Information Technologies and Social Transformation (1985) / Chapter Skim
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The Twilight of Hierarchy: Speculations on the Global Information Society
The Twilight of Hierarchy: Speculations on the Global Information Society
Pages 55-79
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From page 55... ...
But in the 1970s society started to take charge not of scientific discovery but of its technological fallout. The decision not to build the SST or deploy an ABM system even though we knew how to make them, the dramatic change in national environmental policy, and the souring of the nuclear power industry bear witness.
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From page 56... ...
A DOMINANT RESOURCE, A DIFFERENT RESOURCE The size and scope of the information society are now familiar even in the popular literature. We can take it as read that information is the dominant resource in the United States, and coming to be so in other advanced or developed countries.
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From page 57... ...
In 1972, the same year The Limits to Growth was published, John McHale came out with a book called The Changing Information Environment,5 which argued that information expands as it is used. Whole industries have grown up to exploit this characteristic of information: scientific research, technology transfer, computer software (which already makes a contribution to the U.S.
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From page 58... ...
You can sit in Auckland, New Zealand, and play the New York stock markets in real time if you do not mind keeping slightly peculiar hours. And the same is true, without the big gap in time zones, of people in any rural hamlet in the United States.
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From page 59... ...
You may own the paper you hold in your hand, but you do not own its contents, the facts and ideas in the paper. Neither, now that I have written them down and you and I are sharing them, do I.9 The historically sudden dominance of the information resource has, it seems, produced a kind of theory crisis, a sudden sense of having
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From page 60... ...
As Simon Nora and Alain Minc wrote in their landmark report to the president of France: "The liberal and Marxist approaches, contemporaries of the production-based society, are rendered questionable by its deniise."~° The most troublesome concepts are those that were created to deal with the main problems presented by the management of thingsproblems such as their scarcity, their bulk, their limited substitutability for each other, the expense and trouble in transporting them, the paucity of infonnation about them (which made them comparatively easy to hide) , and the fact that, being tangible, they could be hoarded.
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From page 61... ...
More and more decisions are made with wider and wider consultation— or they do not stick. If the Census Bureau counted each year the number of committees per thousand population, we would have a rough quantitative measure of the bundle of changes called the information society.
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From page 62... ...
Most of the history we learn in school is so narrowly focused on visible leaders that it may give us the wrong impression about leadership processes even in earlier times. We learn that Genghis Khan or Louis XIV or ibn-Saud or the emperor of Japan or George Washington said this and did that—as though he thought it up by himself, consulted with nobody, and wrote it without the help of a ghostwriter.
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From page 63... ...
Public policy used to mean what the government does. Now it includes corporate policies, collective bargaining agreements, the cost of health care, the recruitment of university presidents, lobbying practices, equal employment opportunity, environmental protection, tax shelters, waste disposal, private contributions to political candidates, the sex habits of employees, or just about any other insider activities that outsiders think are important enough to engage their time and attention.
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From page 64... ...
But the visibly responsible leaders increasingly have to build into their organizations, not as a public relations frill but as an essential ingredient in bottom-line budgeting, staff members competent to help develop strategy on such issues as these. And the visible executive now has to be personally competent to defend the organization's public posture in public debate.
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From page 65... ...
In consequence, compared with a generation ago most public officials - and a rapidly growing number of private executives conscious of their ultimate public responsibility are much more inclined to ask themselves, before acting, how their actions would look on the front page of the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or on the evening telecast. Even former Vice-President Agnew has conceded that taking cash from contractors in his government office might be wrong if judged by what he called post-Watergate moral standards.
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From page 66... ...
The opposite of centralization is of course not decentralization, which is simply an effort to preserve hierarchical workways when your organization gets too large for grandpa to know everything. The opposite of centralization is what Charles Lindblom calls mutual adjustment: in a generally understood environment of moral rules, norms, conventions, and mores very large numbers of people are adjusting their behavior by watching each other and modifying their behavior just enough to accommodate the differing purposes of others, but not so much that the mutual adjusters lose sight of where they themselves want to go.~3 What makes mutual adjustment work is the wide availability of relevant information, so each mutual adjuster can figure out what the others may do under varied conditions and give forth useful signals about his or her own behavior.
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From page 67... ...
But if all the relevant experts had been asked for their opinions before launching them, some or all of these great ideas might well have shriveled in the womb. Too many people, in Washington and abroad, would have said, "Let's study it some more." Bold initiatives for change can thus be killed by premature exposure to the rough winds of public debate.
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From page 68... ...
The knowledge explosion also produces new kinds of works (computer software) , new means of delivery (microfiche, videocassettes, computerized videotext over a telephone line)
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From page 69... ...
In U.S. universities and research institutes, creative work is already rewarded mostly by promotion, tenure, and tolerant traditions about teaching loads and outside consulting.
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From page 70... ...
Every newly miniaturized recording or micrographic device and every new satellite launched for communication or photography or remote sensing makes it more difficult to sustain the doctrine that national governments can own, or even control, their information resources.
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From page 71... ...
But keeping from our adversaries full knowledge of our capabilities merely adds another element of madness to the nuclear arms race. Our own government has for three decades engaged in halfhearted and demonstrably ineffective efforts to control strategic U.S.
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From page 72... ...
It may help undermine the systems that keep 2 billion people in relative poverty and more than a third of them in absolute poverty. In many ways the most exciting, and puzzling, question about the new knowledge environment is whether it will be good news or bad news for the global fairness revolution and for that revolution's U.S.
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From page 73... ...
Vestiges of the idea survive in the Boston Commons, the National Park system, and in the way many major waterways in Europe and North America are managed. For people in old England the commons, as Ivan Illich defines it, was "that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage [not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households]
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From page 74... ...
: the deep ocean and its seabed, Antarctica, outer space and celestial bodies, and the weather. The Mediterranean Sea, the arena of bloody ancient feuds and lethal modern rivalnes, has recently been formally recognized by all the coastal states (including the Arab states and Israel)
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From page 75... ...
The spices of the Orient, the rubber and tin of Southeast Asia, the coal and iron of Central Europe, the diamonds (and later, uraniums of South Africa, the fruit of Central America, the petroleum reserves of Indonesia and Mexico and Venezuela and North Africa and the Persian (or Arabian) Gulf and the North Sea, the soil that produced those "waving fields of grain" in North America these crucial resources left an indelible mark on the national sovereignties which happened to find them in their backyards.
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From page 76... ...
The state is leaking at the top, as more international functions require the pooling of sovereignty in alliances, in a World Weather Watch, in geophysical research, in eradicating contagious diseases, in satellite communication, in facing up to global environmental nsks. The state is leaking sideways, as multinational co~porations private, pseudo-private, and public—conduct more and more of the world's commerce, and operate across political frontiers so much better than committees of sovereign states seem able to do.
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From page 77... ...
Information technology pervades our lives and institutions in the same way that termites inhabit a house. As unseen termites consume the structural supports of a building, so may information technology challenge the rules, norms, and conventions that, in an earlier time, served to organize society by vesting economic and social power in centralized leadership, secrecy, ownership, resource control, and propitious geography.
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From page 78... ...
," Professor Colin Cherry of the University of London explained the ''sharing" nature of messages—
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From page 79... ...
10. Comments about the obsolescence of both liberal and Marxist approaches are found in the influential examination of the effects of the new communication and computer technologies on society by Simon Nora and Alain Minc in L'informatisation de la Societe.
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