Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

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Critical media and information studies

The basic idea of this chapter is to reflect on how the notion of critical theory can be applied to information studies and media studies. What does it mean to study information and media in a critical way? First, some theoretical foundations of media and communication studies and information science are outlined (section 3.1). Then some theoretical foundations of critical media and information studies are discussed and a typology of approaches in this field is introduced (section 3.2).It is shown how dialectical thinking can be used as an epistemological and methodological tool for critical media and information studies that question technological determinism (section3.3) and for theorizing the informatization of society (section 3.4). Some conclusions are drawn in section 3.5.

3.1 Information science and media and conununication studies 'The title "Communication Studies" covers a vast area of interest and embraces many different disciplines, including journalism, telecommunications, social psychology, physiology; linguistics and semantics' (Gill and Adams 1998, vii). Communication studies 'seeks to understand the production, processing and effects of symbol and signal systems' (Berger and Chaffee 1987, 17). McQuail (2005, 18) identifies six types of communication studies: intrapersonal communication studies, interpersonal communication studies, intragroup communication studies, institutional and organizational communication studies, and mass communication studies. Media studies deal with the production, diffusion and use of communication technologies such as 'television programmes and/or adverts, photographs, films either on video or in the cinema, newspaper articles (or the newspapers themselves), radio programmes and/or jingles, billboards, video games or web pages' (Rayner et ale 2004, 3). These definitions show that communication refers to a symbolic interaction process between human subjects, whereas a medium is an artefact/object/technology that enables communication. Information science is that discipline that investigates the properties and behavior of information, the forces governing the flow of information, and the means of processing information for optimum accessibility and usability It is concerned with that body of knowledge relating to the organization, collection, organization, storage, retrieval, interpretation, transmission, transformation, and utilization of information. (Borko 1968, 3)

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'Information science deals with specifically oriented information techniques, procedures, and systems' (Saracevic 1999, 1056). First, information science is interdisciplinary in nature, however, the relations _ with other disciplines are changing. . . . Second, information science is inexorably connected to information technology . . . Third, information science is, with many other fields, an active participant in the evolution of the information society: (Saracevic 1999, 1052) 'Information science is the study of the characteristic of information and how it is transferred or handled. It is concerned with the way people create, collect, organize, label, store, find, analyse, send, receive and use information in making decisions' (Tenopir 1985, 5). 'The task of information science can then be defined as the exploration of this world of objective knowledge' (Brookes 1980, 125). In many definitions of information science, one finds the aspect that this field deals with the analysis of the need, production, collection, storage, organization, diffusion, transformation and use of information. Information science covers phenomena such as cognition, semiotics, information classification for libraries, information behaviour, the design and the study of the effects of I~ and information society: Information science and media and communication studies have different histories and traditions, but their topics of study are to a certain extent overlapping. In information science, there is a strong focus on computer technologies and library science, whereas in media and communication studies computer technologies are just one area of study besides other media. Topics such as information, human cognition, human communication, ITs and information society can be found in both media and communication studies and information science. As these two academic fields seem to have overlapping topics of research and teaching, it is important to establish critical approaches in media and communication studies as well as in information science. I therefore use the term critical media and information studies and am trying to contribute some foundations of how critical theory and critical research can look like in both traditions. Phenomena such as models of information and communication, computer and Internet usage, the effects of contemporary media and new media on society; or the information society are important topics in both information science and media and communication studies. If one considers critical studies as important for analysing and theorizing these phenomena then the task arises to discuss and diffuse critical theory and critical research in both these academic traditions. An engineering perspective and a social sciences and humanities perspective shape information science. In media and communication studies, one fmds various disciplinary perspectives about the media (legal, economic, political, psychological, cultural, social, technological, etc.). Both fields are multidisciplinary in character. The study of the interrelationship of information and communication technologies (leTs), mobile technologies, the Internet, and so on, and society has been labelled with categories such as Internet research, leTs and society, social informatics, informatics and society; new media research, information society theory; information society research/studies, community informatics, Internet studies, web research, and so on. Basarab Nicolescu (2000) speaks of transdisciplinarity in the context of the analysis of different levels of

Critical media andinformation studies 77 reality that are united in transdisciplinary research. The need for trans disciplinary . research arises in contemporary society because of the complexity of its problems that affect many interconnected realms of existence (Klein 2004; Lawrence and Despres 2004). Social science and computer science are the two different levels that are united in ICTs and society research. Nicolescu (1997, 2000) identifies three central aspects of transdisciplinarity: the concept of levels of reality; the logic of the included middle ('there exists a third term T which is at the same time A and non-A, Nicolescu 2000), and complexity Transdisciplinarity concerns the dynamics engendered by the action of several levels of Reality at once. The discovery of these dynamics necessarily passes through disciplinary knowledge. While not a new discipline or a new superdiscipline, transdisciplinarity is nourished by disciplinary research; in turn, disciplinary research is clarified by transdisciplinary knowledge in a new, fertile way. In this sense, disciplinary and transdisciplinary research are not antagonistic but complementary. (Nicolescu 1997) For connecting computer science and the social sciences, a unity that maintains the disciplinary diversity can be constructed by an included third, by social philosophy; Based on such a general mediation, concrete studies of ICTs and society are possible that are grounded in theoretical foundations. Transdisciplinarity or 'mode 2 research' means the mobilization of a range of theoretical perspectives and practical methodologies to solve problems. But, unlike inter- or multi-disciplinarity; it is not necessarily derived from pre-existing disciplines, nor does it always contribute to the formation of new disciplines. The creative act lies just as much in the capacity to mobilize and manage these perspectives and methodologies, their 'external' orchestration, as in the development of new theories or conceptualizations, or the refinement of research methods, the 'internal' dynamics of scientific creativity; (Nowotny et al. 2003, 186) ICTs have resulted in the tendency of the convergence of traditional media in the digital medium. They shape and create changes in all realms of human society ICTs and society is a field that is very important for both information science and media and communication studies. It tends to overcome a clear separation between these two fields; research and theory in the new trans disciplinary field are conducted based on both perspectives. Although some scholars claim that the field of ICTs and society is an interdiscipline (Duff 2000, 180), a new discipline (Vehovar 2006), or an indiscipline (Shrum 2005), a widely held position is that it is a trans disciplinary field (Fuchs 2008; Hunsinger 2005; Lamb and Sawyer 2005; Sawyer and Tyworth 2006). ICTs and society is both part and no-part of information science and media and communication studies: it is an important research topic for both fields, but at the same time requires that they acquire a transdisciplinary methodology; In this context, William

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Merrin (2009) argues that media studies l.Ois based on the broadcast model and tends to ignore or downplay the importance of digital media: Although mainstream media studies has not ignored digital media it has, however, largely treated it as a topic that can still be understood through its broadcast-era concepts and categories: as an addition to the broadcast media ecology rather than as a fundamental transformation of its systems of media production, distribution, consumption and use. Digital media is too often included as a last chapter of textbooks: a location simulating contemporary relevance whilst ignoring the impact of digital technologies and use upon all the preceding chapters. It is also still seen as an 'optional knowledge within the discipline for lecturers and for students - best positioned as a final-year specialist module students may work their way up to, having been tutored in the core of the discipline. Despite growing up within and living in a digital media environment, and despite their excitement at that environment driving them to the subject, first-year students are rarely allowed near digital media in their introductory modules. (Merrin 2009,21£) Merrin concludes that, for studying digital media, an updated version of media studies (media studies 2.0) is needed. The same can be said about information science. For analysing digital media, both fields need to acquire a transdisciplinary character, which also means that their disciplinary boundaries become blurred and that they tend to converge. Ellis (1992) identifies a physical and a cognitive paradigm in information science. Hjerland and Albrechtsen (1994, 410ff) distinguish the following paradigms of information science: the object paradigm, the communication paradigm, the behavioural paradigm and the cognitive paradigm. These four approaches would be 'distinctly individualistic'. They suggest the approach of domain analysis as collectivist counterpart in information science. Over the last few decades, information science has experienced a shift from a predominantly objectivist view of information theory to focus on the phenomena of relevance and interpretation (Capurro and Hjerland 2003). Various detailed reviews (ibid.; Cornelius 2002; Machlup and Mansfield 1983) identify three approaches to information: the mechanistic approach, the cognitive approach and the constructivist approach. Capurro and Hjerland (2003) make a distinction among (1) information theory; (2) the cognitive view and (3) domain analysis, sociocognitivism, hermeneutics and semiotics. They interpret the first as objective, the third as subjective, and the second as position between the two. This mapping stands in contradiction to the one given by Hjerland and Albrechtsen (1994), who consider cognitive approaches as individualistic/subjectivistic and domain analysis as collectivistic. Saracevic (1992, 1999) argues that there are three general characteristics of information science: (1) its .interdisciplinary character, (2) its connection to IT and (3) it is an active participant in the information society Saracevic (1992) says that information science vacillates between human and technological ends. The objectivistic focus on IT as tools for transmitting data, as represented by Shannon's and Weaver's information theory; was challenged in information science by

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Table 3.1 Results from a Delphi study on how to defme information science - six models of information science Scope

Domain

Mediating

Model (1) Hi-Tech

Data

Information

Knowledge

Message

Focusing on the mediating aspects of D-I-K-M as they are implemented in computer-based technologies Model (2) Technology Focusing on the mediating aspects of D-I-K-M as they are implemented in all types of technologies Focusing on the mediating aspects of D-I-K-M as Model (3) Culture/ Society they are implemented in human societies Inclusive (all Model (4) Human Focusing on all aspects of D-I-K-M as they are aspects) World implemented in the human realm Model (5) Living World Focusing on all aspects of D-I-K-M as they are implemented in the livingworld Model (6) Living and Focusing on all aspects of D-I-K-M as they are Physical Worlds implemented in all types of biological organisms, human and non-human, and all types of physical objects Source: Zins 2007b, 341.

a turn towards understanding information as a quality of cognizing human subjects. Bertram Brookes (1980) argues that a knowledge structure can be subjective or objective and is changed by the addition of information, so that a transformed knowledge structure emerges: K(S) + ~I = K (8 + ~8). The central feature of this formula is that cognitive states of knowledge (Popper's world 2) are transformed by external information (documents, Popper's world 3). This means that information science, according to Brookes, is interested in how Popper's world 3 shapes world 2. 'The physical paradigm takes as its primary focus the artefacts, whereas the primary focus of the cognitive paradigm is the people' (Ellis 1992, 60). The cognitivist paradigm was later again challenged by a number of information science scholars. Hjerland and Albrechtsen (1994) argue that cognitivism is individualistic and that a realistic and collectivistic approach is needed. According to them, domain analysis is an information science approach that analyses knowledge in discourse communities. Capurro (1992) argues for a pragmatic turn in information science that conceives information as holistic, hermeneutic, social and pragmatic. He stresses the social character of information and the importance of information sharing. Capurro, Hjerland and Albrechtsen argue for a social science turn, a turn towards society; in information science. Chaim Zins conducted a Delphi study of how to define information science and its basic concepts. Fifty experts participated in defining information science. Zins (2007b) summarized the results in six models of how to defme information science (seeTable 3.1). Twenty-eight experts participated in mapping the field. Zins (2007a) characterizes 26 of the resulting maps as reflecting the culture model, one as reflecting the living and physical world model, and one as being very general. Zins' study shows that it is an important question for information science in which domains of reality information can be found. Physical systems, biological systems,

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human systems, society;technological systems and computer systems are levels of reality that experts in information science consider important for discussing information. The information theory paradigm in information science operated with information models (1) and (2). The cognitivistic turn brought about an extension of the understanding of information towards the inclusion of model (4). The turn towards society has created interest in model (3). Models (5) and (6) can also be found in information science, but according to Zins they only playa minor role. In recent years, the possibility of combining critical theory and information science and information systems research has been stressed (Cecez-Kecmanovic 2005; Day 2001, 2005, 2007; Howcroft and Trauth 2005). Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991) have distinguished three approaches in information systems research: positivist, interpretive and critical approaches. They have shown that the positivist approach is the dominant one and have introduced critical information systems research as the third type of approach in information systems research. 'Critical studies aim to critique the status quo, through the exposure of what are believed to be deep-seated, structural contradictions within social systems, and thereby to transform these alienating and restrictive social conditions' (ibid., 5£). In the years following the publication of the foundational article of Orlikowski and Baroudi, critical information systems research has been further elaborated and has especially been connected to Frankfurt school critical theory: Advances in critical information systems research have been documented in the Handbook of critical information systems research (Howcroft and Trauth 2005). However, 'critical IS research is not yet established as a valid and legitimate option' in information systems research (CecezKecmanovic 2005, 19). Critical information system researchers 'assist in demystifying the myths of technological determinism and inevitability of particular IS designs' (ibid., 35). Critical IS research specifically opposes technological determinism and instrumental rationality underlying IS development and seeks emancipation from unrecognized forms of domination and control enabled or supported by information systems.... Critical IS researchers produce knowledge with the aim of revealing and explaining how information systems are (mis)used to enhance control, domination and oppression, and thereby to inform and inspire transformative social practices that realize the liberating and emancipatory potential of information systems. (Cecez-Kecmanovic 2005, 19) Ronald E. Day (2001, 120) argues that information science has treated information mainly as a 'reified and commoditized notion'. The unwillingness of research on information to actually attempt to situate a culture of information and communication in terms of interested and powerful social and historical forces is evident by even a brief glance at journals in information management or information studies or in policy papers. Coupled with the dominant tendency of such research to be 'practical' in the service of professional and business organizations and in the service of military and industrial research projects, research in information simply shies away from critical

Critical media andinformation studies 81 engagement, as well as from foundational, qualitative, or materialist analyses, especially from that which is seen to employ 'pretentious', 'political', or, equally; 'foreign' vocabulary; let alone philosophical or Marxist analyses. (Day 2001, 116£) Ajit K. Pyati (2006) suggests that critical information studies should be based on a Marcusean infusion because Marcuse's notion of technological rationality allows explaining why information is primarily treated as a commodity and thing in contemporary society and contemporary library and information studies. Marcuse's notion of one dimensionality would allow deconstructing the neoliberal discourse that argues for the privatization and commodification of information and libraries as ideologies. These approaches show that questions of power and domination have thus far been rather ignored in information science and information systems research, but that there are promising approaches that have worked towards establishing critical information studies. Information science does not primarily engage in the task of the intellectual deconstruction of power structures that shape information. If the turn from information theory towards cognitivism is characterized as the first turn in information science and the turn from cognitivism towards society as the second turn in information science, then we can argue what is now needed is a third turn in information science from considering information in society towards considering the power structures of information in society: The third turn of information science is one towards a critical theory of information, IT and information society: Anthony Giddens (1984, xx) sees the 'division between objectivism and subjectivism' as one of the central issues of social theory Subjective approaches are oriented on human agents and their practices as primary object of analysis, objective approaches on social structures. Structures in this respect are institutionalized relationships that are stabilized across time and space (ibid., xxxi). Integrative social theories (such as the ones by Roy Bhaskar (1993), Pierre Bourdieu (1986a), Anthony Giddens (1984) or Margaret Archer (1995)) aim at overcoming the structure-agency divide in social theory Burrell and Morgan (1979) combined the distinction between subject and object with the distinction between continuity and discontinuity to identify two axes that set up two dimensions so that four different approaches can be identified in social theory: radical humanism (subjective, radical change), radical structuralism (objective, radical change), interpretive sociology (subjective, continuity) and functionalism (objective, continuity) (see Figure 3.1). The problem with this approach is that in contemporary social theory there are approaches that cross the boundaries between the four fields and that the four paradigms therefore can no longer be strictly separated. The distinction continuity/ discontinuity remains valid in political terms. So for example the approaches by Roy Bhaskar (1993), Pierre Bourdieu (1986a), Anthony Giddens (1984) and Margaret Archer (1995) have in common that they are based on a dialectical subject-object integration. Bhaskar and Bourdieu are overall critical of class society that they want to abolish, whereas Giddens and Archer want to transform modernity; but overall aim at its continuation. The approaches by Bhaskar and Bourdieu could therefore be described as integrative-radical change models, the ones by Giddens and Archer as integrative-continuous theories. This requires certain changes to the typology of Burrell and Morgan that are shown in Figure 3.2.

