Myth and Reality of the "Information Age"

One test of the scientificity of a research program is how it responds to counter-evidence. One of the basic hypotheses underlying this effort is that the inherited organizational forms of the revolutionary left have been rendered incapable of decisively shaping events, rather than simply reacting to them, by the changes of social relations triggered by recent technological developments in the means of communication. And that therefore, to continue to test the basic hypotheses of proletarian revolution requires setting such forms aside and investigating the forms the emergent forms of proletarian political organization. (It's worthwhile to restate this from time to time, since the excurses on the likes of Badiou and Mészáros, made necessary by the need to define such terms as "scientificity", "hypothesis" and even "event" by way of counterposition, can distract from that.)

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, while hardly concerned with questions of political organization (revolutionary or otherwise), presents a serious challenge to one of the underlying assumptions of that hypothesis: Namely, that we are currently living through a qualitative change in the ways that human beings interact with one another as mediated by communicative technology. The article, 5 Myths About the 'Information Age' by Robert Darnton, a librarian at Harvard, does not negate that assumption outright, but complexifies it, and does so with supporting data.

(I have access to the article from work, but I think it's behind a pay-wall. My apologies to those who can't access it. To avoid a DMCA violation, I am not going to reproduce huge block quotes, but I will do my best to fairly reproduce the argument.)

Darnton begins by speaking of a kind of "collective false consciousness," a pretty classic definition of ideology. Darnton does not explicitly say so, but we can discern that there is a kind of fetishism at work in the generation of such a consciousness, in which the interconnection of a series of cables, storage devices and processors relaying the words and other data of a finite set of human beings is reified (transformed into a thing)--and moreover, treated as a sentient being with its own imputed consciousness, functioning and properties that are taken to exist and develop independently of the actions of the people who govern it and interact through it. We have a signpost here of something to avoid whenever discussing the topic.

Darnton identifies five basic "myths" that constitute this "collective false consciousness," this ideology of informationism if I may coin a phrase:

1. "The book is dead."
2. "We have entered the information age."
3. "All information is now available online."
4. "Libraries are obsolete." (Understandably a major concern of his, given his profession, and the reason why this article was being buzzed about for over a week among librarians of my acquaintance before it came to my attention.)
5. "The future is digital."

What I would contend is that whereas Darnton's counterarguments to myths 1, 3 and 4 are unassailably factual, the arguments against myths 2 and 5 are no less ideological than the myths themselves, and are based on a misperception of the nature of historical transformation.

For example, his counterargument to Myth 5 points to an important set of historical facts, and then completely misses their significance: "Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing actually expanded after Gutenberg and continued to thrive for the next three centuries. Radio did not destroy the newspaper; television did not kill radio; and the Internet did not make TV extinct. In each case, the information environment became richer and more complex. That is what we are experiencing in this crucial phase of transition to a dominantly digital ecology."

Missing from this is any sense of the role played by a predominant mode of communication in transforming social relationships, or of the possibility of "combined and uneven development," whereby societies or social strata that went relatively untouched by an earlier revolution of technique "skip stages" and find themselves disrupted by the latest developments. Let me present a thought experiment that is based on historical precedents that can be documented. Imagine a hitherto isolated village in a developing country where there are only a few literate individuals, all from elite strata: Perhaps a landlord, a cleric, and/or a schoolteacher. The Gutenberg revolution has barely touched this place. To learn about political developments in the capital, or in other parts of the world, most of the people are dependent upon the good will of those educated individuals, an uncertain prospect with little promise of reward.

Now, in comes a radio. (How the radio comes in is an important variable, but to start out I'll try to abstract from that.) It has information that is clearly, immediately useful--crop price reports, weather forecasts. It has entertainment of various types. But it also has other sorts of information that are now readily accessible that had not been before: News of national and international political developments. It has other information that is not presented as such, from which the villagers can learn, such as exposure to the spoken dialects of urban areas or other parts of the countryside. What does this do to the power relations within the village? To the various forms of political consciousness (class, national, religious) among the peasantry? In several political uprisings of the 20th century, the radio played a significant role in the crystallization of political consciousness among the peasant class.

