European Modernism and the Information Society

Informing the Present, Understanding the Past

W. Boyd Rayward, W. Boyd Rayward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317139478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. Interdisciplinary in perspective, the volume reflects the nature of the thinkers discussed, including Otto Neurath, Patrick Geddes, the English Fabians, Paul Otlet, Wilhelm Ostwald and H. G. Wells. The work also charts the interest since the latter part of the nineteenth century in finding new ways to think about and to manage the growing body of available information in order to achieve aims such as the advancement of Western civilization, the alleviation of inequalities across classes and countries, and the promotion of peaceful coexistence between nations. In doing so, the contributors provide a novel historical context for assessing widely-held assumptions about today's globalized, 'post modern' information society. This volume will interest all who are curious about the creation of a modern networked information society.

Chapter 1
Understanding the Information Domain: The Uneasy Relations between Sociology and Cultural Studies and the Peculiar Absence of History

Frank Webster¹

This chapter reflects on the research into information and information and communications technologies (ICTs) in relation to three spheres: Sociology, Cultural Studies and History. In the first part it observes the absence of History in both Sociology and Cultural Studies’ contributions to information issues (save for a pervasive ‘ahistorical historicism’). Thereafter it traces the development of research on information and communications from the 1980s in relation to trends in Sociology and this discipline’s relations with Cultural Studies. It observes the seminal contribution of Daniel Bell’s conception of post-industrial society/ information society, characterizing it as blending theory with empirical observation while providing a ‘grand narrative’ account of change. Sociology in the United Kingdom during the 1980s largely ignored macro-level analysis and focused on work and employment, took its starting point as opposition to the technological determinism associated with this first-wave enthusiasm for the ‘microelectronics revolution’, and produced localized and textured studies.

Manuel Castells’s conception of the network society signalled a return to the scale and scope offered by Bell, notably in being a macro analysis that combined theory and empirical evidence. Castells’s contribution coincided with a second wave of technological enthusiasm associated especially with the internet. Alongside this, Sociology in Britain has experienced the rise of Cultural Studies, a field that has competed for important parts of what might have been considered sociology’s terrain. Cultural studies often has outpaced sociology in response to recent changes in the information domain. Its emergence expressed little concern with technological determinism, embracing ‘virtuality’ and ‘cyberspace’ and being more open to the exploration of expanding culture.

Cultural Studies remains methodologically flawed while, like so much sociological research on ICTs and information, seemingly incapable of combining theory and empirical evidence that identify and explain the major contours of change. further, both Sociology and Cultural studies remain characterized by presentism and chronocentrism, hence in need of history.

Introduction

At the outset I ask for your indulgence: this chapter will be rather personal, being in part reflections on my own experiences. These amount to 25 years or so of thinking about informational developments from the point of view of a sociologist employed chiefly in English universities. Inevitably, what follows has an Anglocentric bias. During this time sociology has developed in many ways, for instance coming to terms with feminism, engaging with Marxisms, and warming and cooling with regard to the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative methods. Along the way, postmodernism has been encountered and heated arguments have ensued. Few of these challenges for Sociology can have been more consequential than having to come to terms with Cultural Studies and its cousins Media Studies and Communications Studies. Cultural Studies has come to occupy territory one might once have supposed was the rightful domain of sociology, the latter seemingly outflanked in terms of the race to make sense of phenomena such as the internet.

In this chapter I reflect on approaches to, and issues about, information and information and communications technologies (ICTs) particularly in light of relations between Sociology and Cultural Studies. I shall argue that there has been a shift among students of change away from interest in the information society (a term intellectually grounded in sociology) toward concern with the character of cyberspace and virtuality that reflects the emergence of Cultural Studies. I shall continue to argue, however, that sociological research on information proved incapable of developing work with the ambition and scope to match that offered by the leading thinkers Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells. Cultural Studies, while it has kept pace with change and responded more imaginatively than Sociology in its analyses, is methodologically weak and, like much Sociology, has been unable to match the vision and combination of empirical and theoretical work of analysts such as Bell and Castells. In so far as I argue in this way, it might be said that I favour ‘grand narratives’ (so long as they are substantively rooted) toward which much Sociology and Cultural Studies appears to be antipathetic.

The Absence of History

I have been part of discussions between and within sociology and cultural studies, especially with regard to informational matters, and I have a good deal to say about these matters later in this essay. But there is something that I want to articulate right away, about which I feel both embarrassed and even rather bereaved. I refer to the peculiar absence of history both in cultural studies and sociology, particularly in terms of analyses of information. something of my feelings may be understood when I reveal that I was a student of the late Philip Abrams (he died suddenly in 1981, at the tragically early age of 48), author of Historical Sociology (1982), and one of several notable sociologists in the united Kingdom who came to the discipline from History. With Abrams I underwent a programme that emphasized historical and comparative approaches to Sociology. Sources central to my formative years in the discipline were such as Moses Finley, Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Harold Perkin, Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson and Fernand Braudel. Thereby, I was educated in the conviction of C. Wright Mills that ‘all sociology worthy of the name is “historical sociology”’ (Mills 1958, 162).

I am embarrassed because my career as a sociologist dedicated to examining the information domain has been shaped by circumstances that have subverted Abrams’s legacy, and I have not done enough to resist. Crudely, research in British Sociology has been bedevilled by short-termism and by demands that it be policy-relevant. The first pressure is a variant of the ‘publish or perish’ imperative common to most academe, but in the past two decades in Britain it has been exacerbated by the periodic RAEs (Research Assessment Exercises) that distribute funds and esteem. In this regime, if one doesn’t produce four top-class pieces every five years (preferably articles in authoritative professional journals), then one is deemed to be failing. In addition, research awards are indicators of esteem to RAE judges, so these are pursued assiduously and, with diminution of general university budgets, competition for research grants has heightened since without them it is increasingly difficult to do research. For sociologists, this situation serves to weaken commitment to the long-term projects that Historical Sociology presupposes. The second pressure, to be ‘relevant’, means that ‘fundable’ research needs to resonate with policy-makers. This makes things doubly hard for the historically minded since it means that they are unlikely to get funded. Applications for support for a study of ICT skill requirements of employees are likely to be more sympathetically heard than proposals to examine, let’s say, the reading habits of working people over the past two centuries. (Though for illustration of what historical analysis might offer on the subject of information capabilities and practices, see Jonathan Rose’s wonderful The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes [2001].)

On top of this, the standing of History has been the subject of one of the more fierce battles for the soul of Sociology. John Goldthorpe (1991), with a stellar reputation for survey research and statistical aptitude, swept aside Historical Sociology on grounds that historians must perforce rely on ‘relics’ (left-over evidence such as diaries and parish registers), while proper sociology is a data-generating discipline capable of testing hypotheses. Furthermore, Goldthorpe charged that Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Philip Abrams who draw heavily on the writings of historians are working at third hand, since they rely on authorities who themselves turned to inadequate sources (‘relics’) in the first place. Goldthorpe’s arguments, delivered in characteristically combative style (British Journal of Sociology 1994), have contributed to the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) being persuaded to professionalize Sociology by insisting that all postgraduates who gain financial support must undergo training in research methods. In this milieu Historical Sociology has had a hard time; I do not think it irrelevant to observe that the two leading British historical sociologists, Michael Mann and Krishan Kumar, are employed in the United States.

Perhaps I should not worry. I have had the good fortune to work on informational matters, and this is an area that has been smiled on by grant givers. Most visibly, the ESRC has since the mid-1980s provided dedicated sums to research ICTs and cognate matters in a series of research ‘programmes’, each lasting about five years (Programme in Information and Communications Technologies [PICT], Virtual Society?, and the e-Society), with each one providing support for over 20 projects. I have been a beneficiary of this. And yet I do feel some sense of misgiving since the price of participation is not only that one must research in an area delimited by the programme’s terms, but also that one must submit a fundable research project. These are decidedly not bids that are much informed by historical research (though, as we shall see, there is a strong suggestion that we are experiencing a historical rupture, one which underpins the funding regime of this research). My own recent projects have been concerned with transformations in higher education and ICTs (Robins and Webster 2002), ‘new’ politics and the internet (Pickerill and Webster 2006), and the role of front-line correspondents in an era of information war (Webster 2003; Tumber and Webster 2006). Writing this chapter, I reflect uneasily that throughout the 1980s Kevin Robins and myself (1986; 1999) dedicated much of our research time trying to produce a ‘long history’ of the ‘information revolution’. That historical perspective has narrowed markedly over the last decade or so, there being no time or resources for the necessary library and archival research.

My recent projects are notable, it seems to me, for their concern with policy and its focus on the here and now. Each is fortunate to have benefited from circumstances that prioritize research about what has been described as the information society (more recently known as the e-society or cyberspace) and looks favourably on work that might make some contribution to policy. By the same token, these are circumstances that demote historical work, because it appears not to address the momentous character of the information age and has no evident contribution to make to the policy-maker.