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Theory Radical change RADICAL HUMANISM

RADICAL STRUCTURALISM

Objective

SUbjective

FUNCTIONALIST SOCIOLOGY

INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY

Continuity

Figure 3.1 Four paradigms of social theory identified by Burrell and Morgan (1979) Radical change RADICAL HUMANISM

RADICAL STRUCTURALISM

RADICAL CHANGE INTEGRATIONISM Subjective

Objective

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATIONISM

INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY

FUNCTIONALIST SOCIOLOGY

Continuity

Figure 3.2 A refmed version of Burrell and Morgan's typology

A number of communication scholars have stressed that it makes sense to use the typology developed by Burrell and Morgan for identifying different approaches in communication studies and communication theory (Deetz 1994; McQuail 2002; Rosengren 1993, 2000). 'This scheme is equally helpful in mapping out the main alternative approaches to media theory and research, which have been

Critical media andiriformation studies 83 seriously divided by their chosen methodologies and priorities, as well as by their degree of commitment to radical change' (McQuail 2002, 5). 'It is highly relevant when trying to understand different traditions within the study of communication' (Rosengren 2000, 7). Robert T: Craig (1999) has identified seven traditions of communication theory that are based on how communication is defined (see Table 3.2). Although Craig's approach is very relevant and his article (ibid.) has been one of the most frequently cited articles in communication studies in the 2000s, he does not specify an underlying distinctive criterion for his typology; which gives it a rather arbitrary character. Therefore, it makes sense to combine his seven traditions of communication theory with the refined version of Burrell and Morgan's typology The results are shown in Figure 3.3. Figure 3.3 shows that critical communication studies are primarily characterized by their radical change perspective, the analysis of how communication contributes to domination and how ways can be found that communication can take place in a dominationless way within a participatory society: This also means that there are subjective, objective and subject-object-dialectical approaches within critical communication studies. Craig mentions several boundary-crossing approaches that can be considered as representing attempts at combining some of the four fields"in Figure 3.3: Kenneth Burke, David S. Kaufer and Kathleen M. Carley (rhetoric-semiotics); Briankle Chang and Richard L. Lanigan (phenomenology-semiotics); David S. Kaufer and Brian S. Butler (cybernetics-rhetoric); Klaus Krippendorff (cyberneticsphenomenology); John C. Heritage, Gerald T: Schoening and James A. Anderson (sociocultural studies-phenomenology-semiotics); W. Barnett Pearce (sociocultural studies-rhetoric-cybernetics); Rayme McKerrow (critical studies-rhetoric); Robert Hodge, Gunter Kress and Norbert Fairclough (critical studies-semiotics). For Craig, the characteristic that distinguishes critical communication studies from rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, and sociocultural traditions of communication theory is that for critical communication theory, the basic 'problem of communication' in society arises from material and ideological forces that preclude and distort discursive reflection .... Fundamentally; in the tradition of Marx, its point is not to understand the world . . . Its point is to change the world through praxis, or theoretically reflective social action. (Craig 1999, 147£) Craig worked out the specifics of critical studies and other traditions in communication studies. It should be added to Craig's account of critical communication studies that this approach is not only about the analysis of those conditions that distort communication, the ways how communication is embedded into relations of domination, but also about finding alternative conditions of society and communication that are non-dominative and about struggles for establishing such alternatives. Craig (1999, 120) argues that 'communication theory has not yet emerged as a coherent field study' and that this fragmentation can be overcome by constructing 'a dialogical-dialectical disciplinary matrix' that enables the emergence of a conversational community;

Table 3.2 Seven approaches of communication theory according to Craig (1999) [the examples are mentioned in Craig (1999) or Craig (2007)] Type of approach:

Rhetorical

Communication theorized as:

Semiotic

Phenomenological

Cybernetic

Sociopsychological

Sociocultural

Critical

The practical art Intersubjective of discourse mediation by signs

Experience of otherness; dialogue

Information processing

Subjective

Subjective

Objective

Symbolic process that reproduces shared sociocultural patterns Objective

Discursive reflection

Subject/object

Expression, interaction and influence, behaviour in communication situations Subjective

Examples

Aristotle, lloyd Roland Barthes, Wendy LeedsE Bitzer, Kenneth Burke, Hurwitz,]ohn Thomas B. Locke, Charles Farrell, Sonja Morris, Charles Foss, Cindy Sanders Peirce, Griffm, Stephen John Durham W. Littlejohn and Peters and Ferdinand de Plato Saussure

Martin Buber, Briankle G. Chang, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Algis Mickunas, JosephJ. Pilotta and]ohn Robert Stewart

Gregory Bateson, Annie Lang, . Niklas Luhmann, Claude Shannon, Paul Watzlawick, Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener

Objective

Subjective/ objective Albert Bandura, Peter L. Berger, Theodor W. Charles R. Berger, Deborah Adorno, Stanley Richard]. Cameron, A. Deetz, ]urgen Calabrese, Carl Thomas Habermas, Max Hovland and Luckmann, Horkheimer and Marshall Scott George Sue Curry Poole Herbert Mead, Jansen Mark Poster andJames R. Taylor

Critical media andinformation studies 85 Radical change RADICAL HUMANISM: Critical communication studies

RADICAL STRUCTURALISM: Criticalcommunication studies

RADICAL CHANGE INTEG.RATIONISM: Critical communication studies Subjective

CONTINUOUS INTEGRATIONISM

ACTOR THEORIES: Rhetoricalcommunication, Phenomenology, Socio-psychological communication, Socio-cultural communication

Objective

FUNCTIONALISM: Cybernetics, Semiotics

Continuity

Figure 3.3 A typology of communication theories a common awareness of certain complementarities and tensions among different types 'of communication theory; so it is commonly understood that these different types of theory cannot legitimately develop in total isolation from each other but must engage each other in argument. (Craig 1999, 12~) The same can be said about critical communication studies as a subfield of communication studies: a disciplinary matrix of critical communication studies can enhance the dialogue between various subfields of the subfield, such as critical theory, critical political economy; cultural studies, feminist theory; postcolonial theory; queer theory and new social movement approaches in critical communication studies, so that common assumptions and differences about what it means to conduct critical studies of communication can emerge. Diana Iulia Nastasia and Lana F: Rakow (2010) characterize the mainstream of communication studies as puzzle-solving science or investigation: the object or problem of analysis is taken for granted, it is a form of hypothesis testing, promotes measurement and the search for laws of communication, it extends the model of the natural sciences to communication studies, and disavows opposition and crossdisciplinary dialogue - it is positivist in character. Based on the study by Horkheimer (1937/2002), we can therefore say that the mainstream of communication studies is a form of traditional science that operates with instrumental reason (Horkheimer 1947/1974) and technological rationality (Marcuse 1964b) as underlying principles. Nastasia and Rakow see critical communication studies as puzzle-making inquiry that is opposed to the puzzle-solving positivist mainstream. 'Theory as puzzlemaking or map-making is an oppositional approach, one that challenges status-quo and questions the settled, one that calls for cross-disciplinary readings and trans-disciplinary

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flexibility' (Nastasia and Rakow 2010, 8). Critical communication studies (puzzleand question-making inquiry) are seen as being challenging, oppositional, disruptive, subversive and as uncovering power relations and empowering the oppressed (ibid., 11£). Todd Gitlin (1978, 206) characterizes the mainstream of media sociology as taking for granted that the media 'exist in a corporate housing and under a certain degree of State regulation' and that they thereby justify 'the existing system of mass media ownership, control, and purpose' (ibid., 205). It would be based on a fetishism of facts, abstract empiricism, an administrative point of view, marketing orientation, and an hierarchic ideology: It ignores that research driven by countability too easily becomes hostage to the political project deemed thinkable, fundable, and feasible at the moment - which often, not always but often, turns out to be precisely the political project that can be quantified on a relatively safe issue. (Gitlin 1990, 189) The ignorance of broader societal issues and of the critique of power is characteristic not only for the two-step flow model of communication but also for other approaches that have shaped media and communication studies, such as the hypodermic needle model of communication, the uses and gratification approach, the agenda setting approach or certain versions of cultural studies. Stuart Hall (1982) describes the existence of a behavioural approach in media studies that he characterizes as ignoring class formations and economic processes, assuming that the media have to play the function of expressing and reflecting an achieved consensus in society It is based on 'brutal, hard-headed behaviouristic positivism' (ibid., 59). On the one hand, Hall argues that this approach was very early challenged within media studies by the Frankfurt school approach, and on the other hand, he describes a late break with the emergence of what he terms the critical paradigm of media studies. He associates this paradigm with the assumption that the media also favour and legitimatize 'the existing structure of things' (ibid., 63). For Hall, the critical paradigm is -bound up with cultural studies, the rediscovery of the ideological dimension of the media, struggles over meaning, the view that the media are not reflections of consensus, but institutions that 'help to produce consensus and which manufactured consent' (ibid., 86), and 'the return of the repressed' (ibid., 88). The analysis of the repressive role of the media and how they shape the lives of repressed individuals and groups and of the media's role in the stabilization of the status quo is characteristic for all forms of critical media studies, such as critical political economy approaches, Frankfurt school critical theory or critical cultural studies. However, Hall sees the analysis of ideologies as an important quality of the critical media studies paradigm that he describes and he sees the analysis of the commodity aspects of the media as rather problematic (ibid., 68). This shows that his understanding of critical media studies is too narrow and tends to exclude critical political economy approaches that are in some cases (e.g. Dallas Smythe, Nicholas Garnham) more interested in the analysis of media capital accumulation strategies, media concentration and so forth than in ideology critique. Although Hall's understanding of critical media studies is too narrow; his discussion shows that a significant difference between information

Critical media andiriformation studies 87 science and media studies is that critical approaches have besides positivist approaches shaped the history of twentieth century media studies and have become important forces within media studies, whereas they have rather remained peripheral and marginalized within information science. Objective notions of information, such as the classical Shannon-Weaver model, see information as a thing that can be treated in certain ways. It can be no accident that such a definition has become the mainstream model of information in the Western world during the twentieth century: In contemporary information society; the 'meaning of information is reduced to the exchange of knowledge about the world. It is neither related to the formative sensory processes themselves nor to moral enhancement' (Capurro 2009, 130). If information is seen as a thing then it is obvious to argue that it should be treated as a commodity Just like humans, who sell their labour power as commodities, milk that is sold in a shop, cars that are sold by car dealers or stocks that are sold on financial markets. The objective notion of information is the foundation of the rise of ITs that are based on the computer and therefore on binary logic. IT has become an important commodity itself and a medium of advertisement for commodities, and for the selling and transport of information commodities. Therefore, information in its IT form is close to the commodity form and has therefore undergone a process of reification that can also be termed commodification (Fleissner 2006). Commodification, the treatment of social relations as commodities, certainly is not the only type of reification today: One can for example see rape, warfare, media manipulation, racism and xenophobia and so forth as other forms. But commodification is certainly a central form of reification, with which all other forms of reification are articulated. The logic of technological determinism that argues that there are technological fixes to societal problems is an expression of reified consciousness. Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski (2002, 2008) has in contrast to reified information concepts stressed the importance of the unity of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of information. He considers information as a triad of form (syntax), content (semantics) and effects (pragmatics). The very logic of IT is itself one of reification: computers are based on mechanistic logic. Each input produces an exactly determined output. Computers do not have freedom of action, there is no chance and indeterminacy in binary logic. Computers are un dialectical systems. They know no blurring of boundaries, just the logic of either/ or. Dialectical logic in contrast operates based on the logic both/and. Therefore, the computer could also be seen as a reified system, one that is based on technological rationality and instrumental reason. The danger in speaking of a computerized society; an information society; a virtual society; a cybersociety; a digital society or an IT society is that we reify society itself that the metaphors of IT or the computer result in a generalization of the undialectical qualities of the computer to society Lukacs (1923/1972, 89) sees calculability as a central aspect of reification processes. In such processes, humans have to function like parts of a machine (ibid.). Each time when humans are reified, for example, if they are manipulated by the media or have to sell their labour power to survive - processes that were described with the category of instrumental reason by Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) and the category of undialectical one-dimensionality by Marcuse (1964b)- we could also say that humans are computerized, they are reduced to the status of things. The logic of the computer - its

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strict instrumental separation - generalized to society is a process of establishing fascism. In a provocative manner, one could therefore say that fascism is inscribed into the computer, and to avoid a fascist society;we need political regulation of society that avoids negative effects of computer usage. In an even more provocative way; one could say that the computer scientist is the prototype of instrumental reason and therefore always a potential (but not necessarily an actual) fascist. To avoid the realization of these fascist potentials, ethical, normative and critical thinking is needed already in the education of computer scientists. The mass extermination of Jews in extermination camps such as Auschwitz is the ultimate form of reification - the treatment of humans no longer as human, but as things that can be arbitrarily used, abused and killed. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944/2002) argued that Auschwitz is the ultimate result of the modern unfolding of instrumental reason. If instrumental reason is also the immanence of the computer then also Auschwitz is potentially inside of the logic of the digital machine, but not only there. Auschwitz constructed a terroristic binary either/ or: Jew/ Aryan - dead or alive. Auschwitz itself was a giant negative machine, a machine of destruction of humans based on digital logic. Auschwitz is the ultimate digital machine of capitalist society Auschwitz is the computer of modernization. Defining information as thing advances foundations of reifying information. Such definitions should therefore be considered as being ideologies. Lukacs (1923/1972, 100) stressed that reification of information is an aspect of the reification of humans and society Reification stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality; they are things which he can 'own' or 'dispose of' like the various objects of the external world. (Lukacs 1923/1972, 100) In summary; it can be said that capitalistic computationalism (the techno-deterministic view that humans and society are (binary or dual) machines that are reducible, programmable and calculable) is based on instrumental reason (Golumbia 2009; Weizenbaum 1976). If we want to avoid a second Auschwitz, then we certainly need not abolish IT, but we need to shape society and techno-social systems in ways that avoid the reification of humans and establish a new form of rationality that is based on the notion of co.. operation, a logic in which all benefit. The information society is in its capitalistic form (informational capitalism) a highly instrumental society: Therefore, a second Auschwitz might be dawning and needs to be circumvented by all means. Exclusion, oppression, exploitation and warfare are omnipresent and ubiquitous in contemporary society: These phenomena can turn into massive projects of repression. Information and IT are functional parts of repression (Fuchs 2008). The precondition for establishing a humane society is that we put an end to reification. The end of reification is at the same time certainly the end of class society and capitalism. A second type of definition of information is the subjective one. The most prominent subjectivist approach in my opinion is radical constructivism that sees all knowledge as strictly individually constructed. Radical constructivism is therefore based on the worldview of individualism. Individualism is also the ideology that underlies bourgeois society in the form of the notion of private property of the means of production.

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This fundamental bourgeois human right conflicts with another human right, the one of equality Capital accumulation has again and again resulted in socioeconomic inequality, as the history of capitalism has shown. If you consider knowledge as an individual creation, you are bound to celebrate individual creativity A standard legal argument is that individual inventions and creativity need to be protected by property laws. If knowledge is considered as individual creation then the call for intellectual property rights that make sure that knowledge is treated as commodity; that is sold on markets to generate money profit, can easily be legitimated. At the end, subjectivist notions of information turn out to be ideologies that legitimate private property and the commodity form of information. Information is reified to the status of a commodity Therefore, subjectivist notions of information should be seen as being ideological. A non-reifying notion of information is neither objectivist nor subjectivist. If we consider information as subject-object-dialectic then it is a dynamic processual relation between agents. In human society; it must then be considered as social co-production and co-operation process that transforms systems. If social information is always the result of the social interactions of many interacting humans then there is no natural or moral owner of it. Knowledge is a social, co-operative good. New knowledge is based on old, historical knowledge. Those who produce novel qualities of knowledge stand on the shoulders of giants and use the prior history of all knowledge for free to add something new: If there is no true owner of knowledge then it must be considered as a commons, an aspect of society that is needed for its existence and reproduction and should therefore not be limited or restricted to guarantee the reproduction of society and humans to a full extent. Reifying knowledge, treating it as commodity or limiting it in another way; means to partly destroy the commons of society and therefore to destroy basic necessary resources of society Reifying knowledge is unjust because it gives certain individuals and groups (who for example have more money) more control of knowledge so that they can derive material benefits from the usage of knowledge, it is undemocratic because it restricts knowledge production and access to certain groups and individuals and excludes others, and it is a form of malrecognition because it denies people knowledge that could be important for creating change, new insights or worldviews. Not just limiting access is ideological but also providing false, useless, unnecessary; stupefying, manipulative knowledge is a form of ideology that is unjust, undemocratic and an expression of malrecognition. The information concept is today connoted with the primary meaning of a message. Messages are entities that can be stored and transmitted. Therefore, this understanding advances a reified and an objectivistic notion of information. Etymologically; the notion of information stems from the Latin word irformare, which means to shape something, to give form to something, to bring something into a form. Therefore, information can also be understood as the process of forming and shaping. Based on the notion of irformare, information can be conceived as a threefold process of cognition, communication and co-operation (ibid.; Hofkirchner 2002): human information is stored in the brain (cognition), cognitive patterns of individuals form the foundation of and are changed by symbolic interaction processes between two or more humans (communication), based on communication humans can transform the social world and can create new structures (co-operation). Communication is always based on cognition, co-operation is always based on communication and cognition.

