Economy

This week's readings highlighted a set of tensions foregrounded by the Internet and other new communication technologies, all with integral economic implications. These include, in no particular order, tensions ...

Between information and material goods.

Between stability and fluidity of both information and material goods.

Between commodity and gift.

Between freedom (or openness) and profitability (or control) of information.

Or, put another way, between centrally held control and distributed control.

Or even between structure and something close to anarchy in our information environment.
Between competition and monopoly (or at least oligopoly).

Between producers and consumers of information and (other) goods.

Between people as consumers and people as citizens ... or between capitalism and democracy.
Between the powerful and the relatively powerless, both within and among societies (and about potential shifts in power structures and relationships).
Between developed and developing nations.
Other tensions?

The readings also raise -- but do not necessarily answer --questions about how to address or resolve these tensions.

What are our viable options for optimizing the public good (whatever that might look like) and safeguarding the public interest (ditto) in relation to emerging technologies?

The FCC argues that we no longer live in a media world of either limited resources or distinct industries. We therefore need new regulatory structures to fit the world we DO live in: one of both corporate “convergence” and info abundance.

Government’s role, the FCC says, should primarily be to get out of the way. The best way to safeguard the public interest is to allow the market to work naturally in this new media world.

Do you agree?

Two excerpts from a book titled Living in the Information Age offer nearly opposite takes on the effects of media corporatization.

McChesney argues that:

* The media industry is highly concentrated and vertically integrated, allowing a handful of global powerhouses to control ownership of both content and the means of distributing it.

* There is no real opposition to this structure, which allows mostly Western conglomerates to determine the news and entertainment products that virtually everyone in the world consumes.

* These companies do not really care what the content is. They do care whether it's profitable.

* The political bias is inherent and implicit: "Consumerism, class inequality and individualism tend to be taken as natural and even benevolent, whereas political activity, civic values and anti-market activities are marginalized."

Compaine disputes many of these claims:

* The notion of a handful of all-powerful transnational media giants is overstated.

* U.S. companies do not dominate the global media; in fact, the current environment is marked by a plurality of voices. Technologies such as the Internet level the playing field more than ever and make vastly more information available.

* Corporate ownership is not killing hard-hitting journalism because it never existed to any significant extent anyway. A greater number of media outlets means more and better news from more diverse perspectives than ever before.

* Most media are inherently local. Global firms do not peddle homogeneous content because it wouldn't sell if they tried.

* Stricter media regulation "in the public interest" -- which tends to mean "interested publics," a very different thing -- is dangerous and unnecessary. On the contrary, relaxing broadcast regulation may serve to expand competition.
What's your take ...?

Castells is a widely cited author on the subject of "the informational economy." In the excerpt you read, from a book titled Reading Digital Culture, he outlines five key features:

Sources of productivity based on knowledge and technology (that is, on information).

A shift from material production to information-processing activities.

An organizational shift to emphasize flexibility, adaptability, and the customization of products and processes.

The global nature of the inforamtion economy.
An ongoing revolution in technological infrastructure.

... All of which contribute to a fundamental shift in how wealth is generated, as well as in how knowledge is created and used.