Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks

In this research, Wired is seen as a key articulator of a discourse that not only reflects the realities of a new digital capitalism but also endows them with a “spirit” and makes sense of new constellations of power and new forms of life. The digital discourse is a “historically, socially, and institutionally specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs,” perceived as offering a transhistorical “truth”; “Precisely because they are assigned the status of objective knowledge, they seem to be beyond dispute and thus serve a powerful legitimating function” (Scott 1988). The purpose of this work is to uncover the historical, social, and institutional specificity of these new statements, terms, categories, images, and beliefs about contemporary capitalist society as they are crystallized in the digital discourse and point to their legitimation function.

Utilizing Wired magazine as a case study will allow me to expose and penetrate the outer shell of the black box of the digital discourse. A case study is a research model that focuses on a singular social entity or cultural artifact, treats it as a bounded system, and utilizes various methods to study it (Marshall 1994; Stake 1994). A case study is a naturally occurring social phenomenon, selected not chiefly for its typicality, but on the basis of its theoretical significance. The purpose of a case study is to provide the materials for what Geertz (1977) calls a “thick description,” which is essential to reach an understanding of the broader context (Kuper and Kuper 1996). On the other side of the coin of a thick, deep, and meaningful description is the question of how well the case study represents the sociological phenomenon at hand. This makes the selection of the case to be studied critical. A case study must find the global within the local, the general within the specific (Hamel, Dufour, and Fortin 1991, v, 36–38).

Wired is precisely this unique representative of a broader, social digital discourse. It is unique in the sense that it represents this discourse at its most concentrated and crystallized form. It is a more valuable case study than other publications that are part of this public discourse in that it is committed wholly and solely to this particular subject. The value of a case study is measured by how much it facilitates analytical, rather than statistical, generalization (Yin 1989, 21). So while Wired can correctly be characterized as a more extreme case than, say, the New York Times in both quantitative and qualitative terms (i.e., in how much it deals with network technology and in what ways), it is precisely these characteristics of being explicit, straightforward, and mobilized to the digital “cause” that yields more fruitful and cogent results.

This, however, is not a book about Wired; the magazine serves merely as an “instrumental case study” (Stake 1994). The case itself—notwithstanding the deep analysis it receives—is only of secondary significance;

34

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

the goal is ultimately to be able to answer the theoretical question regarding the legitimation role of technology in the political culture of advanced capitalist societies. The methodology of deciphering a dominant discourse through the reading of popular magazines has been extensively utilized in the social sciences. For example, Reading National Geographic (Lutz and Collins 1993) studied national, racial, gender, and geographical representations in the United States through a close textual analysis of the photography featured in the famous magazine. Edward Said famously studied how news outlets in the United States are Covering Islam (1981). And more recently, a group of scholars has offered an analysis of masculinity, capitalism, and consumption in contemporary Western society through reading and Making Sense ofMen’s Magazines (Stevenson, Jackson, and Brooks 2001). In this book, too, the analysis of the magazine takes on a supportive role to facilitate understanding of another, broader issue. Also, since the close observation of the case (Wired magazine) helps us understand an external phenomenon (the digital discourse), the case study does not have to be typical of other cases as long as it increases our understanding of the wider phenomenon (Stake 1994).

Wired was founded by American journalists Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe. It was a great success at its launch and was compared to Rolling Stone magazine for its innovation and cultural impact. It won five National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and three for Design (American Society of Magazine Editors n.d.). The magazine brought together a varied cadre of individuals, such as leaders from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a techno-libertarian advocacy group), academics from the Stanford Research Institute, Nicholas Negroponte from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and Kevin Kelly, editor of Whole Earth Review and author of Out of Control: The Rise of NeoBoiological Civilization (1995; Wolf 2003, 48, 50, 53). The company included not only the monthly magazine but also dozens of Web sites, a search engine (Hotbot), a blog, and a stock index. After a failed attempt to take the company public in 1997, it was sold off in pieces. Wired magazine was purchased by Advance Magazine Publishers, who assigned it to its New York subsidiary, Condé Nast. The editorial offices were kept in San Francisco, close to the epicenter of the digital revolution—Silicon Valley.