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Anthony Giddens (1984, 25) argues that social structures 'are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize'. Structures are 'always both constraining and enabling' (ibid.). Social structures are properties of society that allow social practices to exist across temporal and spatial distances so that a certain regularity of social actions can be achieved. On the basis of Giddens' argument, we can define a medium as a structure that enables and constrains human action. This is a fairly general understanding of media that has been used in social theory by authors such as jurgen Habermas (1981) and Niklas Luhmann (1997). For Luhmann (1997), money; power, scientific knowledge, art, love, morals, language and other social structures are symbolically generalized communication media. For Habermas (1981), money and power are steering media. Media organize human actions and enable social relations. A medium connects two entities. In society; a medium is a structure that connects two or more humans. It organizes social relationships. Natural resources (ecological structures), tools (technological structures), property (economic structures), power (political structures), and definition capacities (cultural structures) are the media that we find in all societies (Fuchs 2008, 338£). In information science and media and communication studies, a strong emphasis is given to specific types of media, those media that enable mass communication, information diffusion to and communication between a large number of humans. Luhmann (1984, 221£) speaks of distribution media (Verbreitungsmedien) that enlarge the number of participants of a communication (e.g., writing, print, radio). Habermas (1981, Vol. 2, 573) says that the mass media are media that create publics, enable communication over spatiotemporal distances and make messages available for different contexts. Media in this narrower sense of the term are structures that store, process and diffuse symbolic materials that represent parts of reality: They are communication technologies. Media operate at the structural level of society, whereas information is a property of the actor level of society: Media are structural properties of society that enable and constrain human cognition, communication and co-operation (information processes). Human information processes are form-giving processes in society: in the threefold process of cognition, communication and co-operation, humans transform, create and re-create social structures. Information and media are two levels of reality that are dialectically interlinked: information processes are conditioned (enabled and constrained) by media; media are re-created by information processes. Human knowledge is externalized by humans with the help of media that store representations of this knowledge (sounds, images.writinga, moving images, multimedia, etc.). Media are complex objectifications of human knowledge. They store and diffuse these objectifications and thereby create direct or indirect relationships between humans, which can extend across spatial and temporal distances. Other humans make use of these media to give meanings to the informational content. They subjectivize the objective representations of reality in complex ways. The whole information process is therefore based on the dialectic of the objectification of subjective knowledge (=encoding process) and the subjectification of objective knowledge (=decoding process) that is enabled and constrained by media (media). Information and the media are based on a subject-object dialectic that takes place within society: there is no subjective information (cognition, communication, co-operation) without media structures, and there are no media

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Media content, media organizations

Media producers

Actor level

Dominant reception

Negotiated reception

Oppositional reception

Critical reception

Manipulative reception

Figure 3.4 A model of the communication process in the media system structures (that objectify; i.e. represent, subjective knowledge) without human cognition, communication and co-operation. In the mass media system (see the model in Figure 3.4), journalists are actors who produce with the help of specific rules, procedures, structures and technologies content that is aimed at informing a broader public. Informing the public in this context means that the journalists aim at a transformation of the consciousness of the public. The content provided can have news value, entertainment value or artistic-aesthetic value. Mass media content is a representation of reality; either a transposed description of certain parts of reality or a description of fictive, constructed realities. There is a certain degree of correspondence between actual reality and specific media content. So for example the correspondence level of a fictive movie that plays in a fantasy world is 10VV; nonetheless it is a product of society and hence as a constructed product tells us something about the society (its relations of production, power relations, cultural relations) in which it has been produced. For distributing content so that it reaches the public and potential recipients, the content information is stored and transmitted with the help of storage and transmission technologies (such as for example satellite transmission, CDs, DVDs, videos, records, computer hard disks, fibre optic transmission cables, computer networks) and organizational structures (e.g. sales and marketing departments, marketing strategies, etc.). Content distribution is the foundation for reception. Production is only possible based on reception and distribution; if reception stops, there is no further need for production. Produced goods are only meaningful if they are consumed. Production implies a need for distribution and consumption. Reception is itself a production process, the production of meaning. In reception, users/ audiences/recipients interpret media content based on their lived experiences and societal contexts. The meaning of objects always depends on the social and historical

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context, meanings are never unhistorical or transcendental, but social and historical. They are determined by the social context of the production and use of sign systems. They change along with the historical and social change of society: Different meanings can be ascribed to the same object. Stuart Hall (1999) pointed out that a certain degree of determinism in the form of hegemonic meaning as well as a certain degree of indeterminism in the form of negotiated meaning and oppositional meaning is present in the cultural reception process. The category of dominant meaning is applied if 'there exists a pattern of "preferred readings"; and these both have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalised' (ibid., 513). Negotiated means decoding that 'contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements' (ibid., 516), oppositional meaning means 'to decode the message in a globally contrary way; ... within some alternative framework of reference' (ibid., 517).The main achievement of Hall is that he has shown that there is no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding. Different interpretations can exist in parallel and even in opposition and antagonism to each other. I have added to these three forms of reception a fourth and a fifth one, critical reception and manipulative reception, that can be partly overlapping with the other types in certain situations. Klaus and Thiele (2007) ask in this context the question if a neo-Nazi group's interpretation of a documentary on Nazi concentration camps as fabrication should also be considered as an oppositional reading. With this example, they want to stress the importance of the relativity of Hall's categories and argue for a relativistic (and therefore uncritical) communication model that cannot make normative differentiations. For me, this interpretation is not sufficient, because under any circumstances the Nazis' interpretation is an expression of false consciousness and manipulation. A more objective criterion for reception is needed to designate normative aspects of the encoding and decoding processes. Hence, the notion of critical reception is introduced: an interpretation of media content is critical if the consumed form or content causes subjective insights that allow the recipients to question certain forms of domination, develop ideas of alternative models of existence that advance co-operation and can potentially be guiding in transformative actions and social struggles. The important aspect here is that there is an objectivist judgement that co-operation is the true, original, essential form of human existence (see Fuchs 2008). Manipulation in contrast to critical reception means that recipients interpret content and as a consequence reality in forms that do not question domination, but further advance, legitimize or leave untouched dominative/ heteronomous structures. The categories of critical and manipulative consciousness refer to states of consciousness. The communication model of the mass media just introduced connects to an actor level and a structure level. Journalists as actors produce structural content, information that is distributed in objective form and comes from the structural level back to the actor level by the way of distribution and consumption. The actors involved are journalists, media workers and recipients. The structures are media products, media institutions, technologies for production, distribution and reception. The production of media structures by media producers is the foundation for the distribution and reception process. Distribution and reception are conditions for further production and reproduction of media structures. One can therefore assume that there is a permanent dynamic process in the mass media system in which media actors and

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Table 3.3 A typology of different media types Space

Media

Production

Reception

Formats

Time

Print/visual

Hands

Eyes

Asynchronous Distance

Audio media Mouth Audio media Mouth

Ears Ears

Newspapers, journals, books, pamphlets, leaflets, comics, satirical prints, flyers,visual art, graffiti, dress, textiles, pins, buttons, stickers, murals, etc. Radio, telephone Conversation, talks, lectures, songs Concerts

Sound recordings (records, music cassettes, CD, MP3, etc.) Audio-visual Mouth, body Eyes, ears Theatre, media performance, happening Audio-visual Mouth, body Eyes, ears Film, video media Audio-visual Mouth, body Eyes, ears Live television media Multimedia, Hand, mouth, Eyes, ears Digital text, digital computer, body audio, digital video, Internet real-time text/audio/ video chat, online radio, online T\S wikis, blogs, Internet art, etc.

Asynchronous Distance

Audio media Mouth, body Ears Audio media Mouth, body Ears

Synchronous Synchronous

Distance Presence

Synchronous

Presence

Synchronous

Presence

Asynchronous Distance Synchronous

Distance

Synchronous Distance or asynchronous

media structures produce each other. The important aspect for critical media studies is that the media communication process is framed by the economy; the political system and the culture. Power structures shape and are shaped by the media and condition communication processes. Table 3.3 presents a typology of different types of media in human society Media are classified according to the body parts that are mainly utilized for production and reception and according to whether production and consumption are temporally synchronous or asynchronous and based on spatial co-presence or communication at a distance.

3.2 Critical m.edia, communication and inform.ation studies Why is it important to defme critical media and communication studies and to provide a typology that shows which approaches are part of this research field? To assume that

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there are critical media and communication studies also means that there are uncritical approaches that are opposed to critical studies. Mainstream scholars frequently criticize approaches that could be considered as critical, such as Frankfurt school cultural theory; cultural studies, or critical political economy of the media and communication, in academic debates. An example is that many communication scholars tend to argue that Chomsky is simplistic, atheoretical, and cannot be taken seriously (see McChesney 2007, 42£). It is therefore an advantage to try to develop a clear identity of critical studies and to distinguish this identity from mainstream studies and to conceive itself as a research field. Many discussions of critical media studies tend to arbitrarily select certain approaches and are not focused on mapping the whole. So, for example, Paul Taylor andJan Ll. Harris (2008) in their book Critical theories ofmass media: Then andnow discuss the approaches of Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno, McLuhan and Debord. Such approaches do not help in trying to map critical media and communication studies as a distinct research field. In twentieth century critical studies, the critical analysis of media, communication and culture has emerged as a novel quality due to the transformations that capitalism has been undergoing. First, there have been subjective approaches that primarily stress how humans produce, reproduce, consume or transform media and culture. Early twentieth century approaches include the theory of Antonio Gramsci on the one hand, and Frankfurt school approaches by authors such as Theodor W Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. German critical theory on the one hand had more structuralist representatives such as Adorno and Horkheimer and more subjectivist representatives such as Bert Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Adorno and Horkheimer had a strong focus on ideology critique. The Gramsci-inspired line of thought has later been continued by the emergence of cultural studies with scholars such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart or Stuart Hall. The Frankfurt school approach was carried on and transformed by scholars such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Jiirgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. Louis Althusser's theory of ideological state apparatuses had a strong influence on critical media and communication studies. It was one of the main influences on cultural studies, but also had effects on the emergence of post-Marxist and post-structuralist approaches. Another important current of critical media and communication studies are critical political economy approaches that emerged with the works of people such as Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller. Critical political economists such as Dallas Smythe or Nicholas Garnham challenged the focus on ideology and stressed the economic function of the media, whereas others such as Vilem Flusser, Noam Chomsky; Edward S. Herman or Herbert Schiller have continued to stress the role of media as producers of ideology: Cultural studies in the 1980s took a turn by the emergence of a specific American version that established its own interpretation of British cultural studies. One of the most important works in this context has been the one of John Fiske. This overview is far from complete, but it is intended to show that critical media and cultural studies have their own complex history: Because all history is shaped by contradictions (as Marx knew), also the development of critical media and communication studies is shaped by conflicts. The debate between cultural studies scholars and critical political economy scholars in communication studies (Ferguson and Golding 1997; Garnham 1998; Grossberg 1998) has for example shown that there are large differences between research schools. But the danger that lies in such conflicts is that

Critical media andiriformation studies 95 critical studies become fragmented and self-centred and therefore weakened in questioning the uncritical mainstream. Therefore, basic categories and a typology can help to unite various critical approaches by showing their connectedness and at the same time their differences (unity in plurality). Edwin Black (2001) in his book IBM and the Holocaust has shown that International Business Machines (IBM) assisted the Nazis in their attempt to extinguish the Jews, ethnic minorities, communists, socialists, gay people, the handicapped and others by selling punch card systems to Germany 1 These systems were used for numbering the victims, storing and processing where they should be brought, what should happen to them, and for organizing their transport to extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Ravensbriick or Sachsenhausen. IBM made an international business out of mass killings by accumulating profits from selling data storage and processing machines to the Nazis. The punch cards covered information on where a victim would be deported, the type of victim he/she was Gew; homosexual, deserter; prisoners of war, etc.) and his/her status. Code Status 6 was 'Sonderbehandlung' (special treatment), which meant death in the gas chamber. Black has shown that the system was delivered and maintained by IBM and that rental contracts between IBM New York and the German Nazi state were made. Black (2001, 9) says that there was a 'conscious involvement- directly and through its subsidiaries -' of IBM 'in the Holocaust, as well as . . . in the Nazi war machine that murdered millions of others throughout Europe', Solipsistic and dazzled by its own swirling universe of technical possibilities, IBM was self-gripped by a special amoral corporate mantra: if it can be done, it should be done. To the blind technocrat, the means were more important than the ends. The destruction of the Jewish people became even less important because the invigorating nature of IBM's technical achievement was only heightened by the fantastical profits to be made at a time when bread lines stretched across the world. (Black 2001, 10) Irving Wladawsky-Berger, then vice president of technical strategy of IBM, commented on Black's book: 'Generally; you sell computers, and they are used in a variety of ways. And you hope they are using the more positive ways possible.f The example shows that corporations in general, and IT corporations such as IBM in particular, are driven by profit interests and will support the worst horrors if they can draw economic profits from it. Wladawsky-Berger's reaction is a typical technocratic one: corporations that have committed moral crimes against humanity argue that they are not responsible for what their customers do with the commodities they sell to them. Critical reasoning such as the one by Edwin Black intends to show in this context that corporations are not always unknowing of what is going on and do have responsibility that they abandon in many cases due to their instrumental interests. The example also shows that the media and communication industries are not innocent, but deeply embedded into structures of domination. And this is exactly the reason why a critical theory of media and information is needed. Karl Marx summarized the imperatives and convictions of corporations in the following words:

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The accumulation imperative stops at nothing. Here are some defmitions of critical media, communication and cultural studies: •

•

•

•

Oscar H. Gandy (1982, 2) argues that a central characteristic of critical scholarship on media and communications is to 'see the primary role of mass media as one of control'. For Hanno Hardt (1992, x, xi), critical communication studies are focusing on 'solving social problems', 'the improvement of society' and 'thinking about freedom and responsibility and the contribution that intellectual pursuits can make to the welfare of society'. He stresses that this approach is not only linked to 'socialism and Marx's critique of political economy' (ibid., x). Douglas Kellner and Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2006, xiv) in the introduction to their anthology Media andcultural studies defme critical media and cultural studies as analyses that see and stress that 'all artifacts of the established culture and society are laden with meaning, values, biases, and messages that advance relations of power and subordination'. Douglas Kellner (1995, 4) defines critical cultural studies as analyses that conceptualize society as a terrain of domination and resistance and engages in critique of domination and of the ways that media culture engages in reproducing relationships of domination and oppression. A critical cultural studies is concerned with advancing the democratic project, conceptualizing both how media culture can be a tremendous impediment for democratizing society; but can also be an all)', advancing the cause of freedom and democracy:

•

Manfred Knoche (2005a, 105): Foundational questions of media economics as critique of the political economy of the media include the analysis of the relationship of media and capitalist society, i.e. the role of the media for the whole material, economic, societal, social, political, and cultural human life. Central focuses of analysis are hence on the one hand the specific developments in media production, -distribution, and -consumption, on the other hand their functions for the development of the total capitalist economic and societal system.

•

Rainer Winter (2004, 118, 120): Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary project which uses qualitative methods to subject the cultural forms, practices and processes of contemporary society to critical investigation and analysis .... It is the goal of cultural studies to understand economic processes better, using whatever theoretical resources and empirical investigations are available, and then, as a second step, to

Critical media andiriformation studies 97 contribute to a change in their context.... They ... may be interpreted as a critique of power. •

Critical media studies are generally concerned with determining whose interests are served by the media, and how these interests contribute to domination, exploitation, and/ or asymmetrical relations of power.... The central aim of critical scholarship is to evaluate the media's role in constructing.and maintaining particular relationships of power. (Ott and Mack 2010, 15)

What many definitions of critical communication and media studies share is a focus on the analysis of media, communication and culture in "the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations, exploitation, oppression and control as object of stud)'. Such analyses are undertaken with all intellectual means necessary to contribute to the establishment of a participatory; co-operative society. From a praxeo-ontoepistemological perspective on science (see Hofkirchner et ale 2005, 78-81), we can then defme critical information, communication and media studies as studies that focus ontologically on the analysis of media, communication, information and culture in the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations, exploitation, oppression and control by using epistemologically all theoretical and/or empirical means necessary for doing so in order to contribute at the praxeological level to the establishment of a participatory, co-operative society Given such a defmition, critical communication and media studies are inherently normative and political. This defmition is fairly broad and allows to combine different concepts that come from different critical backgrounds, such as - to name just some of many - audience commodity; media accumulation strategies, commodity aesthetics, culture industry; true and false consciousness/needs, instrumental reason, technological rationality; manipulation, ideology critique, panopticon, synopticon, silent silencing, dialectical theatre, critical pedagogy; aura, proletarian counter-public sphere, multiple publics, emancipatory media usage, repressive media usage, alternative media, radical media, fetish of communication, ideological state apparatuses, the multitude, the circulation of struggles, hegemony; structure of feelings, articulation, dominant reading, oppositional reading, negotiated reading, capital-accumulation function of the media, commodity circulation function of the media, legitimatizing function of the media, advertising- and public-relations function of the media, regenerative function of the media, propaganda model of the media, communicative action, dialogic communication, discursive communication, communication empire, transnational informational capitalism, working class culture, subculture and so on, under one united umbrella definition that sees them as differentiated unity in plurality that is termed 'critical communication and media studies'. Critical media and communication studies should be in line with the most recent developments of social theory to show that this field can be connected to current debates. One of the major debates in the social sciences in the past years has been the one on public sociology (see section 2.1). Critical studies have been discussed as a part of this debate; therefore, it seems to be particularly suited as a point of reference and further development of critical information, media and communication studies.

