Response: Barney and Andrejevic

This week I am responding to Prometheus Wired: The Hope ofr Deomcracy in the Age of Network Technology by David Barney and iSpy: Surveillance and Poer in the Interactive Era by Mark Andrejevic.

This week’s prompt:
[…]But what is the central reason for this disagreement: what, in other words, do the optimists “just not get” about digital media, according to Barney and Andrejevic? Do you think that the latter two writers might consider the work of the optimists to be a twenty-first century version of what the Marxists called “ideology”?

Barney’s disagreement with the digital optimists seems to be similar to my disagreement with Hayek. I was annoyed with Hayek because I felt that in his idealistic exaltation of “maximum freedom of individual choice,” he was completely ignoring the reality of the many powerless people exploited by the choices of those who have the power to exercise their freedom of choice. Barney makes a similar argument. Although it may be true that the implementation of network and computerized technologies in the workforce would result in a net increase of jobs, as the creation of new types of jobs would outbalance the elimination of manufacturing jobs, Barney points out that those who held the eliminated jobs are not necessarily hired immediately into the new jobs (often, he says, they are not). He seems to feel that the digital optimists try to reduce human lives and all the implications therein to numbers: “The point here is that, even if jobs eliminated by network technology are eventualy replaced by jobs ‘elsewhere’ in the economy, the fact of their elimination is more significant in the lives of the people who held them than is their replacement with a job for somebody somewhere else” (135).

I wonder how Norbert Weiner would respond to Barney’s argument. I interpreted Weiner’s argument in The Human Use of Human Beings to be that both machines and humans have their place in production, and that once machines become available to fill certain tasks, they should be implemented, thereby freeing humans up for more appropriate activities. Weiner feels that to place a human in a job that should be given to a machine is to degrade the human. The human mind should be stimulated, not demeaned to menial, mindless tasks. As such, I think he would approve the use of network technologies that eliminate jobs in the manufacturing industry and the creation of more human appropriate jobs, although there are some positions which have been replaced with machines that he would probably not approve. However, it is difficult to make such an idealistic argument in the face of Barney’s numbers and unemployment rates. Would Weiner maintain that machines should still be implemented, and that concurrently targeted efforts should be made to reintegrate those who lost their jobs into the workforce in new positions?

Andrejevic seems to disagree with the idea that the interactive nature of the internet will lead to a more egalitarian society. For him, this same interactivity praised by digital optimists is one of the key elements in the creation of digital enclosure. Despite claims towards egalitarianism, Andrejevic recognizes that someone still controls and has access to all the information that is exchanged through digital interaction. In an information economy, information is a kind of currency, and, according to Andrejevic, we willing turn over large amounts of this currency to the controllers of the information systems, creating an informational hierarchy: “A similar division of groups can be discerned in the emerging digital enclosure between those who control privatized interactive spaces (virtual or otherwise), and those who submit to particular forms of monitoring in order to gain access to goods, services, and conveniences” (3). Andrejevic does not buy Kelly’s idea that “the web runs on love, not greed.” The controllers of “privatized interactive spaces” only want to exploit the information of “those who submit” for profit.

I found reading the opening pages of iSpy and Andrejevic’s description of Google’s plan for contextual advertising. Today, contextual advertising is an everyday occurrence, and while it is sometimes annoying, we don’t generally view it as having the same sinister qualities as does Andrejevic. Is this because it is really not so sinister after all, or are we just desensitized? Are we so used to submitting to the information controllers so we can get the goods and services we want that we cease to resent such advertising as an uninvited invasion of our privacy?