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ISSN number: 1746-4757

  

Feature essay: Controlled Change: The Politics of ICT and the Noösphere

Drew Whitworth

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Introduction

This paper asks: what is the nature of cyberspace? Most discussions of the "information society" propose that through ICT and the Internet some kind of "virtual" or "online space" has been created. It should therefore be crucial to develop this idea correctly. How is cyberspace actually constituted, and what is its relationship to other aspects of human existence?

Throughout his summary of modern social theory as applied to the "information society", Webster [1] draws attention to the failure of social impact approaches to develop useful insights about the state of the informatised world. Social impact approaches take the emergence of the "information society" as a given, and invariably cast cyberspace as a new and distinct realm of human activity. Sometimes it is called a new "frontier". The consequences of these developments are examined, but there is little or no analysis of their cause. Webster notes how tempting this approach can be. It is straightforward and appears to deliver what it promises. Nor does it require readers to involve themselves with "arcane" social theory. Yet when reading populist declarations of an "information revolution" with some knowledge of this theory, as Webster says, there is often disappointment. Offline power relations (patriarchy, say, or the domination of capital, or North American culture) are reasserted online despite claims that cyberspace is a place where we can overthrow these old controls. Enthusiastic testimonies from users who have ditched their old identities and enjoyed new lives as radical "cyberpersonae" fade into the dull reality of a commercialised Web, hundreds of spam e-mails a day and Usenet abuse. It is as if we have ascended the last pass over to the new frontier but, looking down on its landscapes, see them already strewn with shopping malls and litter.

There should be no question that important changes in human relationships (social, political, economic and psychological) have occurred due to the widespread use of ICT. Capital, for instance, is now more mobile, to the extent that its accumulation is now far more based on information and mobility than territory [2]. It is necessary to account for such issues when formulating any meaningful insights about the state of the world in the 21st century. But the study of cyberspace is too often seduced by its novel aspects, and is blind to its earthier ones; meaning, those which are rooted in what has gone before, and in the world itself. Analysis without this deeper level of understanding will at best be flawed. At worst it will build but a house of cards. It would be unfair to suggest that analysts are deliberately working in a superficial way. But underlying assumptions always influence the end results, and if these are not clear, then readers have no easy way to work out how results may be constrained or limited by the assumptions [3].

The supplementary essay started to develop the idea of the noösphere as a model for thinking about the construction of social reality. In this model, despite our active role in continually constructing and reconstructing this stock of knowledge and values, it retains some objective, independent existence. The structures and patterns within the noösphere -- effectively a record of all previous human activity -- cannot but influence our day-to-day lives. Past history does not completely limit us, but nor can it be disregarded. The supplementary essay also suggested that the noösphere cannot be analysed independently of the other, material spheres on which it depends, and any productive analysis should be holistic, recognising both the influence of the global, macro-level on the individual micro-level, and vice versa.

This essay first reflects on how the noösphere model can be used to appreciate the nature of cyberspace. It then analyses two books on the subject -- Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen and Tim Jordan's Cyberpower -- showing how each is more-or-less limited by certain assumptions, as already suggested. Finally, I suggest ways in which a "vulgar postmodernist" approach can be avoided. The trick is to do so without retreating into equally problematic methods that disregard different interpretations of cyberspace (or any other aspect of reality) and in their place impose some "objective" idea of "truth". The noösphere model can help here as well.

Cyberspace as the noösphere

The similiarities between the noösphere and cyberspace are fairly apparent at a basic level, and have not gone unnoticed by previous commentators [4]. But to make this link and then stop, as if, analytically, it says all one needs to know, is to fall into exactly the trap I am trying to avoid. Cyberspace is not the noösphere in toto, and ICT certainly has not created the noösphere. The noösphere began to emerge along with human communication, and has therefore evolved along with humanity. It is nothing new, for all that much information previously stored by other means has "migrated" to cyberspace, and the mode of access that is ICT allows far more information to be at our fingertips. The novelty of cyberspace should therefore be called into question even at this early stage.