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Table 3.4 A typology of critical and instrumental media, communication and information studies Academic audience

Instrumental knowledge

Extra-academic audience

Professional instrumental information, media and communication studies: research on media, communication, information and culture conducted within research programmes that are shaped by dominative interests

Public uncritical information, media and communication studies: research on media, communication, information and culture that enters discourse with the public in the interest of dominative interests such as capital interests or conservative political interests Critical knowledge Critical information, media and Public critical information, communication studies: analyses media and communication studies: addresses and speaks of media, communication, with the public on issues that information and culture in the relate to media, communication, context of domination, asymmetrical power relations and information and culture in the control conducted in the interest context of domination and in the interest of the abolishment of of the abolishment of domination and the domination and the establishment of participatory establishment of participatory democracy democracy

The typology of social sciences approaches that is shown in Table 2.2 and that is based on Burawoy's discussion of public sociology and a distinction between instrumental and critical knowledge can be applied to information, media and communication studies (see Table 3.4). Applying critical theory to information and the media can be characterized along the three dimensions of critical theory:

Epistemology - dialectical realism, A critical theory of media, communication and information that is dialectical and realistic identifies antagonistic tendencies of information phenomena and the media. The media and information are conceived as complex and dynamic processes that are contradictory; developing and produce results. Media and information are seen as parts of the material world that can be grasped, described and analysed by humans in academic work.

Ontology - 'materialism, To make a materialistic analysis of the media and information means to see media and information neither as purely subjective nor as purely objective, but as attributes of matter. It requires a materialistic monist position that sees information as matter in movement, a productive, contradictory; dynamic relationship between material systems that have development potentials so that higher-order qualities that sublate (Aufhebung) the underlying systems in a Hegelian sense can emerge. Information is

Critical media andiriformation studies 99 based on a subject-object dialectic. That information is contradictory means that in society it is embedded into the antagonisms of capitalism. Therefore, information and the media reflect societal problems and potential solutions to these problems. The analysis of the media and information needs to be related to the broader societal context. A critical information and media theory is negative, because it relates information to societal problems and what society has failed to become and to tendencies that question and contradict the dominant and dominative mode of operation. These tendencies have the potential to become positive forces of societal change towards the better. Such a theory looks for ways of how information and the media can support practical forces and struggles that aim at transcending capitalism and repression as a whole. Based on the insight that the basic resources are highly unequally divided in contemporary society; to construct a critical information and media theory also means to show how information and the media are related to questions concerning ownership, private property; resource distribution, social struggles, power, resource control, exploitation and domination. In such an endeavour, a reactualized notion of class is of central importance (see Fuchs 2008, chapter 7.3).

Axiology - negating the negative A critical information and media theory shows how the two competing forces of competition and co-operation (or other contradictory pairs of the negative and the positive) shape information and the media and result in class formation and produce potentials for the dissolution of exploitation and oppression. It is based on the judgement that co-operation is more desirable than competition, which is just another expression for saying that structures of exploitation and oppression need to be questioned, criticized and sublated. As there are numerous information phenomena, one can distinguish numerous sub-domains and sub-theories of critical information and media theory: I

Scott Lash (2002) has argued that critical theory in the information society must be immanent critique, because there is no outside space for transcendental critical reflection due to the immediacy of information (the speed and ephemerality of information would leave almost no time for reflection), the spatiotemporal extension caused by informatization and globalization processes, the vanishing of boundaries between human and non-human and culture as well as between exchange value and use value. Information critique would have to be an immanent critique without transcendentals. Critique of information would be in information itself and it would be modest and also affirmative, The arguments of a critical theory of information, as outlined thus far, proceed in a different way (see Fuchs 2008): I argue that the information society has potentials for co-operation that provide a foundation for the full realization of the immanent essence of society - co-operation. Co-operation is seen as the very essence of society (an argument that can be found in the writings of young-Marx, Marcuse and Macpherson), it is an immanent feature of society and the human being as such, but this potential is estranged in modern society This immanence is in contemporary society transcendental because the existence of society is different from its essence. The information society promises a new transcendental space - a co-operative society

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(or participatory democracy) - that is imriIanent in society as such (but not existent in alienated societies) and potentially advanced by information and II But such a society is not reached automatically because there is an antagonism between co-operation and competition immanent in capitalism and hence also in the capitalist information society that threatens the potentials for co-operation. Hence for establishing an outside of and alternative to global informational capitalism, transcendental self-organizing political projects are needed that have alternative goals, practices and structures of organization and make use of existing structures (such as communication technologies)to transcend these very structures and create a new global space - a participatory democracy: Information produces potentials that undermine competition, but at the same time also produce new forms of domination and competition. The philosophical argument is based on the logic of essence and on the dialectic of immanence and transcendence. The line of argument assumes a formal identity of immanence and transcendence with society as the system of reference. Transcendence is not something that is externally given to being, but comes from the immanent essence (and thus Wirklichkeit) of that being. Transcendentals are societal forces that represent needs and goals that form the immanent essence of society;but are repressed within the existing antagonistic totality and cannot be realized within it. Hence I do not agree with Lash that transcendental critique and dialectical critique (similar to the one of the Frankfurt school) are outdated. A dialectical framework of critique is needed for understanding the interconnected opportunities and risks of global informational capitalism. Facing Paul A. Taylor's (2006) critique that Lash's information critique is media-determinist and risks becoming uncritical and conformist due to the lack of transcendentals, Lash (2006) seems to argue for the dialectic of immanence and transcendence. One of my main points is that, due to informatization, the dialectics of thinkers such as Hegel, Marx and Marcuse gain a new topicality in transposed forms. Ott and Mack (2010) discuss 11 forms of critical media studies: Marxist analysis, organizational analysis; pragmatic analysis, rhetorical analysis, cultural analysis, psychoanalytic analysis, feminist analysis, queer analysis, reception analysis, erotic analysis and ecological analysis. However, they do not discuss why there are exactly 11 forms, how these 11 types differ and are connected, what the combined grounding theoretical foundations of all these approaches are, and how exactly different forms of domination are connected in the media. On the one hand, I would not consider all approaches that Ott and Mack list as being critical in their entirety On the other hand, some approaches are missing or their importance is downplayed. So for many feminist approaches, media analysis is a very general term that also includes liberal feminist approaches that are content when more women become owners and managers in media corporations that exploit female and male workers. In the media ecology chapter, the authors positively discuss the approaches of technological determinists such as Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan. In the chapter on psychoanalysis, the importance ofJacques Lacan for grounding a critical psychoanalysis is mentioned but the works of Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse are ignored. In the discussion of critical psychoanalytic media studies, the huge influence that Slavoj Zizek's Lacanian-Marxist approach has played in recent years is not mentioned. Critical theory (Frankfurt school) is only discussed briefly and its strong influence on

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critical media studies is thereby downplayed. So, for example, Jurgen Habermas is not at all mentioned. Alternative media scholars such asJohn Downing and Chris Atton are not mentioned and their approaches are ignored. Critical new media studies approaches are hardly discussed. These are only a few examples of what is missing. The book has a specific American focus (which might explain, but does not justify; the lack of consideration of critical theory), but a discussion on the influential integrative approach of Douglas Kellner, who brings together critical theory and cultural studies, is missing. Ott and Mack's book is an introductory course book, but students who read this book only get a partial and distorted picture of critical media studies. An example for critical information theory as immanent transcendence is the antagonistic form of information in contemporary capitalist economy: New media as such do not have clear-cut effects; they are antagonistically structured and embedded into the antagonisms of capitalist society: The antagonism between co-operation and competition that shapes modern society and limits self-determination and participation' also shapes the techno-social Internet system. Under the current societal conditions that are characterized by the colonization of society by the instrumental logic of accumulation, risks and competitive forces dominate over realized opportunities, cooperation and participation on the Internet. The dialectical antagonistic character of social and technical networks as motor of competition and co-operation in informational capitalism reflects Marx's idea that the productive forces of capitalism are at the same time means of exploitation and domination and produce potentials that go beyond actuality; point towards a radically transformed society and anticipate a fully co-operative design of the means of production (Fuchs 2008). The productive forces of contemporary capitalism are organized around informational networks that bring about new forms of exploitation and domination and are at the same time germ forms of a co-operative economy (ibid.). For constructing a typology of critical media studies, the Marxian distinction among three dialectically mediated spheres of the economy can be utilized: production, circulation and consumption. 'In the process of production members of society appropriate (produce, fashion) natural products in accordance with human requirements' (MEW 13, 620). In capitalism, the role of goods is determined by their exchange value that dominates over their use value and constitutes their commodity form. Marx describes circulation as 'an intermediate phase between production ... and consumption' (MEW 13,630). In the circulation sphere, money is exchanged with commodities, entrepreneurs realize profit by selling commodities, consumers exchange money for goods. The commodity then leaves circulation and enters the sphere of consumption, 'where it serves either as means of subsistence or means of production' (MEW 23, 129). The starting point of analysis for Marx is production, which is 'the decisive factor' (MEW 13, 625): 'The process always starts afresh with production' (MEW 13, 625, 630£). The three moments are interconnected. Consumption creates new needs, which are produced in commodity form (MEW 13, 623). Consumption creates production. Production 'supplies the material, the object of consumption ... therefore, production creates, produces consumption' (MEW 13,623). Production is a consumption of means of production, consumption is a (re)production of the human body and mind. Production is based on circulation of the means of production and labour forces that are consumed by capitaL Therefore, production is circulation.

102 Theory Table 3.5 A typology of critical media and information studies Production sphere

Circulation sphere Consumption

Repression hypothesis Commodity hypothesis: media as commodities for accumulating capital Repression hypothesis

Manipulation and ideology hypothesis: media as means of manipulation for the ideological enforcement of class interests

Emancipation hypothesis

Alternative media hypothesis: media Reception hypothesis: as spheres of grassroots production media reception as and circulation of alternative content contradictory process involving oppositional practices

Unification

Integrative critical media theories/studies

Circulation produces a distribution of money and commodity capital in a certain distribution between classes. In the realm of the media we find:

2 3

the organization of the journalistic production of content that is generated and stored with the help of media tools the distribution of content with the help of transmission technologies, so that recipients consume cultural content.

Production is a consumption of journalistic labour power and fixed media capital, distribution is a production of the class-stratified allocation of wealth and information and consumption is reproduction of labour power and the production of meaning and needs. Those who follow the emancipation hypothesis assume that the media function primarily as means of criticizing domination and as tools of class struggle. Those who advance the repression hypothesis argue that the media are primarily means for enforcing and deepening domination and class rule. Next, example approaches for the different approaches in critical media and information studies will be mentioned. These are only examples, the discussion does not want to make the claim to describe all important existing representatives and approaches because space is too limited for achieving this task. Representatives of the commodity hypothesis argue that the media are not primarily ideological means of manipulation but spheres of capital accumulation. Examples are Dallas Smythe's (1978/1997) notion of the audience commodity; Nicholas Garnham's (1990, 2000, 2005) stress on the economic role of media as creators of surplus value through commodity production, exchange and advertising, or Wolfgang Fritz Haug's (1971, 1975) notion of commodity aesthetics. The basic contention underlying the manipulation and ideology hypothesis is that the media are used as tools that manipulate people; advance ideologies; forestall societal transformations; and create false consciousness, false needs and a one-dimensional

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universe of thought, language and action. Examples are Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno's (1944/2002) theory of the culture industry; Leo Lowenthal's (1964) notion of manipulative mass culture, Heinz Steinert's (2003, 2007) theory of the commodified and administered culture industry; Gunther Anders' (1956/1980) theory of the outdatedness of humanness, Herbert Schiller's (1976, 1989, 1992a, 1992b, 1997) notions of the mind managing media machinery and cultural imperialism, and Lee Artz's (2006) notion of the media as hegemonic tools that reproduce capitalist relations of production. A recent formulation of the ideology hypothesis has been given by Thomas Mathiesen (2004), who considers the corporate mass media and the corporate Internet as systems of silent silencing of political opposition. Mathiesen (1997) has in this context coined the notion of the synopticon. Scholars who argue that there are alternative ways of doing and making media for critical ends advance the alternative media hypothesis. Such approaches have a strong subjective orientation. The discourse on alternative media was anticipated by Bertolt Brecht's (1932/2000) radio the or)) Walter Benjamin's (1934/2002) notion of the author as producer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's (1970) model of emancipatory media usage, and Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's (1972) theory of the proletarian counter-public sphere. Armand Mattelart (1971/1979,1979,1983) and Mattelart and Siegelaub (1979, 1983) stressed the role of socialist media in class struggles. Examples for contemporary alternative media theories are the approaches by Chris Atton (2002), who focuses on self-managed media, andJohn Downing (2001), who speaks of radical media. Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999) conceptualizes cyberspace (besides and in contradiction to being a commodified space) as autonomous medium for the circulation of struggles. Representatives of the reception hypothesis argue that reception is a complex and antagonistic process that provides potentials for oppositional interpretations and actions. The most prominent representatives of this hypothesis can be found in cultural studies. Many works in cultural studies focus on cultural practices of everyday life and the interpretation of texts within this sphere (Bennett 1992, 23; Johnson 1986/1987, 43; Nelson et ale 1992, 11). In some forms of this hypothesis, we find a deterministic optimism that assumes that domination automatically must produce counter power. So, for example, John Fiske (1989a, 1989b, 1996) in a deterministic mode of causal argumentation sees resistance as an automatic feature of popular culture: The reading relations of popular culture are not those of liberal pluralism, for they are always relationships of domination and subordination, always one of top-down power and of bottom-up power resisting or evading it.... Popular culture in elaborated societies is the culture of the subordinate who resent their subordination, who refuse to consent to their positions or to contribute to a consensus that maintains it. (Fiske 1989b, 168£) 'Discursive struggles are an inevitable part of life in societies whose power and resources are inequitably distributed.... A media event, then, as a point of maximum discursive visibility; is also a point of maximum turbulence' (Fiske 1996, 5, 8). Douglas Kellner warns cultural studies about being too optimistic:

104 Theory Neglecting political economy; celebrating the audience and the pleasures of the popular, overlooking social class and ideology; and failing to analyse or criticize the politics of cultural texts will make medialcultural studies merely another academic subdivision, harmless and ultimately of benefit primarily to the culture industry itsel£ (Kellner 2009, 19£) The pure repression hypothesis poses the threat that potentials for change are excluded and that humans are tempted to hold a defeatist attitude. Robert McChesney (2007), who argues in favour of a media reform movement, stresses this argument (McChesney and Nichols 2004). The pure commodity hypothesis ignores ideological aspects of the media, which are stressed by representatives of the manipulation hypothesis. The pure manipulation hypothesis leaves out aspects of capital accumulation with the help of the media. The pure emancipation hypothesis is too optimistic and overlooks that alternative media and alternative reception frequently remain ineffective, unimportant, marginalized and without influence. Structural inequality in the access and use of media caused by the class and ownership structure of capitalism are not enough taken into account. Theories of alternative media hardly discuss possibilities of alternative usage or reception of existing mass media. Reception theories hardly consider the possibility for creating collective alternative media proj ects in the realms of production and distribution. The shortcomings of existing approaches can be overcome by integrative multidimensional critical media theories/studies that try to bring together some or all the various levels of critical media studies. One can identify some existing approaches that point into this direction. Integration and unification does not mean that difference is abolished at the expense of identity It rather means a Hegelian dialectical sublation (Aufhebung), in which old elements are preserved and elevated to a new level. New qualities emerge by the interaction of the moments. Such a dialectical integration is a differentiated unity that is based on the principle of unity in diversity It is a dialectical relation of identity and difference. In the German tradition of the critique of the political economy of the media, Wulff Hund and Barbel Kirchhoff-Hund (1980) stressed that capitalist mass communication has an economic and an ideological function. Horst Holzer (1973, 131; 1994, 202ff) and Manfred Knoche (2005a) distinguish four repressive functions of the media: (1) capital accumulation in the media industry; (2)advertising, publication relations and sales promotion for other industries; (3)legitimization of domination and ideological manipulation; (4) reproduction, regeneration and qualification of labour power. Hund, Holzer and Knoche have tried to integrate the commodity and the ideology hypotheses. These approaches go into an integrative direction. However, aspects of alternative media are missing in the two (Hund and Kirchhoff-Hund) respectively four roles (Holzer, Knoche) of the media in contemporary society and it remains unclear why exactly there are two respectively four aspects and how they are connected. A theoretical justification is missing. It is no surprise that these authors tend to use the notion of media functions and thereby go into the direction of media functionalism that neglects potential alternatives. Graham Murdock and Peter Golding (1973/1997; see also 2005) have stressed that the mass media have a commercial and an ideological dimension.

