a strong stand in favor of everyone's rights to share cultural material digitally and in opposition to the efforts of the recording and film industries and their allies to protect existing revenue streams by proposing new laws to prevent file sharing. He belittles the arguments of the recording and film industries that intellectual property laws need to be enforced in order to create an incentive for creative and innovative activity. He claims that these industries are just protecting their own income streams and their control over artefacts created by others. He suggests instead that we "must invent an entirely new copyright law that rewards cultural creation but also fosters new forms of use or consumption and does not inhibit the development of new forms of digital cultural exchange..." (p. 209). Chapter 11 focuses on the theories of Michel de Certeau about the complexity and importance of consumption in postmodernity. Poster argues here that markets for noncultural commodities are or should be different from markets for cultural artefacts. In the former, the distinction between producers and consumers remains stable, whereas in the digital age the distinction between producers and consumers of cultural goods is eroding. "In blogs, massively multiple online games, and peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, consumers are tranformed into users, creating content as they download it" (p. 249). Better examples of this would be the networked collaboration that produces encyclopedia entries to Wikipedia, amateur videos on YouTube, or remixes of digitized audio tracks made available on web sites by performers. The point is that cultural markets should be regulated in such a way as to protect the sharing that is essential to innovation. There is a brief and somewhat pessimistic concluding chapter that contrasts the liberating potential of digital technologies with the potential for greater central control (governmental or corporate) that may result from the erosion of the private-public divide. This argument is similar to that contained in Lawrence Lessig's book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). I was surprised that this chapter did not return to the earlier themes of human-machine coupling, but I suppose that theme is implicit in the argument about the liberating potential of digital technology. To summarize, this is a far-ranging and complicated book on a very important subject (the social impact of digital technology) by a major critical political philosopher. It breaks new ground in a number of areas and provides some excellent criticisms of a variety of approaches that are likely to lead (or already have led) to conceptual dead ends. It is not easy reading and requires a certain amount of patience to get through passages that are filled with philosophical jargon that you may be excused for promptly forgetting. Nevertheless, Poster has written a book with a lot of interesting ideas that I am certain will be read with profit by the growing community of scholars trying to get a handle on the politics of cyberspace. | ||