We must also note the interactions between the noösphere and the material world. As the supplementary essay observed, aspects of the noösphere (such as knowledge and values) can be encoded into artifacts. ICT is a conduit into the noösphere, and one constructed using knowledge and values which are stored there, as indeed is any other technology. All technological artifacts therefore reflect pre-existing knowledge and values at the same time as they may give rise to the possibility of new ones. There is not the space in this essay to explore the development of ICT as a political event -- that is, how the development of the technology was provoked by the systematic need to use the world's (physical and informational) resources more efficiently and more intensively [5]. But we should remember that the world's spheres all act as records of prior activities and events. The distribution of, say, mineral types across the world is a record of geological events, and the distribution of species reflects past evolutionary processes: so it is that aspects of human society reflect prior events, and the distribution of technology is one such record.

In a perceptive paper, Susan Leigh Star [6] describes how the world's information and communication infrastructure is an artifact, a record of activities, and a representation of the world. An information infrastructure will therefore unavoidably reflect the underlying social and political structures which gave rise to it, as any child will take on some characteristics of its parents: even if it then goes on to develop its own. Control over the production of ICT hardware or software means control over what values are encoded into the technology. Both access to and control over the technologies by which we improve our ability to shape the noösphere constitute, at different levels, power in the information society. (Note also the recent move towards more mobility of access -- laptops, mobile phones -- which Bauman correctly notes is an integral part of the new mobility of capital [7].)

One does not need to resort to conspiracy theories to recognise that ICT, despite the claims of more enthusiastic commentators, has not spread across the world because of its potential to change existing systems -- rather, it is implemented to help perpetuate them [8]. Systems which depend on certain environmental conditions for their continued health will (often almost unconsciously) react to dampen changes to those conditions if they can. Precisely because every human being contributes to the continuous evolution of the noösphere, dominant systems are engaged in a similarly continuous process of retarding change, and preventing minor fluctuations from gathering pace and thereby threatening the status quo. This control does not have to be overt -- in fact, it rarely is. More often it is indirect, exerted through:

  • control over access points: who gets the technology? For what purposes can it be (easily and/or "legitimately") used? This can be seen not just with ICT but also, obviously, in the broadcast media, publishing, and so on.
  • control over filtering, selection and simulation. The scale of the Earth (geosphere, biosphere and noösphere) is simply too large for individuals to grasp. Everyone must localise their field of interest in order to have any meaningful interaction with the world and with other people. But if the processes by which individuals do this are not autonomous, but controlled, then one is directed away from autonomous interpretations of the world and, albeit often subtly, towards those interpretations favoured by (and favourable to) dominant interests. [9]
  • control over interpretation. Tim Jordan writes, "power names the things that determine how a life may be lived." [10]. Dominant systems or paradigms can be difficult to challenge simply because individuals have no relevant language or even abstract concepts from which to construct alternatives.

All of these are mechanisms for control over the noösphere. None are perfect: there will always be the possibility to use or subvert them, in order that new values or élite-challenging discourses can spread through a society. But anyone seeking to do so must be aware of their existence and the reasons for their existence. And because they exist in the noösphere, they exist in cyberspace as well.

So far, then, we have developed a model of cyberspace as something very far from a "new frontier". Rather, it is a subset of the noösphere -- a communicative space and a record of prior activities -- and as such cannot help but reflect the social and material world from which it developed. Admittedly, this is something of a pessimistic view, and one which may seem to acquiesce to the status quo: we will return to this argument on page 4. In the meantime, let us take the model and use it to review the arguments of two important works of "cyberculture".

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Footnotes

1. Webster, Frank (2002), Theories of the Information Society, 2nd. ed., London, Routledge. return

2. See, for instance, Bauman, Zygmunt (2000), Liquid Modernity, Cambridge Mass., Polity Press. return

3. For a useful introduction to the role of ontology, epistemology and methodology in social science research, see Grix, Jonathan (2002), "Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Science Research", Politics 22/3, pp. 175-186. return

4. For a summary see Samson, Paul R. and David Pitt (1999), The Biosphere and Noösphere Reader, London, Routledge, pp. 144-6. return

5. Webster (op. cit.) provides many starting points here. return

6. Star, Susan L. (1999), "The Ethnography of Infrastructure", American Behavioral Scientist 43/3, pp. 377-91. return

7. Bauman, op. cit., p. 58. return

8. See Sharpe, Richard, quoted in Webster, op. cit., p. 139. return

9. for instance, see Crang, Mike, Phil Crang and Jon May (1999), "Introduction", in their edited collection, Virtual Geographies: bodies, space and relations, London, Routledge, p. 7. return

10. Jordan, Tim (1999), Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge, p. 1. See also page 3. return