Part 1 of a series of short book reviews themed around social formations in technology. Includes Control revolution, 1997, by J.S. Beniger; Anson Rabinbach’s. The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor, 2018; Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, 1983 and Kat Jungnickel’s Bikes and Bloomers, 2018.
Introduction
A crisis of control-generated by the industrial revolution in manufacturing and transportation (6), leading to revolution in societal control.
Key technologies of control: bureaucracy and computer technology
section 1. Control revolution - Key definitions:
Explaining the meanings of words "revolution" (restoration of previous forms vs abrupt violent change) and "control" (purposive influence toward a predetermined goal + explanation of words "influence" and "purpose"). (7)
- information processing
- reciprocal communication
technology - in broad sense, any intentional extension of a natural process, that is, of the processing of matter, energy, and information that characterizes all living systems (9)
Is human brain a technology? It probably developed in interaction with purposive tool use and may therefore be included among human technologies.
Section 2. Crisis of control. Industrialisation as a process characterized by infusion of capital fro extraction of fossil fuels, wage labour and machine technology. A source of a crisis here is that industrialisation tends to break the barriers and expand via the means of logistics (Durkheim, Division of Labor in Society, 1893).
Beniger's approach differs from Durkheim in the way that it looks not on individual and society, but on material economy (technology's capacity to process matter, energy and information).
Section 3. Bureaucracy and Rationalization. The solution to the emerging crisis of control in the industry came with technological, followed by social developments. First came bureaucracy. Max Weber expands on it in Economy and Society (1922). His other term, rationalization, meant not only increasing the capability to process information, but decreasing the amount of information to be processed. For Beniger, this is the meaning of preprocessing, or placing the information together in a way that it could be easily accessed later.
Section 4. New Control Technology. Further development required distribution, which included infrastructure (railroad, postal service and telephone) and control of demand and consumption (marketing - oh my word!). (19)
In this context emerged a new style of bureaucratic rationality, namely intellectual technology. It meant applying algorithmic rules to admininstration (compare with Silva, 2007:289 quoting Foucault, Society Must Be..,2003), - such as central economic planning in Soviet Union after 1920 or Keynesian fiscal policies in the late 1920.
Section 5. The Information Society
Characterize by the labour force composition:
Which provides, for Beniger, no reason to reject the hypothesis that the Information Society developed as a result of the crisis of control created by railroads and other steam-powered transportation in the 1840s. Digitalization here is key to blurring the distinctions between communication of information and its processing, and between types of data (numbers, words, pictures up to tastes, odours, sensations, etc.).
Section 6. Conclusion: Societal Dynamics Reconsidered
What motivates Beniger's investigation is that particular attention to the material aspects of information processing, communication, and control? As he explains in the end of the introduction, he's aiming at creating a broad conceptual framework that would "subsume social
changes noted by previous observers" and would help "portray a more fundamental societal transformation" (26).