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The obvious starting point for a political economy of mass communications is the recognition that the mass media are first and foremost industrial and commercial organizations which produce and distribute commodities.... In addition to producing and distributing commodities, however, the mass media also disseminate ideas about economic and political structures. It is this second and ideological dimension of mass media production which gives it its importance and centrality and which requires an approach in terms not only of economics but also of politics. (Murdock and Golding 1973/1997, 3-5) In the United States, Robert McChesney; Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky established the integrative approach of the Political Economy of Communication (Chomsky 2006; Herman and Chomsky 1988; Herman and McChesney 1997; McChesney 1992/1997, 1993, 2000, 2004, 2007; McChesney and Nichols 2004). Herman and Chomsky (1988, 1-35) argue that the capitalist mass media are characterized by five filter functions: (1) profit orientation, (2) advertising, (3) dominant information sources, (4) flak and (5)anticommunism. The first filter corresponds to the commodity role of the media, the other four to their ideological role. Herman and McChesney (1997) stress both the capital economic and the ideological role of global media corporations. Although Herman, McChesney and Chomsky are not optimistic concerning alternative developments, they stress that alternative media can exert counter-power against capitalist media corporations (see Herman and Chomsky 1988, 307; Herman and McChesney 1997; Mcflhesney 2007, chapters 22, 23; McChesney and Nichols 2004). This approach attempts to integrate the commodity; the ideology and the alternative media hypotheses. By trying to combine culturalism and structuralism in cultural studies, Stuart Hall (1999) established a unity of the reception and the ideology hypotheses in his model of communication encoding and decoding process. In newer publications, Hall together with colleagues works with a cultural circuit model that is based on the moments of production, consumption, representation, identity formation and political regulation of the media (Du Gay et ale 1997, 3). Similar to Hall, also Douglas Kellner (1995, 1997, 1999, 2005a) argues for a unity of the manipulation and the reception hypothesis. He suggests a multiperspectival synthesis of critical theory and critical political economy on the one hand and cultural studies on the other hand. Thus one should attempt to avoid the one-sided approaches of manipulation and resistance theory and to mediate these perspectives in analysis. In a way; certain tendencies of the Frankfurt School can correct some of the limitations of cultural studies, just as British cultural studies can help overcome some of the limitations of the Frankfurt School. (Kellner 2009, 18) This combination should be accompanied by some positions of postmodern theory; feminism and multicultural theory (Kellner 1995, 9). Such an approach combines the analysis of the political economy of communication and culture, text analysis and

106

Theory

reception analyses (Kellner 1999, 357). For Kellner, critical medialcultural studies is 'a diagnostic critique' that 'uses media culture to diagnose problems, hopes, fears, discourses and social struggles current to the social moment' (Hammer and Kellner 2009, xxxv). Vincent Mosco (2009, 2) defines political economy of communication as 'the study of the social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution and consumption of resources, including communication resources'. It decentres the media by 'viewing systems of communication as integral to fundamental economic, political, social and cultural processes in society' (ibid., 66). Mosco (ibid., 211-236) argues for building bridges between this approach and approaches on its intellectual borders, especially cultural studies, public choice theory and science and technology studies. In establishing such an integrative approach, a return to class power as starting point of all analyses would be needed (ibid., 232£). Shane Gunster (2004) argues that seeing Adorno's and Benjamin's theories as complementing allows a balanced view on culture and the media that identifies contradictory manipulative potentials and imaginative alternative utopian potentials. Thinking together Adorno and Benjamin would re-dialecticize the thesis of the culture industry: With the help of Grossberg's notion of articulation, Gunster tries to link cultural studies' reception hypothesis to the Frankfurt school's manipulation hypothesis and to Benjamin-inspired alternative media theory: For Habermas (1981, Vol. 2, 572-573), the mass media have an authoritarian character caused by the potential colonizationby steering media on the one hand and an emancipatory potential that can advance consensus-oriented communicative action in the mass media public sphere on the other hand. Habermas's theory can both account for repressive media (colonization) and alternative media (communicative action). In Thestructural transformation of the public sphere, Habermas (1989) describes both the commodity- and the ideological character of modern mass media. In the book's last chapter 'On the concept of public opinion', he sees a counter-force and speaks of the potential for a critical publicity; which can be interpreted as an aspect of alternative media. Habermas's theory can be seen as an attempted integration of the commodity, the manipulation and the alternative media hypotheses. Vilem Flusser (1996a, 1996b) has distinguished dialogic and discursive forms of communication that can result in a participatory telematic society or a totalitarian media society: Flusser's communicology can be read as a critical theory that integrates the manipulation and the alternative media hypotheses. On the one hand, he argues that media manipulate by withholding information and limiting communication and, on the other hand, that media can support grassroots potentials. For Herbert Marcuse (1964b), media on the one hand advance ideologies by simplifying reality and representing reality in one-dimensional, positivistic, undialectical ways, so that antagonisms are factored out and false consciousness is created (for a detailed discussion of Marcuse's theory see Fuchs 2005a, 2005b). The capitalist mass media for him are an expression of a technological rationality that limits and instrumentalizes human thought and activity: They would be 'agents of manipulation' that are used for 'the defense of the established reality' (Marcuse 1964b, 8, 68). The result would be one-dimensional thought, which means a lack of negativity and the suppression of thinking about potentials that transcend existing society:

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The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole ... Ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. (Marcuse 1964b, 12) On the other hand, Marcuse considers as antagonistic counterpart to the ideological character of the media the possibility that protest movements appropriate the media as a means of struggle. Marcuse stressesthat alternative media and alternative institutions are needed for counter-information, counter-intelligence and counter-enlightenment institutions for establishing a 'resisting intelligentsia' (Marcuse 1975, 156). The mental space for negation and reflection would have to be re-established. The main problem of the political left would be its lack of access to mass media and public institutions because of a lack of funds. An important strategy would therefore be 'working against the established institutions while working in them', 'the development of radical, "free" media', and the 'development of independent schools and "free universities'" (Marcuse 1972, 55). One should remember that for Marcuse contemporary culture is at the one hand in its one-dimensional form an expression of repressive desublimation - an invalidation of 'the cherished images of transcendence by incorporating them into . . . [capitalism's] omnipresent daily reality' (Marcuse 1964b, 70), and on the other hand, in the form of counterculture an expression of 'a new sensibility' that in its aesthetic dimension 'can serve as a sort of gauge for a free society', opens up imagination for 'a universe of human relationships no longer mediated by the market, no longer based on competitive exploitation of terror', and allows to 'see, hear, feel new things in a new way' by creating a new aesthetic environment (Marcuse 1969a, 27, 37). Furthermore, for Marcuse, the aesthetic form of authentic art is autonomous and revolutionary because it is subversive of perception and understanding, an indictment of the established reality; the appearance of the image of liberation. . . . The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.... Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world. (Marcuse 1978, xi, 9, 32£) Marcuse's account of the media can be understood as a unity of the manipulation/ ideology; the alternative media and the reception hypothesis. In his analysis of culture, he stresses both its affirmative and transcendent potentials. This discussion shows that there are approaches that try to integrate the commodity and the ideology hypothesis; the commodity, the ideology and the alternative media

108 Theory hypothesis; the ideology and the reception hypothesis; and the ideology; the reception and the alternative media hypothesis. However, all these approaches leave out certain aspects of the repressive or emancipatory character of the media. An integrative critical theory of media and society can make use of dialectical logic to establish a dialectical unity of repressive and emancipatory aspects of the media and a dialectical unity of aspects of production, circulation and reception. The underlying line of thought is that the media reflect the antagonisms of capitalism and therefore have an antagonistic character (Fuchs 2008). In a given societal situation, they are not to the same extent emancipatory and repressive, the distribution is based on the results of political struggles and tends to be uneven. Generally; the ideology and commodity form of the media are predominant because dominant groups in capitalism have more resources, power, money and means of mobilization. As a consequence, the probability that media are used in repressive ways is today larger than the possibility of emancipatory media usage. The existing distribution of capital and power advances commercialization and ideologization of the media. Besides the question about the reality of the mass media, there is also the one about their potentials. This question cannot be expressed in terms of possibilities. Possibilities are immanent potentials that can only be realized by activities and in class struggles. The~e are immanent possibilities to use, organize and design media in alternative ways, participatory and critical potentials, and to interpret their contents in critical ways. These potentials are only partly or hardly realized today In principle, there are possibilities to politically set structural conditions so that alternative media, critical production and reception of content are funded and supported. But such endeavours contradict capital interests because critical media question the capitalist totality Alternative media politics are only realizable as politics of class struggle that make demands for redistribution and partial expropriation of capital (in the form of increasing capital taxation) to use the obtained resources for creating and supp orting alternative projects and spaces. Herbert Marcuse (1964b) argued that the antagonism between potentials and actuality is tightening in late capitalism. This means that media in contemporary capitalism have large potentials for the socialization of the mental means of production, especially based on global computer networks. But these potentials exist only as such in themselves and are only partly realized as long as they are subsumed under dominant interests and structures (see Fuchs 2008). The emergence of new media technologies' and products is the result of capital interests and political interests. A new media technology such as the Internet is under the regime of capitalism always a sphere of capital accumulation, circulation and consumption as well as a sphere of ideology production, circulation and consumption (ibid.). At the same time, new media technologies also pose potentials for the development of alternative forms of organizing media and alternative media contents that are characterized by transformed conditions of production, circulation and consumption. One and the same media technology (such as Internet, T\S newspaper, radio, film, video) can be shaped by different interests and usage forms that contradict each other. So, for example, the Internet in the Iraq war 2003 was on the one hand a sphere, in which established mass media conducted global war propaganda and transformed war images into capital. On the other hand, with the help of the Internet also the phenomenon of war blogging emerged that allowed anti-war activists to share

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Table 3.6 Wages and profits in Europe and the USA rear

EU15 wage share (%)

USA wage share (%)

EU15 netoperating surplus as USAnetoperating surplus percentage of GDPat current aspercentage of GDPat prices current prices

1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995

63.3 67.5 66.0

65.9 64.0 65.3

62.7 61.4

63.4 63.3

59.5 58.7 57.7

62.3 64.0 61.1

27.2 22.8 22.0 24.2 24.8 24.6 23.9 24.6

57.0 57.3

60.8 60.7

25.0 24.5

2000 2005 2008 2009

22.2 22.8 21.8 24.0 24.1 24.6 22.4 23.6 24.7 25.0

Source: Annual Macroeconomic Database (AMECO), European Commission.

their views and to network. Of course two contradicting events are not automatically of equal relevance, new media structures always have a dominative character under capitalism, and if and to which extent alternative structures can emerge from them is uncertain and depends on the results of political struggles. The commodity and ideology functions of the media are almost automatically dominant and omnipresent, whereas the alternative media and alternative reception function is first of all only an unrealized potential. Only if it is possible to attain a certain freedom of action for critique by political demands and struggles, the probability that these potentials can be realized can be increased. Frequently; alternatives remain marginal, precarious and unrealized because there is a structural dominance of uncritical thinking and dominative interests. To improve the conditions for realization, media politics should be politics of criticizing capitalism and of aiming at overcoming this very system. The struggle against the dominance of capital interests is also a struggle to create spaces for free thinking and action that allow humans to engage in critical discourse and to organize themselves against the existing totality The central political problem underlying media politics today is that public structures are eroded because the state gives tax incentives to corporations and redistributes income towards corporations and the rich by deregulating working conditions and creating the juridical conditions for the existence of low-paid precarious jobs. As a consequence there is an increased centralization of wealth also in the realm of the mass media. Corporate profits have in the past decades increased relatively fast because wages have relatively decreased. It is a general tendency in Europe and the United States that decreasing the wage share has increased profit rates. Table 3.6 shows that, in the United States and Europe, profits have remained at continuous high levels in the past 30 years, whereas wages have relatively declined. This implies that profit growth has been achieved by an increase in the rate of surplus value, an intensification of the exploitation of labour by relatively decreasing wages.

110 Theory The centralization of ownership and wealth results in a situation in which a few actors dominate national and international public opinion and have a huge influence on public institutions such as the media, education, politics, culture and welfare. If demanding partial capital expropriation by high capital taxation was successful, the obtained material resources could be used for supporting public affairs, such as education, health, social care, information, communication, and for decoupling them from capital interests. For the realm of the media this means that by capital taxation non-commercial, non-profit, free access media proj ects could be created and supported. If in addition a certain share of labour time became free from the exposition to capital by the introduction of a universal unconditional basic income guarantee financed by capital taxation and taxing the rich then material and temporal resources could be obtained that could function as foundation for critical action in critical media projects. Another precondition is the support of critical pedagogy and education that are decoupled from capital interests and enable young people to question domination and exploitation. Struggles for change are not hopeless. They pose the only chance for abolishing the existing totality If ... [capitalism] is to change, and in a positive way; it is important that people who are dissatisfied with the status quo should not be overcome and rendered truly powerless by a sense of hopelessness and cynicism. As Noam Chomsky said, 'if you act like there is no possibility for change, you guarantee that there will be no change'. (Herman and McChesney 1997,205) The approach advanced in this book is one that considers the media as antagonistic: They pose at the same time potentials for emancipation and repression. Mass media in capitalism automatically have a repressive character; they take on commodity and ideological forms. But they also carry potentials for alternative production, content, distribution and reception that are marginalized and only existent as immanent potentials that are not automatically realized. There are structural inequalities that decrease the possibilities of realization for these alternative potentials. Politics of class struggle that primarily aim at redistribution and expropriation are a way for increasing the possibilities and structural conditions for realizing these potentials. Therefore, the position advanced in this book is neither a hypothesis of emancipation nor a hypothesis of repression, but rather a political perspective that situates the media within the societal totality and sees them as being embedded into political struggles. To take this position means to decentre the media, to avoid media essentialism, and to see that there is a dialectic relationship of the media and society: For Marx, there is a threefold task of critique: (1) the critique of the contemporary dominative form of society; capitalism, which is achieved by revealing the laws of motion and contradictions of modern society by dialectical analysis (critique of the political economy), (2) the critique of academic and everyday consciousness that sees capitalism/dominative realities as unhistorical, endless, self-evident and natural by showing how the categories of this thinking have a social and historical character (ideology critique) and (3) the connection of analyses to the interests and (potential or actual) struggles of dominated and exploited groups (practical critique, revolutionary critique) that have an objective interest in the establishment of a free society Marx therefore says that (1) 'it is the ultimate aim of this work [Capita~ to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society' (Marx 1867, 92). 'The work to which I am

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referring is Critique of Political Economy; or, if you like, the system of bourgeois economy critically presented. It is at once a presentation, and, thereby; a critique of that system' (Marx 1979, 423). This method involves showing the essence behind 'the form of appearance of things' (Marx 1894, 956). (2) Marx criticizes the academic discipline of traditional political economy that investigates 'the real internal framework of bourgeois relations of production' (Marx 1867, 174£) and proclaims the qualities of this framework as 'everlasting truths' (ibid., 175). This critique is not only a critique of bourgeois academics, but of all forms of 'bourgeois consciousness' (including everyday consciousness) that see capitalist reality as 'self-evident and nature-imposed necessity' (ibid.). (3) The dialectic is 'in its very essence critical and revolutionary' because 'it includes in its positive understanding of what exists a simultaneous recognition of its negation' (ibid., 103). Therefore, the critique of bourgeois economics 'represents the class whose historical task is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes - the proletariat' (ibid., 98). This allows imagining (and potentially or actually struggling for) historical alternatives: 'Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men' (ibid., 171). Karl Korsch (1963, 86) has stressed the three aspects of Marxian critique:

(1) [Marx] specifies bourgeois society and investigates the tendencies visible in the present development of society; and the way to its imminent practical transformation. [Marx uses] throughout Capital and in his other works too, . . . the concept and principle of 'contradiction', especially the contradiction between what is called 'essence' and what is called 'appearance'. (Korsch 1932) (2) It is generally accepted that the critique of political economy - the most important theoretical and practical component of the Marxist theory of society - includes not only a critique of the material relations of production of the capitalist epoch but also of its specific forms of social consciousness. (Korsch 1970, 86) Marx was the first to represent that fundamental character of the bourgeois mode of production as the particular historical stage of material production, whose characteristic social form is reflected reversedly, in a 'fetishistic' manner, both in the practical concepts of the ordinary man of business and in the scientific reflection of that 'normal' bourgeois consciousness - Political Economy; (Korsch 1963, 136)

(3) The critique of Political Economy; which Marx began in Capital, can ... only be completed by the proletarian revolution, i.e., by a real change of the present bourgeois mode of production and of the forms of consciousness pertaining to it. It is only after the full accomplishment of this revolution that, in the further development of the Communist society; all 'fetishism of commodity production' and the whole 'fetishistic' science of Political Economy will be finally merged into a direct social theory and practice of the associated producers. (Korsch 1963, 157)

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Theory

For critical studies of media and information, the structure of Marxian critique implies that it (1) analyses and criticizes modern society and the media and information in modern society by revealing the contradictions and laws of motion of media and information in modern society; (2) analyses and criticizes the role of the media and information in creating and reproducing bourgeois consciousness that conceives reality as self-evident and nature imposed, and that it (3) specifies and practises the role of the media and information in contributing to the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production, the abolition of all classes, and the establishment of an association of free men. Critical media and information studies are a critique of the political economy of the media, ideology critique of the media and alternative media analysis and practices. The gap between the commodity hypothesis, the ideology and manipulation hypothesis, the reception hypothesis and the alternative media hypothesis can be bridged. A way of establishing the connection is finding a theory that contains and connects all elements. In my opinion, grounding critical media and information studies in Marx's works can provide such an approach. In chapter 4, critical media and information studies will be connected to Marx's works and the Marxian cycle of capital accumulation.

