Critical Perspectives on Information Society
Herbert Schiller on information and capitalism
Herbert Schiller: Information Inequality (1996)
In critical tradition, represented by Schiller, there are three key characteristics
(Webster 2002)
1) The emphasis is on the structural features behind the content of information / media
2) Systemic analysis of information / media in capitalism
3) Emphasis on history
- Schiller doesn’t deny the impact of “information explosion”, but he stresses on the continuities of capitalism
- The central role of power, control and interest: for whose benefit and under whose control will the information and the technology be implemented?
Schiller gives emphasis to three arguments:
1) The market criteria as a driving force in informational developments
2) The existence of class inequality with regard to information
3) The domination of corporate institutions (the information and ICT will be developed for private rather than for public ends)
- the rise of transnational corporations (TNC’s) after the II world war
- interlocking interests of different TNC’s, including the communication industries
- the production of communication content and media messages as well as the development of ICT is being formed largely
inside a system of powerful economic actors
- vast bulk of media imagery is intended to assist the marketing of products
The impact on content:
- the commercial media is dependent on the advertising money as a licence to do business
-> advertisers choose content that serves their interests
- example: Silvio Berlusconi and Italian media markets
· commercial media has dual markets: audiences and advertisers
· it has two products: media content and audiences
What does a commercial media company want?
1) Audience size
2) Audience demographics
3) Consumer-friendly media environment
- because of transnationalization of news media, the media system produces an overwhelmingly western viewpoint on events
- dominance of western entertainment
-> cultural imperialism?
- market criteria: information will be produced and made available only where there is the prospect of profit (information is a commodity)
- information serves the interests of existing power structures
- there is a sharp class divide between what Schiller calls the information rich and the information poor
- the latter are subjected to “garbage programming”
- the ideological meaning of information and media content: expansion of the scope of consumerism and an individualistic as opposed to collectivistic way of life
- development of ICT is closely connected to power: technologies of surveillance, monitoring of people etc.
-> ICT enhances the present social inequalities, instead of offering a remedy