Wired perceived what was happening at that epicenter as the bedrock of a social revolution, a revolution that is ignored by mainstream media, which continued to concentrate on the old, industrial-era structures of power and social dynamics. The magazine’s goal was to register and articulate this new revolution and make sense of the new society to which it gives birth. Wired’s first issue makes explicit some of the motivations of the magazine’s introduction and some of the themes that will dominate it for years to come. The alignment around the axis of new media and technology was laid out in the magazine’s first words, taken from Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 book The Medium Is the Message:¹ “The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re-evaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted. Everything is changing: your education, your family, your neighborhood, your job, your relation to ‘the others.’ And they’re changing dramatically” (McLuhan 1967, cited in Wolf 2003, 71). In the next page of its inauguration issue, cofounder Louis Rossetto asserts why Wired is needed: “Because the Digital Revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali Typhoon—while the mainstream media is still groping for the snooze button. And because the computer ‘press’ is too busy churning out the latest PCInfoComputingCorporateWorld iteration for its ad sales formula cum parts catalog to discuss the meaning or context of social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire” (Wired, January 1993, cited in Wolf 2003, 71).

Contemporary Technology Discourse

35

In the January 1998 issue, celebrating the magazine’s five-year anniversary, Rossetto reiterates the magazine’s mission. He recalls his difficulty to pitch to investors the notion of a revolution brought about by information technology: “Digital Revolution? Most publishers were barely aware of the Industrial Revolution . . . What we were dreaming about was profound global transformation. We wanted to tell the story of the companies, the ideas, and especially the people making the Digital Revolution. Our heroes weren’t politicians and generals or priests and pundits, but those creating and using technology and networks in their professional and private lives—you” (Rossetto 1998).

From the heights of the dot-com euphoria, Rossetto outlines the magazine’s basic theory of contemporary society and the role of the magazine in it:

The Internet has mushroomed from an obscure academic mail system into the fastest growing medium, marketplace, and community in history. Genetic engineering is conquering disease, and new energy technologies promise to save our environment. The global financial network has created a force for change more powerful than the nation-state. And digital citizens are reinvigorating democratic discourse and reinventing civil society . . . We at Wired remain obsessed with authoritatively reporting on the new economy, new media, crucial technologies, and the digital nation. With providing context for a community overwhelmed by data. With not just telling the story of the modern, but visualizing the excitement of our times. (Rossetto 1998)

36

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

Right from the outset Wired’s founding rationale is that the technological revolution is yielding a social revolution. Hence, the main protagonist of the magazine is network technology itself, as well as the people and organizations intimately engaged with it. But Wired is not a magazine about technology but about society, only every topic is filtered through network technology. The stories are told through technology, but they are really about every conceivable facet of society. Later, other, more traditional publications, such as the New York Times and Newsweek, followed suit with their own technology sections. This shift from news stories that involve network technology to a weekly section devoted to (mostly digital) technology signifies the extent to which network technology entered as a subject—right next to the economy and politics—of everyday, generalized public discourse. “Network technology” has become a staple of our political discourse.

In fact, as Gary Wolf—an intimate witness to the formation of the magazine and a contributing editor—suggests, the roots of this digital discourse in the public sphere had sprouted before the inauguration of Wired; there was just a need for someone to crystallize the discourse and to consolidate its fragmentary voices into one harmonious sound. In that respect, the magazine sprouted unto a fertile ground. Recalling work on the pilot issue of the magazine, Wolf writes in Wired: A Romance (a biography of the magazine and its creators), “None of the articles or photographs were [sic] original . . . They were cribbed from every type of publication that touched on parts of the story [cofounders] Louis and Jane were trying to tell,” types of publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Business Week, and numerous others. “But,” Wolf continues, “the borrowed stories seemed bolder here than they have in their original publication. Bound together, they radiated a sense of fanatical self-assurance, as if united in expectation of technological wonders and tremendous social change. The fact that the stories were taken from mainstream sources strengthened rather than softened the effect, for the credits page offered evidence that the revolution Louis believed he was chronicling has already been widely noted only the context was new” (Wolf 2003, 47). Wired then was serving as a reverse prism: unifying the variety of representations of an emerging digital discourse in the public sphere into a coherent, cogent, and bright voice.

