“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/3/135622/4413 and “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/2/104034/7861 have an interesting debate on whether the term “information age” is a metaphor, synechdoche or a description of a more-or-less tangible empirical phenomenon. I’ll have more to say about this soonish when I finish reading Bruce Abramson’s “Digital Phoenix”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0262012170-0 ; but in the meantime want to recommend those interested in this question to Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-1565847709-2 (which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/henwood-seminar on in 2004).
Update: And “Ed Kilgore”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/3/233228/5444 jumps in too, arguing, as best as I can tell, that skepticism about the information age is rooted in nostalgia for a 1950’s version of social democracy, that only ever applied to the “aristocracy of labor” in the North.
{ 8 comments }
John Quiggin 06.04.05 at 2:30 am
The idea that the ‘information age’ is some sort of all-purpose justification for free market policies, referred to by Matt and Mark, is surprisingly prevalent.
Prima facie the opposite is true: the fact that information is a public good makes market provision highly problematic. And whatever Abramson may predict (I’ve only looked at the summary you linked to), experience so far is that the information non-economy of free exchange has boomed while the information economy of dotcoms, strong IP and so on has floundered.
Publius 06.04.05 at 3:08 am
Always like Larry Lessig’s take on this type of thing: http://www.freeculture.org
Michael Turner 06.04.05 at 8:34 am
Peter Drucker was talking about knowledge-driven organizations even as far back as the 50s. If you really want to push it: Lincoln practically lived in the telegraph room during the Civil War, sometimes starting to dictate responses even as the message was still coming in, and he hired and fired several generals that he’d never personally met, using the digital network of the time.
Obviously you can’t take “Information Age” literally, or you’d have to start with the beginnings of human language. It’s hard to take it as synecdoche (ah, spelled it *right*) either: information is not a technology, it’s something that happens inside brains. In any other sense, it’s just data or mechanical control elements — did we think of a loom’s ‘program’ or a piano roll as containing ‘information’? Did we think of the resulting textiles of the player piano’s tinkling as being ‘informed’ by that ‘information’? No, but now we do, full of wonder and surprise, like the dude who was astonished to discover he’d been speaking prose all his life.
Yglesias’ comment section on this subject (or more specifically, on what “info-politics” means, if anything) dissolved rather hilariously into a back-and-forth gripefest about the presentation style and typography of his blog comment section. The Age of Informational Involution, anyone?
“Info-politics” should be consigned to the dustbin, unless you want to also talk about the infopolitics of radio — yielding FDR and Hitler — or the infopolitics of television — yielding Estes Kefauver, the death of a thousand self-inflicted cuts of McCarthy’s career during the Army-McCarthy hearings, Kennedy’s win over Nixon in 1960, and so on.
“Info-politics” is in a class with that horrible neologism, “cybergovernment”, in which both “cyber” and “govern” derive from the same Greek root: kubernetes (Greek that’s more clearly fossilized in the amber of Latin in the word “gubernatorial”.) We’ve had “Info-politics” for as long as we’ve had politics.
Nobody talks about the Space Age anymore, much less the Atomic Age. This too shall pass. Just not soon enough for me. One of these days, I’ll finish Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age — ah, now *that’s* a technological horizon truly worthy of such a name.
MNPundit 06.04.05 at 11:23 am
From a anonymous comment on that thread at TPMCafe:
“I am sorry to say that they sound too much like what one expects to hear in a graduate seminar in political science or sociology.
If dems think that these type of discussions will lead to some sort of understanding as to what it will take them to win elections, we are all screwed.”
I can’t help but agree with that (and I did).
Keith 06.05.05 at 3:23 pm
“Information Age” is a metaphore, in as much as it means anything at all. It is simply a shorthand phrase constructed to squeeze a large set of ideas into a box big enough to hang your hat on. Nothing more. To take it as a justification for plicy or something that refers to a tangible artifact is mistaking the map for the territory, as Korzybski used to say.
Michael Turner 06.06.05 at 12:45 am
I’m sorry, I don’t trust the metaphor-parsing instincts of anyone who would shift their metaphor from box to hatrack within five words.
And what’s in this box? There’s little agreement on what this “large set of ideas” comprises. By contrast, there are an awful lot of social implications that one can trace from the working of stone, the casting of bronze, and iron, and, if you will admit an Age of Steam, from the ability to substitute the burning of wood and coal for animal and human labor.
I’d like to be making an error as egregious as mistaking the map for the territory, even if the diagnosis came by way of a crank like Korzybski. That way, at least, I’d know there was a map. As it is, nobody has handed me a map of Information on which I can tell north from south. And no wonder: a map of Information is going to be a map of maps, since maps are information and all information requires mapping of some sort (in the mathematical sense, at least) to be coherent. It’s inherently involutional, not directional.
So let me call it the Age of the Electron, and date it roughly from the inception of telegraphy. Nobody will follow suit, but that’s OK — at least I’ll have squeezed it into a box that’s *small* enough to hang my “size: microcephalous” hat on, just in case I ever have to flee in the night with only a few meager possessions.
James Wimberley 06.06.05 at 7:48 am
Fot the farthest-out take on the issue, go back to the master himself, Marshall McLuhan, apparently chanelling another visionary/fruitcake, Teilhard de Chardin:
“The Christian concept of the mystical body – all men as members of the body of Christ – this becomes technologically a fact under electronic conditions.”
Source: Tom Wolfe, “Digibabble, Fairy Dust and the Human Anthill”, reprinted in the collection “Hooking Up”, NY, 2000. Unfortunately Wolfe does not give a proper reference for this amazing citation. Any offers?
Another prophet was Rudyard Kipling, whose fine poem “The Deep-Sea Cables” – on the Net eg at http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/deepseacables.html – concludes:
“And a new Word runs between: whispering, “Let us be one!†“
bi 06.06.05 at 12:51 pm
James Wimberley, Rudyard Kipling might well be referring to the creation of Microsoft Word and the monopolistic company behind it, or the rise of a certain famous German Chancellor, or any of a thousand other things.
I say, we’re in the “Dang-How-The-Hell-Do-I-Sort-The-Wheat-From-The-Chaff?” Age.
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