3.3 Dialectical philosophy and critical media and information studies I have stressed in section 2.4 that dialectical thinking is important for a critical theory It is therefore important to discuss how dialectics can be used as epistemological procedure in critical media and information studies. Dialectical philosophy enables complex technology assessment. One of the reasons why critical theory is important for analysing media, technology and information is that it allows to question and provide alternatives to technological determinism and to explain the causal relationship of media and technology on the one hand and society on the other hand in a complex way that avoids one-dimensionality and one-sidedness. Technological determinism is a kind of explanation of the causal relationship of medialtechnology and society that assumes that a certain media or technology has exactly one specific effect on society and social systems. In case that this effect is assessed positively; we can speak of techno-optimism. In case that the effect is assessed negatively; we can speak of techno-pessimism. Techno-optimism and technopessimism are the normative dimensions of technological determinism. The problem of techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic accounts is that they are only interested in single aspects of technology and create the impression that there are only one-sided effects. They lack a sense for contradictions and the dialectics of technology and society and can therefore be described as technological deterministic forms of argumentation. Technological optimism and pessimism assume that technology leads to a situation of inescapable necessity: ... To optimists, such a future is the outcome of many free choices and the realization of the dream of progress; to pessimists, it is a product of necessity's iron hand, and it points to a totalitarian nightmare. (Marx and Smith 1994, xii)

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Rob Kling (1994) characterizes technological optimism as technological utopianism. These are 'analyses in which the use of specific technologies play a key role in shaping a benign social vision' (ibid., 151). Technological pessimism/anti-utopianism 'examines how certain broad families of technology are key enablers of a harsher and more destructive social order' (ibid.). The main problem of these approaches is for Kling that they see certain effects of technologies as necessities and are based on linear logics, the absence of contingencies and on causal simplification. Many scholars therefore consider technological optimism and technological pessimism as forms of technological determinism. Technological determinism sees technology as developing independently from society, but as inducing certain societal effects with necessity (Cohen 1978, 147; Kling et al. 2005, 13, 188; Lister et at. 2003, 391; Shade 2003). Technological determinism assumes that 'technologies change, either because of scientific advance or following a logic of their own; and [that] they then have effects on society' (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999a, 3). It is based on 'a simple cause-and-effect sequence' (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999b, xiv). 'Such determinism treats technology as both panacea and scapegoat' (Shade 2003, 433). Technological determinism is a fetishism of technology (Robins and Webster 1999), 'the idea that technology develops as the sole result of an internal dynamic, and then, unmediated by any other influence, molds society to fit its pattern' (Winner 1980/1999, 29). Technological determinism is 'typified by sentences in which "technology;" or a surrogate like "the machine," is made the subject of an active predicate: "The automobile created suburbia." ... "The robots put the riveters out of work'" (Marx and Smith 1994, xi). These arguments are frequently accompanied by the assumption that technology drives history (Marx and Smith 1994). Technological determinism can therefore also 'be taken to mean that the laws of nature determining human history do so through technology' (Bimber 1994, 87). Classical examples of technological determinism are the assumptions that modern technologies result in the forgetting of being (Seinsvegessenheit, Martin Heidegger), desensualization (Arnold GeWen), inherent technological necessities and the end of politics (Helmut Schelsky), a dominative megamachine (LewisMumford), the decline of the Occident (Oswald Spengler), technological tyranny jjacques Ellul) or to the emergence of a global village (Marshall McLuhan). Marien (2006) applies the distinction between techno-optimism and techno-pessimism to the information society discourse to discern between information society enthusiasts and information society critics. An alternative to technological determinism is the social construction of technology (SCOT) approach: Pinch and Bijker (1987) argue that technologies are socially constructed, that their design is a manifestation of how groups interpret the social world, which problems they see, and which solutions to these problems they consider adequate. The SCOT approach suggests that technical things do not matter at all (Winner 1980/1999). There is a neglect of the ways that technologies shape society (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999a, 22£). The SCOT approach reverses technological determinism: it is no longer technology that fully determines society; but society that fully determines technology Both approaches are based on one-dimensional causality An alternative that avoids technological and social determinisms is to conceptualize the relationship of technology and society as dialectical: society conditions the invention' design and engineering of technology and technology shapes society in complex

114 Theory ways. Technology is conditioned, not determined, by society and vice versa. This means that societal conditions, interests and conflicts influence which technologies will emerge, but technology's effects are not predetermined because modern technologies are complex wholes of interacting parts that are to certain extents unpredictable (Perrow 1999). Technology shapes society in complex ways, which means that frequently there are multiple effects that can stand in contradiction with each other. Because society and technology are complex systems, which means that they have many elements and many interactions between these elements, it is unlikely that the interaction of the two complex systems technology and society will have onedimensional effects. Based on a structuration theory framework, one can argue that technology is the medium (enabling and constraining) and the outcome of society (Fuchs 2008). Thomas E Hughes (1994, 102) says that 'social development shapes and is shaped by technology'. Lievrouw and Livingstone (2002, 8) argue that 'new media technologies both shape, and are shaped by; their social, economic and cultural contexts'. Hofkirchner (2007) terms such dialectical accounts of the relationship of technology and society mutual shaping approaches. A critical theory of technology and society is a specific mutual shaping approach that adds the idea that technological development interacts with societal contradictions. A critical theory of media and technology is based on dialectical reasoning (see Figure 3.5). This allows to see the causal relationship of medialtechnology and society as multidimensional and complex: a specific medialtechnology has multiple, at least two, potential effects on society and social systems that can co-exist or stand in contradiction to each other. Which potentials are realized is based on how society; interests, power structures and struggles shape the design and usage of technology in multiple ways that are also potentially contradictory: Andrew Feenberg says in this context: Critical theory argues that technology is not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an 'ambivalent' process of development suspended between different possibilities.... On this view; technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. It is a social battlefield, or perhaps a better metaphor would be a 'parliament of things' in which civilizational alternatives contend.... Critical theory holds that there can be at least two different modern civilizations based on different paths of technical development.... Technologies corresponding to different civilizations thus coexist uneasily within our society (Feenberg 2002, 15) A critical theory of media and technology is based on dialectical reasoning. It allows to see the causal relationship of medialtechnology and society as multidimensional and complex: a specific medialtechnology has multiple, at least two, potential effects on society and social systems that can co-exist or stand in contradiction to each other. Which potentials are realized is based on how society;interests, power structures and struggles shape the design and usage of technology in multiple ways that are also potentially contradictory The dialectical critical theory of technology is grounded in the works of Karl Marx, who said that technology has contradictory potentials and that under capitalism the negative ones predominate:

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Technological/media determinism: Cause

Effect +=Technooptimism

MEDiAl TECHNOLOGY

-=Technopessimism

Social construction of technology: Effect

Cause

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Effect

MEDiAl TECHNOLOGY - - - - - - - - - - . SOCIETY

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Figure 3.5 Three causallogics of technology assessment: technological/media determinism, SCOT and the dialectic of technology/media and society The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist application of machinery do not exist, they sa)', because they do not arise out of machinery as such, but out of its capitalist applications! Therefore, since machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; since in itself lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the bourgeois economist simply states that the contemplation of machinery in itself demonstrates with exactitude that all these evident contradictions are a mere semblance, present in everyday reality, but not existing in themselves, and therefore having no theoretical existence either. Thus he manages to avoid racking his brains any more, and in addition implies that his opponent is guilty of the stupidity of contending, not against the capitalist application of machinery; but against machinery itsel£ (Marx 1867, 568£) Also, Herbert Marcuse (1941/1998, 41) is a representative of a dialectical critical theory of technology that identifies contradictory potentials of technology: 'Technics by itself can promote authoritarianism as well as liberty; scarcity as well as abundance, the extension as well as the abolition of toil.' The difference between a deterministic and a dialectical analysis of the media can be shown with the help of an empirical example study Social networking sites (SNS)

116 Theory are web-based platforms that integrate different media that allow at least the generation of profiles that display information that describes the users, the display of connections (connection list), the establishment of connections between users that are displayed on their connection lists, and the communication between users. SNS allow the establishment of new friendships, communities and the maintenance of existing friendships. Examples are Facebook, MySpace, Xing, Friendster; studiVZ, LinkedIn, hi5, Orkut, Vkontakte or Lokalisten. One can distinguish three kinds of SNS research: (1) techno-pessimistic SNS research, (2) techno-optimistic SNS research and (3) critical/dialectical SNS research. Techno-pessimistic approaches conclude that SNS are dangerous and pose threats primarily for the users, especially foro kids, adolescents, and more generally young people (Acquisti and Gross 2006; Dwyer 2007; Dwyer et ale 2007; Gross et ale 2005). Acquisti and Gross (2006) and Gross et ale (2005) argue that the SNS users in their studies showed a very low concern for privacy: Dwyer et ale (2007) conducted a quantitative survey (N = 117) of Facebook and MySpace users. They found that Facebook users were more likely to reveal identifying information and MySpace users more likely to reveal relationship status. Dwyer (2007) conducted interviews with SNS users and concluded: 'While most social networking sites did offer privacy options, most participants did not make much of an effort to customize who could view their profile.' Frederic Stutzman (2006) undertook a survey (N = 200) of students who use Facebook. He found that a 'large number of students share particularly personal information online'. One can also characterize this approach as victimization discourse. Such research concludes that SNS pose threats that make users potential victims of individual criminals, such as in the case of cyberstalking, sexual harassment, threats by mentally ill persons, data theft, data fraud and so on. Frequently; these studies also advance the opinion that the problem is a lack of individual responsibility and knowledge and that as a consequence users put themselves at risk by putting too much private information online and not making use of privacy mechanisms, for example by making their profile visible for all other users. One problem of the victimization discourse is that it implies young people are irresponsible, passive, ill informed, that older people are more responsible, that the young should take the values of older people as morally superior and as guidelines, and especially that there are technological fixes to societal problems. It advances the view that increasing privacy levels technologically will solve problems and ignores that this might create new problems because decreased visibility might result in less fun for the users, less contacts, and therefore less satisfaction, as well as in the deepening of information inequality: Another problem is that such approaches implicitly or explicitly conclude that communication technologies as such have negative effects. These are pessimistic assessments of technology that imply that there are inherent risks in technology The causality underlying these arguments is one-dimensional: it is assumed that technology as cause has exactly one negative effect on society: But both technology and society are complex, dynamic systems (Fuchs 2008). Such systems are to a certain extent unpredictable and their complexity makes it unlikely that they will have exactly one effect (ibid.). It is much more likely that there will be multiple, at least two, contradictory effects (ibid.}. The techno-pessimistic victimization discourse is also individualistic and ideological. It focuses on the analysis of individual usage behaviour

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without seeing and analysing how this use is conditioned by the societal context of ITs, such as surveillance, the global war against terror, corporate interests, neoliberalism and capitalist development. Techno-pessimistic accounts are contradicted by other studies. So, for example, Jones et ale (2008) conducted a content analysis of MySpace sites (N= 1,378) and concluded: 'This study did not find any evidence of widespread disclosure of information that would be easily used for stalking or other forms of offline harassment.' Ybarra and Mitchell (2008) conducted a survey of SNS users (N = 1,588) that showed that 4 per cent of users reported an unwanted sexual solicitation. Alice Marwick (2008) therefore argues that politics and the media have created an overdrawn moral panic about online predators who want to sexually abuse kids with the help of MySpace. This panic in her view does not correspond to the reality of SNS. Such data allow us to conclude that the victimization discourse is a construction that serves ideological purposes. It distracts from more serious issues such as corporate interests and state surveillance. Techno-optimistic SNS research sees SNS as autonomous spaces that empower young people and help them to construct their own autonomy that they need to become adults and to strengthen their personality (boyd 2006, 2007, 2008). The techno-optimistic discourse is one of empowerment. It stresses the potential of technology for autonomy; personal development, freedom, the formation, maintenance and deepening of communities, love or friendships. This discourse assesses SNS fairly positively; it mainly sees advantages and considers disadvantages as ideological constructs or as minor issues. Techno-optimistic accounts focus on positive effects of SNS. Some examples of this discourse can be given. boyd (2008) argues that teenagers are controlled in school by teachers and at home by parents and therefore seek autonomous spaces that they need for identity formation and their personal development. SNS would be such autonomous spaces. Ellison et ale (2007) conducted empirical research on the quality of social connections in the social networking platform Facebook. Their method was a quantitative empirical online survey with a random sample of 800 Michigan State University undergraduate students, of which 286 completed the survey: The major result of the study was that 'participants overwhelmingly used Facebook to keep in touch with old friends and to maintain or intensify relationships characterized by some form of oflline connection such as dormitory proximity or a shared class'. Valkenburg et ale (2006) conducted a psychological survey of SNS users (N = 881) and found that positive feedback on profiles enhances adolescents' self-esteem and wellbeing. Raacke and Bonds-Raacke (2008) conducted a study that showed that the majority of college students use SNS for making new friends, locating old friends, and staying in touch with existing friends. Just like techno-pessimism, techno-optimism is a one-sided discourse that ignores the multiple, contradictory causality of complex systems (Fuchs 2008). Just like it is unlikely that SNS only put users at risk, it is one-dimensional to assume and unlikely that SNS only empower users. The empowerment discourse is also individualistic because it focuses research primarily on how individuals use SNS for making connections, maintaining or recovering friendships, falling in love, creating autonomous spaces and so on. It does not analyse how technology and technology use are framed by political issues and issues that concern the development of society; such as capitalist

118 Theory crises, profit interests, global war, the globalization of capitalism or the rise of a surveillance society (ibid.). The problem of techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic accounts is that they are only interested in single aspects of SNS and create the impression that there are only one-sided effects of these platforms. They lack a sense for contradictions and dialectics. Critical SNS studies are viable alternatives to techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic SNS research. David Beer (2008, 523£) says that most studies of SNS are overlooking the software and concrete infrastructures, the capitalist organisations' the marketing and advertising rhetoric, the construction of these phenomena in various rhetorical agendas, the role of designers, metadata and algorithms, the role, access and conduct of third parties using SNS, amongst many other things .... Capitalism is there, present, particularly in the history; but it is at risk of looming as a black box in understandings of SNS.... This is what is missing, a more political agenda that is more open to the workings of capitalism. One important aspect of critical studies is that they focus on the critique of society as totality They frame research issues by the macro context of the development dynamics of society as a whole. Herbert Marcuse (1937b, 134) has argued in this respect that critical research analyses and criticizes 'the totality of the established world'. 'It is more due to the theory's claim to explain the totality of man and his world in terms of his social being' (ibid., 134£). SNS usage is conditioned by the capitalist economy; the political system and dominant cultural value patterns and conflicts. I conducted an empirical case study on the relationship of surveillance society and SNS usage by students in Salzburg (Fuchs 2009a). The survey used a questionnaire that consisted of 35 (single and multiple) choice questions, three open-ended questions and five interval-scaled questions. The questionnaire was implemented as an electronic survey with the help of the online tool SurveyMonkey: Two open questions asked the respondents about the main advantages and disadvantages of SNS. In a complex, dialectical research approach (complex technology assessment), one assumes that there are not only advantages or disadvantages of these platforms, but that there are multiple effects that contradict each other. I received 557 qualitative answer texts to the question that addressed advantages and 542 texts relating to disadvantages. I identified 17 categories for the advantages and 16 categories for the disadvantages and analysed the answers to the two open questions by content analysis (Krippendorff 2004) so that each text was mapped with one or more categories. The respondents tended to list more than one major advantage and disadvantage. Therefore, each answer was mapped with more than one category in most cases. Figure 3.6 presents the major advantages of SNS that our respondents mentioned. Figure 3.7 shows the major perceived disadvantages of SNS. The data of the survey show that 59.1 per cent consider maintaining existing contacts and 29.8 per cent establishing new contacts as major advantage of SNS, whereas 55.7 per cent say that surveillance as a result of data abuse, data forwarding or a lack of data protection is a major threat of such platforms. Communication and the resulting