My argument is that Wired is representative of a much broader social phenomenon. At the same time, it has several unique characteristics that distinguish it from three other types of publications that also focus on technology and that makes it particularly suitable for studying contemporary technology discourse. The first type is trade magazines, such as PC World, PC Magazine, and InfoWorld, which are geared toward professionals in the field. These publications center more on the technical facet of information technology. Indeed there were some other professional publications (such as Mondo2000 and Signal) that also grew out of the epicenter of the high-tech industry (in and around San Francisco) that tried to capture the same technological and social revolution that Wired was after. However, while other technologically centered publications targeted specialized and professional audiences, Wired’s goal was “to broaden the definition of the digital vanguard to include hundreds of thousands of readers” (Wolf 2003, 49). In that respect, Wired thought the digital revolution to be a deep and populist social revolution brought about by individual users rather than by experts or hackers. Thus, Wired saw its goal in providing these individuals monthly updates on this emerging world—their world (Wolf 2003, 50).

Contemporary Technology Discourse

37

The second type of publication from which Wired needs to be distinguished is comprised of publications like Technology Review, Spectrum, Discover, Popular Science, and Scientific American, which are aimed at the general public. They usually present a discourse of fascination of, and even fetishization of, network technology, but, unlike Wired, they see their value mostly in bringing technological news to society and rarely venture into social, political, and cultural questions. Another advantage of Wired compared to this second group is the former’s concentration almost exclusively on network technology, rather than technology (and sometimes science) in general, and its integration within the economy and culture of Silicon Valley. To sum up, unlike those two types of publications, I see Wired not as a magazine about technology but rather as a magazine about the intersection of technology and society. It is oriented not toward a professional public and technical issues, but toward the general public and social issues. It is a current affairs magazine, just like The Economist, Time, and Newsweek, only it perceives technology (rather than politics or economics) to be the predominant axis of these affairs in contemporary society.

That leaves us with the task of differentiating Wired from weekly publications on current affairs (such as Time or The Economist) as well as daily newspapers, all of which now regularly feature a special section on technology. Here the distinction is much more subtle, and the choice of Wired rather than the other publications is mostly methodological. First, in terms of content, Wired’s discourse tends to be what we might call more “ideological.” The digital discourse, which is the hypothetical structure that this book seeks to capture, can be found in a more crystallized and pure form in Wired rather than in, say, the New York Times. Second, while Newsweek or Time are established magazines that have integrated a technology section into their older content, Wired is sui generis, that is, it was created precisely for the sake of registering and defining the digital discourse. It preceded some of those other publications by a few years in terms of a technologically centered reporting, and, in terms of social networks and geography, it has been located at the heart of the revolution on which it purports to report.

38

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

Discourse and Its Analysis

The notion of discourse is a central concept in this book, both theoretically and methodologically. Chapter 1 made a theoretical claim and asserted the discourse on technology in general and the digital discourse in particular as valid and important sociological objects of study. Let me add here a more general discussion on discourse and consider in particular the interrelations between discourse and practice. Since the linguistic (or interpretive) turn, language has come to be seen as a central arena of social production. Language is a system “through which meaning is constructed and cultural practices organized and by which, accordingly, people represent and understand their world” (Scott 1988). Language is neither a cause nor a reflection of social relations, as the idealist-materialist opposition implies. Rather, “the analysis of language provides a crucial point of entry . . . for understanding how social relations are conceived” and, in turn, “how institutions are organized, how relations of production are experienced, and how collective identity is established” (Scott 1988).

Whereas structuralist analysis seeks to uncover the hidden meaning of language—that is, to reduce the multiplicity of the phenomenology of language (the superstructure) into the unitary and essential meaning (the base)—the assumption behind the poststructuralist approach is that society takes place precisely within language and discourse. Language generates meanings and practices that constitute the social. For Foucault, discourse involves the production of knowledge that “gives meaning to material objects and social practices” (Barker 2003, 102).

While the knowledge produced by discourse does not reveal any essential and ultimate truth, it is not arbitrary; Foucault insists that discourse “generates meaning under specific material and historical conditions” (Barker 2003, 101). The task of the researcher is therefore not to examine the link between discourse and reality but to point out the link between discourse and its conditions of possibility—that is, the social conditions under which it has been produced—and the link between discourse and its effects.

Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999) assert the significance of the study of discourse as part of the project of critical social science, especially under contemporary political and economic conditions. Contemporary social changes, with their global scale and sheer complexity, “increase the sense of helplessness and incomprehension” (3). “Social forms that are produced by people and can be changed by people are being seen as if they were part of nature” (4); they are therefore “widely perceived as inevitable” (3). The analytical category of discourse can be critical insofar as it highlights that discourse and practice are mutually constitutive. Bourdieu (1998a, 1998b) points out that the notion of “flexibility,” central to the neoliberal discourse, is already a reality in global capitalism, “but it is also backed by social forces (e.g., the banks) which aim to make it more of a reality, and the discourse of flexibility is one of the [symbolic] resources they have . . . for achieving this” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999, 4). The relationship between discourse and social practice is dialectical so that “imaginaries,” that is, “representations of how things might or could or should be” (Chiapello and Fairclough 2002) are enacted as practices, such as technologies, bodies of knowledge, genres implicated with social practices, and identities, which in turn become the material for further representations of reality. In the language of Bourdieu this book aims to decipher and deconstruct the digital discourse as a “symbolic resource,” which partakes in the construction of the digital society.

Contemporary Technology Discourse

39

Conclusion: Discourse_, Ideology_, and Spirit

The central category analyzed in this study is that of discourse, but there are two additional, closely related concepts that are discussed in the book: ideology and spirit. The genealogy of ideology, spirit, and discourse in the history of ideas is as diverse as the history of social thought itself. Ideology is traced back to Marx, spirit to Weber, and discourse to Foucault. Ideology is a structuralist concept, spirit focuses on agency, and discourse is derived from poststructuralist thought. Ideology points to a divergence between truth and (both common and false) knowledge; spirit—to the meanings that shape social action; discourse—to knowledge that becomes truth through practice and power. But they all share a common sensibility that is at the heart of this book. Discourse, ideology, and spirit point to the social function of knowledge; in all of them knowledge is treated not simply as a function of cognitive reflection but as closely intertwined with social practices.

To some degree, discourse, ideology, and spirit—as well as hegemony (Gramsci 1971), mythology (Lévi-Strauss 1963; Barthes 1972), and doxa (Bourdieu 2003)—engage the legitimation function of knowledge. They all point to the characteristics of a particular type of knowledge that is socially embedded, intertwined with practice, self-evident, a priori, and axiomatic. Such knowledge is resistant to scrutiny precisely because it is woven into deeper constructs, such as an “outlook,” or “identity” (Ram

40

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

2006, 13), or as Raymond Williams puts it, into the “structure of feelings” (Williams 1978). This type of “natural” knowledge is the backbone of political culture and political legitimacy. As Lyn Hunt argues, “The legitimacy of political authority depends on its resonance with more global, even cosmic cultural presuppositions, for political life is ‘enfolded in general conceptions of how reality is put together” (Hunt 1984, 87). “The digital society,” “the network society,” and so forth are “master fictions” (Geertz 1977) that bring together these various presuppositions and endow them with shared meaning (Ram 2006, 13). The purpose of this book is to analyze the digital discourse as this kind of knowledge and show the usually invisible threads that connect it to politics and power.

Contemporary Technology Discourse

41

Part II

Network Market

Part II of the book presents the analysis of the digital discourse at the intersection of network technology and the new, post-Fordist capitalism. Over the course of four chapters, it presents the central narratives of the digital discourse and underscores how these constitute a new “spirit of networks.” As the market, work, production, and the human become integrated into network technology, so are their essences transformed. The next four chapters analyze the digital discourse on the network market, network work, network production, and the network human.

As outlined in Chapter 1, beginning in the 1970s, capitalism has gone through radical transformations in its mode of operation. From a functionalist point of view, these internal transformations were necessary in order to revitalize capitalism and represented a response to its inherent contradictions and crisis tendencies (Mandel 1978), which at that time have reached their zenith and threatened to collapse capitalism onto itself. The ultimate goal of capitalism as a world system has remained the same: the infinite accumulation of capital by peaceful means (Wallerstein 2004), but its means, or its mode of accumulation, was revolutionized, shifting from Fordism to post-Fordism.

The New Dynamics of Markets in Post-Fordism

One of the focal points for this transformation has been the market: the emergence of post-Fordism entailed a radically new constellation of power between the market and the state and, more profoundly, between the market and society, with markets becoming increasingly disembedded from society (Polanyi 2001; Harvey 2005). This disembeddedness—part of a broader social transformation from Fordism to post-Fordism—is dominated by two trends: marketization and disorganization.

Marketization entails the increasing dominance and scope of markets in social life. Markets have gained more autonomy vis-à-vis the state, becoming more deregulated and more globalized (Castells 1996; Sassen

C H A P T E R 3