How to Think about Information
Holly Gail Thomas · Canadian Journal of Communication · 2009
Following the tech bubble burst of the late 1990s and early 2000s, many predicted an inevitable decline in information industries.However, in his recent book How to Think about Information, Dan Schiller suggests this dismissal may be far too hasty.In an era where media convergence has become the norm, Schiller's book is timely.While we watch TV on our computers, listen to radio broadcasts on our iPods and surf the Internet on our cell phones, Schiller exposes the political-economic roots and forces contributing to these media and technological trends that we often take for granted as objective innovations.Schiller examines not just the convergence of technology but also explores how information emerges as a commodity in the converging fields of culture, media, and telecommunications.By engaging the "transformative political-economic changes occurring throughout the realm of information technology and culture" (p.xiii), Schiller locates the recent acceleration of the commodification of information within a history of telecommunications development and policy to expose the emergence of a contemporary form of U.S. domestic and global informationalized capitalism.With several prominent works to his name, Schiller's recent piece represents twenty years of interest and work on the information age.In this work, Schiller contends that "if we wish to understand the motive, force and direction of contemporary society, it is still necessary to think about information carefully and in an extended way" (p.xiii).Schiller approaches this lofty goal by examining the roots of informationalized capitalism and explicating how informational activities have been socially transformed into profit-making commodities through a variety of political-economic trends both in the United States and globally during the past century.By grounding his arguments in a rich amount of empirical evidence, Schiller makes a convincing case for the continued relevance of information in our global digital age.The crux of Schiller's argument is simple: information is a now a commodity-a product of waged labour and thus subject to market laws.However, when we move beyond the surface, we find more complexity as Schiller argues that information is not inherently a tradable commodity; it is subject to cultural and social forces and therefore has only become a commodity under certain capitalist conditions that have enabled an accelerated process of information commodification since the 1970s.Therefore, information has no intrinsic value; it is only assigned economic value under capitalist market conditions.By exploring the complex interdependency between information and culture industries, governmental policies and transnational telecommunications corporations, Schiller argues that information as a commodity has become the dominant perspective, usurping notions of information as a social and public good.True to his political economy roots, Schiller's book focuses less on post-modern theoretical and broader cultural shifts in how we think about and reconceptualise information.Instead, it exposes the intersection of historical trends leading to a marketized state of informationalized capitalism through the recent acceleration of the commodification of information.While Schiller has an occasional tendency to reify concepts such as information, culture, and capital, he is also quite thorough in moving beyond technological determinist attitudes and exposing the social actors behind capitalist and political forces that are driving the evolution of modern telecommunications systems.By looking to the past to understand the recent and arguably ongoing crisis in telecommunications, Schiller retains Reviews