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Most important advantages of social networking sites, N = 557

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1: Maintaining existing contacts, friendships, family relations, etc. 2: Establishing new contacts with unknown people or with people whom one hardly knows and can easier contact online 3: Finding and renewing old contacts 4: Communication in interest groups and hobby groups 5: Communication and contacts in general (no further specification) 6: International and global character of communication and contacts 7: Sharing and accessing photos, music, videos 8: Entertainment, fun, spare time, amusement 9: Source of information and news 10: Browsing other profiles, 'spying' on others 11: Free communication that saves money 12: Reminder of birthdays 13: Business communication, finding jobs, self-presentation for potential employers 14: Being hip and trendy 15: Mobility, access from anywhere 16: Self-presentation to others (for non-business reasons) 17: Flirting, sex, love

Figure 3.6 Major perceived opportunities of social networking sites (N= 557) reproduction and emergence of social relations are overwhelmingly considered as major advantage, potential surveillance overwhelmingly as major disadvantage. The impression of the majority of the respondents is that SNS enable communicative advantages that are coupled with the risk of surveillance and reduced privacy How can we explain that they are willing to take the surveillance risk that they are knowledgeable and conscious about? Communication and surveillance are antagonistic counterparts of the usage of commercial social networking platforms: our data show that students are heavily using SNS and are willing to take the risk of increased surveillance although they are very well aware of surveillance and privacy risks. The potential advantages

120 Theory Most important disadvantages of social networking sites, N

16 15 14 13 12 11 10

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1: Data abuse or data forwarding or lack of data protection that lead to surveillance by state, companiesor individuals 2: Privateaffairs become public and resultin a lack of privacyand privacy control 3: Personal profile data (images, etc.) are accessed by employeror potentialemployers and result in job-relateddisadvantages (such as losinga job or not getting hired) 4: Receiving advertising or spam 5: Lack or loss of personal contacts,superficial communication and contacts, impoverishment of social relations 6: Stalking, harassment, becoming a crime victim 7: Commercial selling of personal data 8: Data and identity theft 9: I see no disadvantages 10: It is a waste of time 11: Virus, hackingand defacingof profiles, data integrity 12: Internetaddiction, increaseof stress and healthdamages 13: Unrealistic, exaggerated self-presentation, competition for best self-presentation 14: Disadvantages at universitybecauseprofessors can accessprofiles 15: Costsfor usage can be introduced (or exist in the case of some platforms) 16: Friendscan get a negativeimpression of me

Figure 3.7 Major perceived risks of social networking sites (N = 542)

seem to outstrip the potential disadvantages. It is not an option for them not to use social networking platforms because they consider the communicative and social opportunities associated with these technologies as very important. At the same time, they are not stupid, uncritical or unaware of potential dangers, but rather very conscious of the disadvantages and risks. They seem to fear that they miss social contacts or will have disadvantages if they do not use platforms such as studiVZ, Facebook or MySpace. Not using these technologies or stopping using them is clearly not an option for most users because it would result in disadvantages such as reduced social contacts and the feeling

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of not participating in something that has become important for the young generation. The crucial aspect of the antagonism between communicative opportunities and the surveillance risk is that alternative social networking platforms that are non-commercial and non-profit and therefore do not have an interest in economic surveillance, and that see privacy as a fundamental right that needs to be well-protected under all circumstances, are hardly available or hardly known. Commercial profit-oriented sites such as studiVZ, Facebook or MySpace have reached a critical mass of users that is so large that the platforms of these commercial providers have become cultural necessities for most young people. For non-commercial platforms, it is hard to compete with these economic corporations because the latter have huge stocks of fmancial means (enabled by venture capital or parent companies such as News Corporation or Holtzbrinck), personnel and technological resources. Capitalist business interests and the unequal distribution of assets that is characteristic for the capitalist economy result in the domination of markets by a handful of powerful corporations that provide services and that make influence by non-commercial, non-profit operators difficult. Given the fact that students are knowledgeable of the surveillance threat, it is obvious that they are willing to use alternative platforms instead of the major corporate ones if such alternatives are available and it becomes known that they minimize the surveillance threat. Not students are to blame for potential disadvantages that arise from their usage of social networking platforms that in the opinions of our respondents threaten privacy and advance surveillance, but the corporations that engage in surveillance and enable surveillance are to blame. Corporate social networking platforms are for example not willing to abstain from surveillance for advertising because they have profit interests. The antagonism between communicative opportunities and the surveillance threat is not created by students' and young people's usage of social networking platforms, but by the economic and political logic that shapes social networking corporations' platform strategies. A dialectical analysis of SNS shows that they neither advance only opportunities nor only risks, but that SNS usage is framed by power structures of society and therefore by phenomena such as capitalism and surveillance. As a result, there are both actual advantages and disadvantages for the users. The advantages (communication and community) can only be achieved through the disadvantages (data surveillance, commercialization and commodification). This shows the antagonistic structure of communication technologies in capitalism and suggests the impossibility that capitalism poses advantages without disadvantages.

3.4 Inform.ation society theory and informational capitalism. The information society theory discourse can be theoretically categorized by distinguishing two axes: the first axis distinguishes aspects of societal change and the second one the informational qualities of these changes. There are theories that conceive the transformations of the past decades as constituting radical societal change. These are discontinuous theories. Other theories stress more the continuities of modern society Subjective social theories stress the importance of human individuals and their thinking and actions in society; whereas objective social theories stress structures that transcend single individuals (Giddens 1984, xx). Subjective information society theories stress the importance of human knowledge (thought and mental activities)

122 Theory Radical change, discontinuity knowledge economy, post-industrial society, postmodern society, knowledge-based society

networksociety, Internetsociety, virtual society, cybersociety

Transnational Informational Capitalism Subjective

~ Technology ~ , •..' CONTEXT:CAPITALISM r. . '

Objective

Cognition, Communication immaterial labour, multitude vs. empire,cognitive capitalism, reflexive modernization

MP3 capitalism, virtual capitalism, informatic capitalism, high-tech capitalism, digital capitalism Continuity

Figure 3.8 A typology of information society theories in contemporary society; whereas objective information society theories emphasize the role of ITs such as the mass media, the computer, the Internet or the mobile phone. Figure 3.8 shows a typology of information society theories. Discontinuous subjective concepts are for example the knowledge economy (Drucker 1969; Machlup 1962; Porat 1977), the post-industrial society (Bell 1976; Touraine 1971), the postmodern society (Lyotard 1979) or the knowledge-based society (Stehr 2001). Objective discontinuous notions that stress the importance of ITs are for example the network society (Castells 1996, 2000; van Dijk 2006), the virtual society (Buhl 2000; Woolgar 2002), cybersociety Gones 1998) or the Internet society (Bakardjieva 2005). Discontinuous information society theories prefix certain terms to macrosociological categories such as society or economy; which implies that they assume that society or the economy have undergone a radical transformation in the past decades and that we now live in a new society or economy These approaches stress discontinuity; as if contemporary society had nothing in common with society as it was 100 or 150 years ago. 'If there isjust more information then it is hard to understand why anyone should suggest that we have before us something radically new' (Webster 2002a, 259). Therefore, Nicholas Garnham (2004) characterizes information society theory as ideology; Such assumptions have ideological character because they fit with the view that we can do nothing about change and have to adapt to existing political realities (Webster 2002b, 267). Peter Golding (2000, 170)argues that information society discourse is an ideology that 'anticipates and celebrates the privatization of information, and the incorporation of leT developments into the expansion of the free market'. The danger in sociology's fascination of the new would be that it would be distracted from the focus on radical potentials and the critique of how these potentials are suppressed (ibid., 171).

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I agree with these critiques that discontinuous information society theories occlude viewing the continuity of capitalist structures. But such critiques tend to assume that the capitalist character of contemporary society is self-evident and therefore do not or hardly ground their criticism of discontinuous information society theories in empirical data. Qualities of society can only be presented in a convincing manner if theoretical assumptions are supported by data. It therefore needs to be shown that we have been living in a capitalist society in the past decades and that therefore there is a continuity of capitalist structures. Karl Marx characterized capitalism with the following words: 'The driving notion and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent, i.e. the greatest possible production of surplus-value, hence the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist' (Marx 1867, 449). Capitalism is a dynamic economic system that is based on the need for permanent capital accumulation to continue to exist. Capital can only be increased by the extraction of unpaid labour from workers that is transformed into money profit. 'The employment of surplus-value as capital, or its reconversion into capital, is called accumulation of capital' (ibid., 725). A central characteristic of capitalism therefore is the class relationship between capitalists and workers, in which surplus value is produced that is objectified in commodities that are sold on markets so that surplus value is transformed into profit and the initial capital is increased and reinvested. This is a dynamic process. To show the continuity of capitalism, we therefore need to analyse the development of capital and labour in time. Figure. 3.9 shows the development of the worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) in the years 1961-2008. GDP growth seems to develop in cycles that include upswings and downswings. The combination of these cycles can result in longer waves of GDP

124 Theory

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growth or sudden phases of stagnation/crisis. Except for the year 2008, there was an overall growth of the world GD~ which is an indication for continuous capital accumulation in the outlined period. But GDP is an indicator that contains both wages and profits and therefore obscures the class relations that are at the heart of capitalism. To analyse the development of class relations, we therefore need to refer to other data. Figure 3.10 shows the development of the wage shares for the EUl5 countries, the United States andJapan in the years 1960-2009. The wage share measures the share of total wages in the GDE The wage share decreased from 65 to 75 per cent in the mid-l 970s to 55 to 60 per cent at the end of the first decade of the new millennium. This means that wages have relatively decreased to profits: lowering wages has radically increased profits. In the past 35 years, capitalism has been characterized by an intensification of class struggle from above: corporations have combated labour by relatively lowering wages. They have been supported in this endeavour by state policies that deregulated markets, labour laws, and decreased corporate taxes. Capital accumulation has therefore remained continuously at high levels for most of the time in the years 1960-2008. An indication for this circumstance is that world cross capital formation, which measures the total value of additions to fixed assets, has remained at more than 20 per cent in all these years (Figure 3.11). The combined value of all stocks has remained continuously at rates above 40 per cent of world GDP in the years 1960-2008 (Figure 3.12). Figure 3.13 shows the growth of total capital assets in the EU15 countries and the United States for the years 1960-2009. The continuous growth of capital assets shows that capital accumulation has continuously yielded profits in the past decades. The continuous growth of world GD~ capital assets, cross capital formation and stock market values in the past decades is an indication that we live in a capitalist economy: The tendency for the growth of profits by decreasing the wage share is an indication for an intensification of class

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Figure 3.11 World gross capital formation (percentage of GDP) Source: WDI.

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Figure 3.12 Market capitalization of listed companies (percentage of world GDP) Source: WDI.

struggle by capital in the past decades, which shows the continuous class character of the contemporary economy: Continuous information society theories stress that we still live in a modern capitalist society; but that certain changes of the forms that express basic capitalist structures have taken place. Subjective continuous information society concepts are for example reflexive modernization (Beck et at. 1994), cognitive capitalism (Vercellone 2007), semio-capitalism (Berardi 2009a, 2009b) and general intellect and immaterial labour

126 Theory 450 400 350 300

200 150 100 . 50 .

I-+- Net capital stocks at 2000 prices, EU15 countries--- Net capital stocks at 2000 prices USAI r

Figure 3.13 Growth of total capital assets in the EU15 countries and the United States (1960 index = 100) Source: AMECO.

(Hardt and Negri 2000, 2005; Virno 2004). They stress the importance of mental labour for capital accumulation in contemporary capitalism. Objective continuous information society concepts include for example digital capitalism (Glotz 1999; Schiller 2000), virtual capitalism (Dawson and Foster 1998),high-tech capitalism (Haug 2003), MP3 capitalism (Sennett 2006) and informatic capitalism (Fitzpatrick 2002). Based on Hardt and Negri's (2000, 2005) focus on immaterial labour, there are some Marxist approaches that frame the current transformation not as objective approaches as a technological transformation, but as a subjective turn. Maurizio Lazzarato (1996, 133) introduced the term immaterial labour, by which he means 'labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity'. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005, 108) popularized the term and define immaterial labour as labour 'that creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response'. Franco Berardi (2009a, 45) stresses the subjective character of what he terms semiocapitalism: 'Semio-capital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation.' The 'intellectual becomes a mass social subject that tends to become an integral part of the general productive process' (ibid., 63). Semio-capitalism means for Berardi (ibid., 149) the 'integration of language in the valorization process'. Semio-capitalism 'takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value' (Berardi 200gb, 21). Berardi (ibid., 200) says that semio-capitalism puts the soul at work: 'Not the body but the soul becomes the subject of techno-social domination.' Christian Marazzi and Paolo Virno say that contemporary capitalism is shaped by the general intellect, which they conceive (other than Marx) as a purely subjective concept. Christian Marazzi (2008,44) writes that in 'post-Fordism the general intellect

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127

is not fixed in machines, but in the bodies of workers'. The 'primary productive resource of contemporary capitalism lies in the linguistic-relational abilities of humankind, in the complex of communicative and cognitive faculties (dynameis, powers) which distinguish humans' (Virno 2004, 98). The notion of general intellect refers for Virno (ibid., 42) to the mind and linguistic-cognitive faculties of the human. Virno (ibid., 65) says that today general intellect 'instead of being incarnated' into 'the system of machines, exists as attribute of living labor'. He uses the notion of the intellectuality of the masses for 'the whole of post-Ford era living labor ... in that it is a depository of cognitive and communicative skills which cannot be objectified within the system of machines' (ibid., 107). Negri (2008,64) uses the term cognitive capitalism for stressing that 'the production of value depends increasingly on creative intellectual activity which, apart from placing itself beyond any valorization related to scarcity, also places itself beyond mass accumulation, factory accumulation and the like'. Nick Dyer-Witheford (2005) sees cognitive capitalism as 'the commercial appropriation of general intellect', but also stresses that one 'of the defming features of cognitive capitalism is its elaboration of high technology communications systems, of which the most famous is the Internet'. Carlo Vercellone (2007, 16) sees the transformation of capitalism as a subjective turn and hence speaks of 'cognitive capitalism' as a formation that is characterized by 'the hegemony of knowledges, by a diffuse intellectuality; and by the driving role of the production of knowledges by means of knowledges connected to the increasingly immaterial and cognitive character of labor'. There would be a 'preponderance of the knowledges of living labor over knowledges incorporated in fixed capital and in corporate organization' (ibid., 32). The emerging antagonism between the living knowledge of labour and the dead knowledge of fixed constant capital would cause a crisis of the law of value and an antagonism between capital's attempt to enforce the law of value artificially (e.g. by intellectual property rights) and the socialization of knowledge by its incorporation in the brains of the collective workers of the general intellect. Virno (2004) formulates this assumption as his thesis no. 7: that in postFordism, the general intellect does not coincide with fixed capital, but manifests itself principally as a linguistic reiteration of living labour. That the role of technology does not vanish as claimed by Negri, Vercellone, Virno and others can for example be seen by the fact that among the worldwide largest corporations (measured by a composite index of sales, market value, assets and profits, for example the Forbes Global 2000 list from 2009) there are not only financial, banking, insurance institutions and oil corporations but increasingly also IT-producers such as AT&~ Verizon Communications, IBM, Telef6nica, Hewlett-Packard, Deutsche Telekom, Nippon or Microsoft. The notion of cognitive capitalism ignores that not only human knowledge is a productive force but that knowledge is also stored, shared, communicated and networked with the help of ITs such as the computer, the Internet and the mobile phone. Informational productive forces involve both human knowledge and ITs. Humans make use of technologies for diffusing, using, sharing and storing data. Knowledge becomes networked with the help of technologies. Notions such as immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism are subjectivistic and idealistic, they ignore the technical features of contemporary society that mediate human cognition, communication and co-operation.

