Introduction: Beyond the Neoliberal Critique?

Summary

The process of receiving and of using information is the process of adjusting to the contingencies of our environment […] The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before.

– Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings

On 9 June 1977, the New York Times published an editorial by Democratic Party senator and one-time presidential hopeful, George McGovern, titled simply ‘The Information Age’. Noting that there was a ‘growing agreement’ that we were now in a new era of information, McGovern’s article considered the international implications of this new epoch, a task, he argued, few had come to terms with even in the United States. In many ways, the article was a public declaration of the anxieties that were occupying McGovern in the Senate. The day before its publication McGovern had begun chairing a series of hearings on the implications of ‘International Communications and Information’, in areas such as media, banking, business and labour. Cognisant of the scope and scale of this new information order, McGovern was especially concerned that information could be ‘a new economic weapon in the arsenals of both developing and developed nations’. Both opportunity and threat, then, information seemed to engender a new socio-economic terrain but with consequences for international relations.

The article reflected mounting social concerns regarding ‘information’ in a decade marked by the rapid emergence of new technologies. In 1971, Intel released the first commercially available silicone ‘microprocessor’, which, in integrating a computer’s central processing unit into a single chip, paved the way for digital computers to enter the mass market. By 1982, the personal computer had become Time Magazine’s ‘person of the year’, the first time the award was given to a non-human entity. As the ‘information revolution’ took root in the 1970s, a popular literature on its consequences multiplied not only through newspaper and magazine editorials but also through the futurological writings of Daniel Bell, Yoneji Masuda and Alvin Toffler as well as reports sponsored by various Western governments such as Marc Porat’s The Information Economy and Simon Nora and Alain Minc’s The Computerization of Society.