Note that it did not release that peasant class from a state of intellectual dependency. In each of these cases, the political tone was set by a dominant or emergent urban class with access to the technical prerequisites for dissemination and an existing political program to govern what was to be disseminated (e.g., the urban proletariat in the case of Russia 1917, or the radicalized intelligentsia on Cuba's "Radio Rebelde"). Radio did not give the peasantry its own voice. But it made it possible for it to play a political role on a national or even international scale that could not have been foreseen in the 19th century, when Marx could honestly say that "the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes." The change in technical means of communication did not dictate either the existence or the outcomes of those revolutions. It did not solve the manifold problems of the peasantry. In fact it created new problems, but it also created new means by which to attempt to solve both the old and the new problems.

Nor did it render print communication obsolete. The mass literacy campaigns that followed both the Russian and the Cuban revolutions stand as evidence of that. But the significance of literacy had been transformed by the advent of radio.

Darnton's response to Myth #2 is even more ideological in nature: "[E]very age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time. No one would deny that the modes of communication are changing rapidly, perhaps as rapidly as in Gutenberg's day, but it is misleading to construe that change as unprecedented." A precedent or a metaphor, however, is not an explanation. The fact of rapid change is not unprecedented. The nature and content of those changes, however, may well be unprecedented, or at least so different from prior changes as to limit the value of any precedent.

Darnton has a basic presumption of the essential gradualism of historical change, revealed by way of negation when he claims that these myths "present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts—before and after, either/or, black and white" and argues for a "more nuanced view". Yet the example he provides of his own most recent scholarly work undermines that very presumption. His most recent book "describes how street songs mobilized public opinion in a largely illiterate society. Every day, Parisians improvised new words to old tunes, and the songs flew through the air with such force that they precipi­tated a political crisis in 1749." His point in giving the example is to talk about how great it was to bundle an electronic supplement with recordings of those songs.

But let's look at it from another angle, in comparison to the recent uprisings in the Arab World. Consider the spread of the slogan "ash-sha'ab yurid isqat an-nizam" (the people want the fall of the regime). Instead of it spreading within a single city, it has become the watchword of a diverse range of mobilizations spreading across a continent-sized stretch of states. Its rhythmic qualities account for that in part. So does the fact that one can hear it readily--on radio, on Al-Jazeera, or on YouTube. The role of song and poetry as a means of spreading political consciousness and resolve can appear as a constant, from Paris in 1749 to the Arab World in 2011. But the differences are too significant to downplay: In France before the revolution of 1789, there was barely a common language linking the capital city to the provinces, or the provinces to one another. In the Arab world today, while it is broken into a series of prison-states, and there are a wide variety of local dialects, there is a standard common language that has been spread through radio, television and now the Internet which is readily understood and used.

Revolutions--sudden, rapid moments of transformation that impose a black and white, either/or, before and after structure to our understanding of the world--happen, and revolutions matter. Revolutions in technique (in the forces of production, of which the forces of communication are a subset), social revolutions (in the relations of production) and political revolutions (in the ways of governing the predominant relations of production) are distinct from each other, but interact upon and can hasten or retard one another.

The ideology of informationism, the fetish of the Internet as an unknowable thing-in-itself, presents the technical revolution as the only one that matters, tearing it out of its historical, political and social context and ruling out transformations in those realms as irrelevant. Thus it junks the past and leaves us stuck in an eternal present mis-labeled "the Future". But the notion that the technical revolution is unreal, insignificant, or can be leveled off into a gradual accretion of purely formal changes is just as a a-historical as the denial of any other revolution (including the ones happening right before our eyes).

We do not live in the "information age". We still live in the capitalist age. But we need to recognize the changes in how that dominant mode of production is propagating itself, and is being combated.