We should remind ourselves of warnings historians might issue regarding this thinking. First, historians would draw attention to the dangers of presentism, the focus on the hic et nunc. Presentism’s conceit is that now is of singular significance and such presumption pervades commentary on the information society. We are so enveloped in the tumult of now, so enthralled by the hereness of contemporary change, that research easily becomes fixated on the present. We become dazzled, convinced without argument that we indeed live in ‘new times’. A historian’s perspective helps us scrutinize and be sceptical about this belief. Take, for instance, presentism’s repeated assertion that now is a time of enormous uncertainty. There are variations of this point of view, but the consensus seems to be that everything nowadays exudes this uncertainty: thus there are no longer ‘jobs for life’, but rather portfolio careers that must fit with the flexible ‘new economy’; moral sureties are untenable in our world of globalized media; intimate relationships are more likely than ever to fracture, and so on. information and ICTs are regarded as central to this uncertainty and attendant insecurity: it is constant innovation that destabilizes, either by introducing new ways of working or displacing workers by creating new products or transferring production off-shore; it is new media that subvert once-assured beliefs by allowing access to alternative ways of thinking about family life; it is the enormous increase in reflexive resources – whether with e-mail, migration or educational experiences – that bolsters doubt and insecurity; it is the electronic media that heighten apprehension and anxiety about death and disaster by providing ‘rolling news’ coverage from pretty well any crisis point around the globe.

But some history might lead us to question whether the way we live is either experienced as, or actually is, especially insecure. Consider, for instance, Europe between the First and Second World Wars, where pretty well everywhere was blighted by demoralization and political polarization, deep disillusion following the enormous loss of life in the First World War, and economic depression at a level never since encountered. Richard Bessel writes:

from the valleys of South Wales to the Urals, from Andalusia to Berlin, insecurity, anxiety, and upheaval characterised European society after the first World War ... [Yet] the profoundly disturbing development of the interwar years in Europe, terrible though they were for the millions of Europeans who suffered from the effects of inflation, depression, collectivization, and forced industrialization, pale alongside the effects of the events of 1939-45

(Bessel 2002, 131).

Bessel’s point is elaborated in Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent, a history of Europe that highlights the collapse of liberal democracy between the wars, leading to the unprecedented instability and uncertainty of mass unemployment, forced migration and the death and displacement of some 90 million Europeans between 1939 and 1948 (Mazower 1998, 222). If I may add a personal comment here: my father reached school-leaving age – 15 – in 1935 while living amid the Durham coalfield, when unemployment in parts of that county exceeded 70 percent. Though he had won a scholarship to a grammar school, he felt compelled to join the royal navy to get a job. Unfortunately for him World War II broke out when he was at sea, aged just 19. He then had to serve through until 1946 when he was demobilized. When I hear talk of our living in uncertain times I cannot but think of my own father’s – not unexceptional – experiences, when, still a teenager, job opportunities were close to zero and the risk of death exceedingly high for those, like him, serving on convoys to Mourmansk in the Soviet Union.

One might also comment on the willingness nowadays to identify ‘fundamentalism’ as a response from those who cannot tolerate living with uncertainty in our rapidly changing world (Bauman 1997). Readers of Harold Lasswell (1935) may wonder what is so new here, though commentators nowadays interpret fundamentalism to be a response to the acceleration of change that accompanies globalization (Giddens 1994). In his book World Politics and Personal Insecurity Lasswell presented his ‘insecurity hypothesis’ by way of an explanation for the emergence in Europe of fascism. The latter, attests Lasswell, was a response to the insecurities brought about by depression, hyperinflation, and the collapse of belief that was prevalent during the 1920s and 1930s. Lasswell even used the term ‘fundamentalism’ to describe this resolution to ‘insecurity’. Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose …

Finally, we might reflect on observations made by Marc Bloch in his classic Feudal Society (1961). Presentists readily conjure a settled and stable past against which to contrast today’s world of frenetic change that creates high anxiety. The suggestion here is that once upon a time, though threats from famine, plague and invasion were real enough, and actuarially speaking life was vastly more tenuous than it is today, those inhabiting the feudal epoch could take comfort from the certitudes of their ways of life. Bloch has no time for such fantasy, observing that a ‘quality of perpetual insecurity’ characterized our distant predecessors, something that explains the ‘emotional insecurity’ and ‘nervous sensibility’ of those times which ‘made people’s minds constantly and almost morbidly attentive to all manner of signs, dreams, or h...