Pinky and the Brain

Following the Industrial Revolution, society was soon faced with the Information Revolution that was primarily generated and controlled by the government or the upper levels of a hierarchical organization. In order to manage and maintain the increase of industrialization, information technology had to be developed at an immense speed. All of this led to the rise of “bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructure of transportation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via mass media.” (Beniger, 7) But at the time that Beniger wrote his book, Control Revolution, computers at the time were a centralized tool of the government and certain institutions. The decade following his book saw computers quickly becoming accessible to the public and the Internet becoming a new major mass media (Stadler).

So where are we now? If we are still involved in a control revolution of information, who controls it? And where will the control pass to in the future?

Much of what Beniger wrote has become obsolete. The development of information technology over the past century has moved society from a hierarchical organization to one that is composed of networks (Ronfeldt & Arquilla). We have become a community of what Barry Wellman calls a “network of networks” where we can connect to any person in any place about anything. We have entered into a new phase of the control revolution where information is controlled by the individual – both as sender and receiver.

The advancements in technology – laptops, cell phones, texting, etc. – has aided and abetted to society’s security in getting what information they want, when they want it. We have re-established and expanded community ties into what Wellman calls as CMC (Computerization of Community) where we can connect to people on a local and global level. People control the expansions of their relationships and find specific niches where they gain a sense of identity in a network. And it is the network that has allowed the power of information to fall into anyone’s hands.

We would like to think that the people controlling the information that we are seeing are honest and trustworthy people; that they are “do-gooders” and are passing along information for the greater good of mankind. But what if they are not? What if they are Dr. Evils trying to take over the world? I’m sure that Beniger never foresaw the netwar.

Though the network has been claimed as “mankind’s finest forms of organization” (Rondfeldt & Arquilla), it has brought about some negative side effects and concerns. The network has not only re-defined the community, but it has also re-defined the functionality of criminal minds and the information they output. Terrorism has found a new playing field in the world wide net where they can reach any weak mind with its propaganda and instigate acts of violence half way across the world. And that is just the icing on the cake. Criminal activity has found a host through the internet, and now the whole world can be infected and no one has the cure.

Though the individual has control of the information that they receive, one still has to be careful with what is fact and fiction, who we can trust and who we can’t (the constant war on pedophiles comes to mind), and how dependant we become on the internet for a sense of identity (how much time spent on the internet is decreasing our level of experience in the physical world?) As netwar becomes a growing battle of good versus evil, there is no telling who will control the information. I think that the individual will still have the greatest control because the number of networks increases every day, and it will take a complete technological blackout to kill the beast. But if the information age went from centralized (Beniger) to decentralized, will we go full circle and return to centralized? Where do we go from here and who will hold the reigns of information next?

~ by Cait on September 11, 2007.