According to this view, to talk about digital technology is both transparent and instructive. It is transparent because the discourse on technology is merely a reflection of the realities of digital technology (to say, for example, that network technology allows flexibility and interactivity is to merely state the obvious). It is instructive because the discourse ultimately describes the operation of society (e.g., the flexibility of digital technology creates a flexible economy). However, I argue here, the discourse on technology is not a transparent vignette on reality but rather a particular outlook on it and is therefore worthy of analysis in its own right. Moreover, technology not only constitutes the material foundations of modern societies but also functions as its legitimation. The prevailing outlook regarding the relationship between technology and society is partial and, as such, ideological as well. It is the ideological nature of these relationships between (a new network) technology and (a new, post-Fordist) capitalism that I want to make the center of my investigation.
Historical Transformations in Technology Discourse
This book offers an inquiry into the contemporary discourse on network technology in advanced capitalist societies—in short, the digital discourse—that is located between a new capitalism and a new technology. I will argue that the sociopolitical constellation of our current network society is the result not only of economic and technological transformations but also of ideological transformations. That technology functions ideologically in modern societies is evident at almost all social levels, from the cultural realm where technological gadgets and engineering feats are celebrated and seen as pinnacles of the human spirit, to the political realm where instrumental reason reigns and technological means overwhelm substantive rationality.
But beyond this general critique of a technologistic outlook are the particular forms of technology discourse that are historically and sociologically contingent. Hence, while technology discourse can be said to function ideologically, its particular role and content are dependent upon specific social constellations and are variably integrated into the political culture of modern societies. At the center of this book is the argument that the role of technology as a legitimation discourse has gone through radical transformations concurrent with the transformations of capitalism in the last few decades. During Fordism, technology discourse legitimated the interventionist welfare state, the central planning in businesses and the economy, the hierarchized corporation, and the tenured worker. However, during our contemporary, post-Fordist society, technology discourse legitimates instead the withdrawal of the state from markets, the globalization of the economy, the dehierarchization and decentralization of businesses, and the flexibilization of production and the labor process. This new legitimation discourse of technology marks a transformation in the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1958) to use Max Weber’s famous expression, from its industrial phase, which emphasizes the capacity of capitalism to bring about social emancipation by alleviating exploitation, to its postindustrial spirit-of-networks phase, which focuses on the capacity of capitalism to enhance individual emancipation by alleviating alienation.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age