by Kate Burns
New ways of obtaining power, or losing access to power are being shaped by the growing influence of digital technologies. This paper highlights a few concepts and ideas to promote further thought and investigation about the interconnectedness between power and digital technologies.
In his article, "Harold Adams Innis: The Bias of Communication", , Marshall Soules states, "Innis extended the economic concept of monopoly to include culture and politics. If we consider that a society has a network of communications systems, we can see that there are key junctures or nodal points where significant information is stored, and from where it is transmitted to other parts of the system... Traditionally, the universities have attempted to monopolize certain kinds of information, as have professional associations,...as have governments. As both Innis and Michel Foucault have demonstrated, individuals or groups who control access to those points wield great power. Those who monopolize knowledge are also in a position to define what is legitimate knowledge."
The power of these monopolies increases as we step deeper into the information age.
Articles abound by people that profess the information on the Net is too vast and too fluid to organize. Articles in almost equal numbers describe people or organizations trying to do the un-do-able, trying to organize the unorganizable.
In "Cataloquing the Web" (Quill and Quire, September '97) Mary Land, describes the mandate of the Cataloguing Internet Resources Project (CIRP). Six Canadian libraries (4 of them University Libraries) are working to, "catalogue the Net selectively." Land quotes Grant Campbell, who coordinated the project for 8 months, "It's not a question of imposing a grid on the Internet and finding a way to catalogue the whole thing. It's just too large. Instead, the study aims to target 360 sources, generate records for them, and store them in a database at A-G Canada" (formerly ISM - a bibliographic utility).
The CIRP is indicative of attempts by groups and individuals throughout the world wide web to collect, organize, store and transmit information.
Not only are educational, professional and governmental agencies working to monopolize access to information, but media and commercial interests are flexing their influence by shaping the flow of information.
In "Information Ecology", a position paper for PROBE, the Think Tank at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, the authors state, "Media build an integrated environment based on flows of information. Increasingly, this environment provides the primary setting for human agency... The two elements, flows and nodes, are mutually constitutive, one builds upon the other...The flow of information does not simply connect two sides; by being connected they change."
Those who control the flow, or the method of flow also wield power. Media are increasing their influence.
Why else would Robert Lisbonne, "vice-president of client products for Netscape" declare "Microsoft Corp. is trying to hijack the Internet with the release ... of its latest browser software, Internet Explorer 4.0" (IE4). Is it just monetary concerns that worry Lisbonne, which no doubt are legitimate ("Last year, fewer that 10 percent of Internet users surfed the Web using Microsoft software. But now, Microsoft's share of the browser market ranges from 25 to 40 percent...") or does Lisbonne protest because he knows the influence and power his company could lose should Microsoft's browser software become more widely used?
I read the newspaper on-line these days. That's where I found Robert Everett-Green's final installment of "Networds" for the Globe and Mail (Tuesday, September23). While acknowledging the Net is still in its, "magic period", Everett-Green is less enamored by it than when he started his column four years ago.
While not addressing the issue of power directly Everett-Green makes some important points. He reminds us that we have been disillusioned by technological 'advancements' before. "When TV was young, it too was supposed to make us nobler, wiser and happier. Instead it has made us sillier."
Everett-Green worries about the 'Wired West.' "I'm especially concerned about the potential of the Internet to help 'disappear' whole populations. In his Massey lectures three years ago, Conor Cruise O'Brien talked about the 'cultivated inattention' of the prosperous nations of the world towards the less well-off. You can hear this inattention in the voices of seers who announce that, someday very soon, 'we' will all be jacked into one global network. Of course, that generous 'we' excludes the billions who have never seen a computer, and whose needs are rather more basic than a T1 connection. From this angle, the future of the Net looks more savage than humane."
It is difficult to avoid using superlatives when describing the difference in access to power between those who use a computer and those who do not. It seems a fundemental concern when exploring the impact of digital technologies on power. In "information Ecology", the writers describe one of the four dimensions of information ecology: "all nodes are connected to other nodes through communicative processes. Other than mechanical machines that are isolated from one another, the very nature of the ecological environment is its connectedness."
This is true, as long as you are connected. But if you are one of the billions without access to a computer where do you fit in? Will two parallel ecologies emerge, each with its own sources of power? This seems a critical question for the information age. If some (perhaps the smaller percentage of the population) are busy watching the screen, gathering, transferring and monitoring information, what will be developing in "real" life where people are not hooked into digital technologies? How will power evolve there, or be influenced by the power developments associated with digital technologies?
Everett-Green asks, "And what have we learned, when so many of us still talk about using computers 'only as a tool?' The one big lesson of Marshall McLuhan that never seems to stick is that our traditional idea of tools implies a degree of mastery over the situation that we never have. Once you accept the tool, you have a relationship with it, and it with you, and it grows into your life and culture and changes them permanently."