128 Theory If one applies a dialectical methodology; the rise of transnational informational capitalism is not only a subjective or an objective transformation but also based on a subject-object-dialectic. Objective approaches are techno-deterministic and neglect how forms of labour and agency have changed, subjective approaches neglect that technology is a force that shapes and is shaped by agency; Hence, both the technologyoriented objective and the subjective knowledge-oriented Marxist approaches are insufficient. But at the same time, they are right in stressing one pole of a dialectic of a larger framework: The notion of transnational informational capitalism sublates both lines of thinking dialectically because information and networks have both an objective and a subjective aspect, they transform the means of production and the relations of production. The search of capital for new strategies and forms of capital accumulation transforms labour in such a way that cognitive, communicative and cooperative labour forms a significant amount of overall labour time (a development enforced by the rise of the ideology of self-discipline of 'participatory management'), but at the same time this labour is heavily mediated by ITs and produces to a certain extent tangible informational goods (as well as intangible informational services) (Fuchs 2008). The notion of transnational informational capitalism grasps this subject-object-dialectic, it conceptualizes contemporary capitalism based on the rise of cognitive, communicative and co-operative labour that is interconnected with the rise of technologies of and goods that objectify human cognition, communication and co-operation. Informational capitalism is based on the dialectical interconnection of subjective knowledge and knowledge objectified in information. The reason why I think that this approach is better grounded is that dialectics allow to conceive reality as complex and dynamic, which questions one-dimensional and static-ideological accounts of reality Transnational informational capitalism is the result of the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity that shapes capitalist development. Surplus value, exchange value, capital, commodities and competition are basic aspects of capitalism; how such forms are exactly produced, objectified, accumulated and circulated is contingent and historical. They manifest themselves differently in different capitalist modes of development. In the informational mode of development surplus value production and capital accumulation manifest themselves increasingly in symbolic, 'immaterial', informational commodities and cognitive, communicative and co-operative labour. The accumulation of capital, power and definition capacities on a transnational scale is strongly mediated by new media. Roy Bhaskar (1993, 12) distinguished between real negation ~ transformative negation ~ radical negation to stress the non -deterministic and complex character of sublation."Not all negations of negations are at the fundamental level, there are also partial sublations that are transformative, but not radical. The emergence of transnational informational capitalism is a transformational sublation but not a radical one. After the second world economic crisis in the mid-1970s, there was a transition from the Fordist mode of development to the post-Fordist mode of capitalist development. To increase profits, new strategies and a flexible regime of accumulation and domination (Harvey 1989) emerged; the main idea is to increase profits by putting pressure on nation states to lower wages and by decentralizing and globalizing the production process to reduce wage costs and investment and reproduction costs of

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capital so that variable and constant capital decrease, which results in an increased production of surplus value and hence in rising profits. The increasing importance of computer networks and global network organizations is an instrumental result of capitalist development. Computer technology and the Internet were not invented and introduced in an economic, but in a military; context. But the societal diffusion of these technologies is due to the role they have played primarily for the economic restructuration of capitalism. Computer networks are the technological foundation that has allowed the emergence of global network capitalism, that is regimes of accumulation, regulation and discipline that are helping to increasingly base the accumulation of economic, political and cultural capital on transnational network organizations that make use of cyberspace and other new technologies for global co-ordination and communication. Globalization can generally be defined as the stretching of social relationships in space-time, a globalizing social system enlarges its border in space-time, as a result social relationships can be maintained across larger temporal and spatial distances. In modern society; processes of globalization are based on the logic of accumulation of natural resources, tools, money capital, power and hegemony: The main problem that modern society tries to solve is how to accumulate ever more capital. Whenever an existing regime/mode of accumulation reaches its inherent limits and enters crisis, new strategies and areas of accumulation are needed to revert to ordered processes of accumulation. Hence, globalization is in modern society inherently driven by the logic of capital accumulation that results in the appropriation and production of new spaces and systems of accumulation. The antagonism between structures and actors characteristic for modern society (social structures are alienated from their producers, i.e, they are controlled by certain groups that exclude others from control) results in a clash of estrangement and self-determination that is characteristic for all subsystems of modern society: The basic conflict is that many people cannot cope with the increased complexity of the world because their lives are increasingly shaped by global alienated structures that are out of their reach and that they cannot participate in., Contemporary capitalism is based on a transnational organizational model: organizations cross national boundaries; the novel aspect is that organizations and social networks are increasingly globally distributed, that actors and substructures are located globally and change dynamically (new nodes can be continuously added and removed) and that the flows of capital, power, money; commodities, people and information are processed globally at high speed. Global network capitalism is a nomadic dynamic system in the sense that it and its parts permanently reorganize by changing their boundaries and including or excluding various systems, groups and humans by establishing links, unions and alliances or getting rid of or ignoring those actors who do not serve or contribute to the overall aim of capital accumulation. Network technologies such as the Internet due to their global reach, decentralized structure and high speed support communication and social relations across spatial and temporal distances. Philip Graham (2006, 1, 72) sees the high speed and extent of communication as the central characteristic of what he terms hypercapitalism. High speed is just one quantitative feature of a new quality of capitalism, a networked transnationalist regime of rule. It might be better to focus on qualities and not on

130 Theory quantities in choosing a key concept, because in dialectical thinking, the transformations that emerge from the overturn on quantitative features are decisive. A global space is constituted by the interaction of global technological systems and transnational (economic, political and cultural) organizations and institutions. This space is a space of global flows of capital, power and ideology that create and permanently recreate a new transnational regime of domination. The accumulation of money capital, power and cultural definition capacities, that is exploitation, domination and ideological legitimization, has become more transnational and is influenced by knowledge production (subjective aspect) and networked digital ICTs (objective aspect). Transnational network capitalism has an antagonistic character, knowledge and new technologies do not have one-sided effects, but should be analysed dialectically: they are embedded into a fundamental antagonism of capitalism, the one between co-operation and competition, that has specific manifestations in the various subsystems of society The computer is a universal machine that is simultaneously a means of production, circulation and consumption. This feature combined with networking has resulted in the emergence of the figure of the prosumer that on the one hand promises a new model of co-operative production and socialization of the means of production, but on the other hand it is antagonistically subsumed under the rille of capital. FDI flows have increased from approximately 0.5 per cent of world GDP at the beginning of the 1970s to a share between 2 and 4.5 per cent since the end of the millennium (data source: UNCTAD). FDI stocks have increased from a level of about 5 per cent of world GDP at the beginning of the 1980s to 25 per cent of world GDP in 2006. In 2006, the top 100 transnational corporations (TNCs) listed in the World Investment Report (2008, 28) had an average transnationality index (a composite index that measures the degree to which asset, sales and employees are operating outside the home base of a TNC) of 61.6 per cent, which shows that large multi- and transnationals indeed do have transnational value sources. World exports and imports have increased from approximately 10 per cent of the world GDP in 1965 to more than 25 per cent in 2007. These are empirical indicators that contemporary capitalism is more global in character than Fordist capitalism. Global capitalism is therefore a term that denotes an extension and intensification of the globalization of contemporary capitalism in comparison with Fordist capitalism (1945-1975).

But can we indeed rnaintain that transnational capitalism is informational in character? If one defmes information as cognitive and communicative process (Fuchs 2008), then one can see the information sector of the economy as being comprised of the generation' distribution and consumption of informational goods and services (affective labour, production of ITs, communication equipment, media infrastructure, media content, research, education, recreation, culture and entertainment). The United Nations International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (Rev 3.1) distinguishes various economic activities that can be mapped to four economic sectors: the primary (agriculture and mining), the secondary (traditional manufacturing), the tertiary (non-informational services) and the quaternary (informational goods and services) sector (see Fuchs 2008, 194fE).

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Table 3.7 Distribution of employees in four economic sectors Economic sector

US(%)

Germany

Nonocy

(%)

(%)

France (%)

Austria

Finland Italy

(%)

(%)

1st

2.0

2.3

4.8

3.5

12.0

5.3

4.3

2nd

15.9

23.7

17.5

19.2

20.7

22.8

27.1

3rd

34.2

32.2

29.2

28.7

31.8

26.0

34.4

4th

47.9

41.7

48.5

48.7

35.4

46.0

34.1

(%)

2006 data for total employment, source: author's calculations based on data from DECD Database for Structural Analysis.

Table 3.8 Distribution of value added in four economic sectors Economic sector 1st 2nd 3rd 4th

US (%)

Germany

Norwqy

France

Austria

Finland

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

(%)

Italy (%)

3.0 40.5

1.1 42.9

2.1 38.2

2.2 51.3

2.9 44.6

2.5 46.8

25.2 31.2

27.8

29.3 32.8 14.7

28.7

20.4

19.6

24.0

28.3

23.2

31.0

26.1

33.0

26.8

2006 data: value added at current prices, source: author's calculations based on data from DECD Database for Structural Analysis.

The information economy constitutes the quaternary sector. Statistical analysis (based on data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] Database for Structural Analysis) allows analysis of how value added and employees are distributed within various countries across these four sectors. Tables 3.7 and 3.8 show the results for a number of countries. The selected advanced countries display uniform structural patterns: the informational economy is the dominant employment sector in all selected countries (Italy excepted). The secondary sector is the dominant locus of value production in all selected countries. In all the selected countries, the informational sector is the second largest locus of value production. These statistics allow analysing the role of information in national economies. Structural analysis shows that information is important in the economies of some of the dominant countries, although it is only dominant in the employment structure and not in value production. What is the role of information in transnational economic relationships? Does it play an important or a rather minor role in foreign investments, transnational business operations and world trade? It is one of the tasks of this chapter to answer these questions by treating the topic of the information economy within the context of the debate on the new imperialism and global capitalism. Figure 3.14 shows an analysis of the distribution of the capital assets of the world's largest 2,000 corporations between various economic sectors. Finance capital is the dominant fraction of capital today; which shows that an important characteristic of imperialistic capitalism is present today Fossil fuels are also still very important in the contemporary econom~ This is an indication that industrial society is not over, and that we have entered a hyperindustrial era in which information production, selling and consumption becomes an important factor of the overall economy; but does not substitute for

132

Theory

~4.63°!c>

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1.510/0

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c=J Finance (Banking, Financials, Insurance) ~ Oil & Gas Operations, Utilities ~ Information (Telecommunications, TechnologyHardware & Equipment, Media, Software & Services, Semiconductors) E:::::I ConsumerDurables ~ Food (Food, Drinks & Tobacco; Food Markets;Hotel, Restaurants & Leisure) lIIJ Conglomerates . . Materials . . Transportation . . Construction

Figure 3.14 Share of selected industries in total capital assets of the world's largest 2,000 corporations in 2008 (Note: sectors of minor importance not displayed.) Source: Forbes 2000, 2009 list.

the economic importance of finance capital and fossil fuels. Financialization, hyperindustrialism and informatization characterize contemporary imperialist capitalism. Information companies are important in the global capitalist economy; which reflects a trend towards informatization, that is, the rise of the importance of information in economy; but they are far less important than finance and the oil and gas industry. Data for the employment structure, value added and capital assets show that, depending on which indicator we use, we will achieve different results to the question to which extent contemporary capitalism is informational. Furthermore, these data show that contemporary capitalism is not only informational but also imperialistic and hyperindustrial. I therefore use the notion of informational. capitalism not for designating that information, knowledge or ITs are the central aspects of contemporary society or economy; but to argue in a more pragmatic way that informational capitalism should be used as a term that characterizes all those parts of the economy that create informational goods or services. To which extent the capitalist economy is information based can only be determined by empirical research.

3.5 Conclusion Critical theory and critical studies focus on the analysis of phenomena in the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations, exploitation, oppression and control as

Critical media andinformation studies

133

object of study This approach can be applied to information science and media and communication studies, which are two fields that tend to converge due to the rise of digital media. Critical information and media theory/studies is an endeavour that focuses ontologically on the analysis of information, media and communication in the context of domination, asymmetrical power relations, exploitation, oppression and control by employing epistemologically all theoretical and/or empirical means necessary for doing so in order to contribute at the praxeological level to the establishment of a participatory; co-operative society Given such a defmition, critical information and media studies are inherently normative and political. There are many approaches in critical media and information studies. They can be discerned with the help of a typology that distinguishes between the commodity hypothesis, the ideology hypothesis, the alternative media hypothesis, the reception hypothesis and integrative approaches. Dialectical thinking can be applied to studying media and technology (complex technology assessment). A critical theory of technology and media questions the one-dimensional causal logic of technological determinism and provides a methodology for analysing the relationship of technology/media and society as complex and as being shaped by antagonisms. In analysing the poles of this dialectic and their relation in a concrete example situation, one needs to fmd out which pole is the dominant one. Technology and the media do not automatically produce benefits for all, therefore political struggles in and against heteronomous society are necessary for establishing participatory technologies in participatory societies that benefit all. Frank Schirrmacher (2009, 19), editor of the conservative German newspaper FAZ, argues that Marxian ideas have become a living praxis in the age of the Internet in the form of 'free information, but also self-exploiting micro-labour on the Internet'. This quotation shows that even conservatives acknowledge the importance of Marxian thinking for explaining contemporary media. This is an indication that critical media and information studies in the twenty-first century should base their analysis in Marxian critique to understand contemporary media, their role in domination and their potential role in emancipation. At the beginning of section 3.2, the example of IBM and the Nazis was introduced. It showed that media and communication are implicated in systems of domination such as the Nazi regime. All roles of the media that were identified in chapter 3 can be found in this example. IBM sold communication systems to the Nazis as commodities for gaining profits. The Nazis made use of media such as the single-channel radio known as the Volksempfanger, for diffusing their fascist ideology. Resistance groups, which were primarily communist in nature, tried to make use of alternative media, such as critical leaflets, post cards or papers, which they had to create, print and distribute all by themselves under extremely difficult clandestine conditions and under the threat of being discovered and as a result killed. To fmd out what was really going on in the war and to escape the manipulated Nazi propaganda, some Austrians and Germans adopted the alternative reception practice of listening illegally to the BBC. Cases have been documented that show that penal servitude was used as punishment for listening to what was termed 'Feindpropaganda' (enemy propaganda). So, for example, the Viennese janitor Leopoldine Amort was sentenced to 18 months' penitentiary in maximum-security prison on April 25, 1942 for the 'crime of listening to foreign radio stations and propagating news reports of foreign radio stations'. 3 An excerpt from the verdict against three communist resistance fighters reads:

134

Theory The defendants [Ferdinand] Kosztelny, [Ferdinand] Anderst and [Johann] Fried have paid membership fees to the Communist Party of Austria up to and beyond the beginning of the military campaign against the Bolsheviks. Furthermore they have distributed subversive pamphlets and have (except Kosztelny) courted like-minded persons for the payment of contributions. Therefore they are sentenced to death and lifelong loss of civil rights because of subversive activities. 4

Ferdinand Anderst,Johann Fried and Ferdinand Kosztelny were executed on October 22, 1943 at the Regional Court, Vienna. This example shows that critical communication practices can under repressive conditions threaten the lives of those who engage in it. It shows also that communication is deeply embedded into structures of domination and poses potentials for displaying counter-power. Karl Marx defined critique as 'the categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence' (MEW 1, 385). The examples just given should have shown that information is implicated in domination and that therefore the Marxian categoric imperative is important for analysing communication, the media and information. Critical media and information theory is only critical if it is a Marxian theory; which means that it is a theory that provides conceptual means that can guide potential struggles for a non-reified world. In the next chapter, we will systematically analyse the importance of Marxian thinking for the critical study of media and information.

Notes See also the scene on IBM in the film 'The Corporation' by Mark Achbar andJennifer Abbott (Big Picture Media 2004, available on DVD), http:/ / de.youtube.com/ watch?v=pkoM8RB-kJO 1 (accessed on August 19, 2008). 2 Interview in 'The Corporation', film by Mark Achbar andJennifer Abbott (Big Picture Media 2004, available on DVD). 3 Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance, Database of Gestapo Victims, http:// de.doew:braintrust.at/gestapoopferdb.html (accessed on August 19, 2008). 4 Ibid. 'Die Angeklagten [Ferdinand] Kosztelny; [Ferdinand] Anderst und [Johann] Fried haben bis in die Zeit des Feldzuges gegen die Bolschewisten hinein fur die KPO Mitgliedsbeitrage gezahlt und einkassiert. Sie haben ferner staatsfeindliche Flugschriften verbreitet und bis auf Kosztelny andere Gesinnungsgenossen fur die Beitragszahlung geworben. Sie werden deshalb und wegen sonstiger staatsfeindlicher Betatigung zum Tode und zum Ehrenrechtsverlust auf Lebensdauer verurteilt.'