Manipulating information (personal/academic)

A range of influential writers, from Robert Reich (1992) and Peter Drucker (1993) to Manuel Castells (1996-8), suggest that the economy is led and energized by people whose major characteristic is the capacity to manipulate information. (Webster, 2006, p. 446, emphasis is mine)

Given the state of current global financial markets, during what the former Chair of the Federal Reserve Board Alan Greenspan might still call “The Age of Turbulence”, I am unsure if Webster knew how prescient the word “manipulate” would be...

Webster wrote this quotation as an example of the occupational change endemic to an “information society”. Webster, mimicking a sociological perspective, states that “we have achieved an information society when the preponderance of occupations is found in information work”. Although this argument smacks of circularity (e.g. How do you know when we have an “information society”? Well, when everyone in “society” has a job dealing with “information”…), this metric is as good as any of the others used to define the nature of an amorphous phenomenon like the information society.

I find this quotation especially intriguing in light of the recent financial meltdown of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG, etc. and its particularly appropriate use of the phrase “manipulate information”. In “our globalized and fast-changing world” (Webster, 2006, p. 446) with financial services that allow increasingly large amounts of money to change hands almost instantaneously, good financial information becomes a highly valuable commodity. When you mix an oligarchy that monopolizes high-end financial information with direct access to a great deal of capital, these types of cataclysmic market corrections seem highly foreseeable, if not inevitable. Although there is no certainty as to what exactly caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and others (1), part of it has to do with this deliberate manipulation of information.

I believe that Reich, Drucker, Castells and Webster wrote in good faith about the phenomenon of informational leaders. When they wrote about information manipulation they used neutral terms and meant it simply as those who create and use information. But for a person who until very recently (e.g. check out last week’s blog) would count himself as a “soft technological determinist” (2), I can’t help but revisit my seemingly rash view that “hard technological determinism” (3) carries less weight. It is difficult not to revisit these thoughts during a global economic meltdown accelerated by instantaneous financial transactions carried out by technology. At least in the present instance, financial services technology has hastened the collapse of some major Wall Street players.

Could these problems have still occurred without technology? Possibly. I guess that is up to the economic historians to decide…

(1) Speculation is rampant that this meltdown was based, to some extent, on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). CDOs are an unregulated asset-backed security. In some instances they can be mortgage-backed securities, some of which, as you would expect, were exposed to the subprime mortgage markets.

(2) Technology is viewed as a part of a more complex mix of economic, political and social factors (Marx & Smith, 1994, p. xiii).

(3) Hard technological determinism imputes agency to technology itself and technological advances leading to a situation of inescapable necessity (Marx & Smith, 1994, p. xii).

References:
Marx, L., & Smith, M.R. (1994). Introduction. In M.R. Smith & L. Marx (Eds.), Does technology drive history?: The dilemma of technological determinism (ix-xv). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Webster, F. (2006). The information society revisited. In L. Lievrouw & S. Livingstone (Eds.), The Handbook of New Media, Updated Student Edition (443-457). London: Sage.