Information Technology

Historical and Intellectual Context

The emergence and character of information technologies over the course of the twentieth century are the outcome of complex technological, economic, social, political, and cultural contexts and processes. In technological terms, the fairly rapid development of personal computers, cable, satellite and digital television, office workstations, computer networks, and so on, are innovations as significant in scope and scale as the rise of agriculture and the machine technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Across disciplines, most changes have been understood under the rubric of the information society—characterized by informational service work and employment, a global economy, a reorganization of time-space, the saturation of everyday life by media—a term that is related in various different ways to processes of postindustrialization, postmodernization, and globalization (see Webster 2002). IT is thought to be implicated in a transition from industrial to postindustrial society, organized to disorganized capitalism, and mass production and consumption to flexible specialization and individualized consumption in service economies.

The intellectual contexts for understanding IT and consumer culture in the context of an information society are varied. Economic approaches have favored measuring increases in informational goods and services and their relative worth to the overall national economy. Sociological approaches have often drawn on Daniel Bell's canonical analysis of postindustrialism and in particular the new occupations and consumption patterns implied by such a shift. Geographers, and those interested in the socio-spatial aspects of production and consumption, have examined the role of IT in enabling “networked” spaces to emerge, allowing for differentiated flows of goods and services to arise. Post-Marxist cultural theorists have inherited the legacy of the Frankfurt school critique of the culture industry, where the current consumer culture represents a perfect alignment of technology and capital. The intellectual context of postmodernism has had a profound influence on theories of consumer culture, especially the production and consumption of images, signs, and lifestyle, and provides an important trajectory in locating IT-based media as central in mediating consumption and consumer identities through advertising and marketing, according to Mike Featherstone. Similarly, those studying “new media” have pointed to the novel characteristics of networked media, suggesting that many-to-many communication establishes radically different modes of distribution and exchange that have impacted on the form and content of goods and services, the relations between producers and consumers, and the theoretical assumptions underpinning conceptions of capitalist power. Others in information science and science and technology studies (STS), such as Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, suggest thinking about IT as the often-invisible infrastructure or architecture of classification, management, and ordering in contemporary societies.

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