Critical theorists concerned with issues of class and power see the Information Age as merely an extension of capitalist influence beyond its traditional industrial base … My own work, which shares this critical view, describes the process as a kind of panoptic sort, an all-seeing discriminatory technology that uses information about individuals gathered from numerous sources and transformed into strategic intelligence by means of sophisticated statistical models. This intelligence is then used to determine the quality of options and experiences we face in our roles as citizens, employees, and consumers.
Predictor: Gandy, Oscar H.
Prediction, in context:In this 1994 article in the Phi Kappa Phi journal National Forum, Professor Oscar Gandy writes: ”Critical philosophers like Jacques Ellul offer us a vision of technological determinism. For Ellul, technology is almost autonomous in its development and in the spread of its influence. Although politicians and social planners may actively consider their options, they are constrained by what they understand to be technologically feasible. In this way, technology can be seen to ‘impose its own laws’ on a variety of social organizations, disturbing and changing what we thought to be permanent – the product of natural laws. For Ellul, not only is technology – la technique – machines and devices, but it is also a point of view; it is a religion, too, that has efficiency as its god, economists as its priests, and engineers as its faithful servants. Other theorists hold views that deny Ellul’s technological determinism … Important among these is James Beniger, whose Control Revolution describes the workings of a kind of evolutionary dialectic through which innovations in communications and information technology, both hardware and software, are developed and called into use to control problems generated by earlier technological advances … an interactive chain of events in which advances in production generate bottlenecks in distribution that are addressed by advances in transportation, that then contribute to problems of underconsumption. These problems begin to be addressed by advances in marketing and the management of demand. All these activities begin to reveal the outlines of the Information Age … Critical theorists concerned with issues of class and power see the Information Age as merely an extension of capitalist influence beyond its traditional industrial base. Frank Webster and Kevin Robins discuss this process of general mobilization as a kind of ‘cybernetic capitalism’ … my own work, which shares this critical view, describes the process as a kind of panoptic sort, an all-seeing discriminatory technology that uses information about individuals gathered from numerous sources and transformed into strategic intelligence by means of sophisticated statistical models. This intelligence is then used to determine the quality of options and experiences we face in our roles as citizens, employees, and consumers.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: General, Overarching Remarks
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: National Forum
Title, headline, chapter name: The Information Superhighway as the Yellow Brick Road
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?Did=000000005878683&Fmt=3&Deli=1&Mtd=1&Idx=5&Sid=6&RQT=309
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney