Chapter 26 The virtual sphere (Papacharissi)

This chapter talks about the Internet as a public sphere. I think several pieces of our readings (e.g. those on the digital divides) have touched on this point: technology can faciliatate participation of the public sphere (here is "virtual sphere"), but it does not guarantee it. This also reminds me again of Lessig's "code" and "choice". And Papacharissi brings us some interesting observations, among which fragmentation and irrational discourses are particular interesting to me.

Chapter 25 Structural transformations of the public sphere (Keane)

Since every chapter in this part is about public sphere, I come to wonder the specfic relationship between democracy and public sphere. Is democracy more of an abstract idea, while the public sphere emphasizes the "spatial relationship"? Or the public sphere is a path to and a necessary part of democracy? Or democrary emphasizes on this particular political system, while the public sphere emphasizes more on the specific debates, discussions, and communication among citizens? What are the specific roles of the public spheres in democrocy?

The author differentiates micro-public spheres, meso-public spheres, and macro-public spheres, which is very helpful in understanding the concept of public spheres. But I don't quite understand the author's use of the word "refeudalization", which, as he claims, is different from Habermas's use. To me the transformations of the public spheres do not have implications of "feudalization".

Chapter 24 The Media and the public sphere (Garnham)

Again, in this chapter Garnham talks about the shift of public information as public good to "privately appropriate commodity", which immediately reminded me of Schiller's "deregulation, privatization, and the expansion of market relationship" and the privatization of science information and government information (chapter 17). In particular, he critisizes libraries' shift from open access to accessing proprietary databases on a payment-by-use basis. I think there is a misunderstanding of the library services because libraries are trying so hard to fight for the open access. However, this does show people's concern about this issue. So librarians are not alone in fighting for free, open access against information as proprietary, private, and commoditized.

This issue is also related to the project of my group - Digital Millennum Copyright Act. When digital information get particular protection from the law, the content became more and more proprietary, then where is the place for the public sphere?

Chapter 23 The public sphere (Habermas)

This chapter is short, but concise and profound. Habermas talks about the histroy of public sphere very briefly, but again, very penetrating and illuminating. His analysis of feudal lord makes readers to rethink about the meaning of "representation". The liberal model of the public sphere and the ideal newspaper press remind me of the earlier readings (especially those on the digital divide) which criticize the press corporation as serving particular interests. The concept of "refeudalization" is absolutely an interesting idea.

Maybe because I'm from a different culture and learned history from a different perspective, much of the histroy analysis mentioned in this piece is new to me. For example, I do not quite see the role of the Chartist Movement and the Feburary Revolution in the development of the public sphere.

Just to remind myself, Habermas is translated into "哈本马斯" in Chinese. There might be other translations...

Chapter 22 New Directions in theory (Lyon)

I think it will be better if this piece is the first one in this part (Part 7: Surveillance) because it gives readers a general sense of this particular area of study. The brief introduction of the four strands of surveillance - nation state, bureaucracy, technologic, and political economy - is very helpful in understanding the importance of surveillance in the modern society. Of course, to me the last strand is much more familiar than the other three. Lyon also talks about Panopticon, or 'superpanopticon', but the way he puts it is much easier to understand than Foucault.

Chapter 21 Managing the informated organization (Zuboff)

Technology is not neutral - it changes the world. The kaleidoscope metaphor is a nice one. I think Zuboff's arguments about technology and human choices better explain the essence of technology than just control (Lasch). Technology is much more complicated than that. Although seeming like a technology determinist at the beginning, Zuboff does a very good job revealing the complex relationship between technology, management and organization. The pair of concepts "the intrinsic" and "the contingent" provides a very helpful frame for us to think about our "choices".

What makes this chapter different is that it's from the perspective of the managers. Technology and knowledge changed the "landscape of authority", thus the old methods of surveillance or control are outdated, and division of labor is changed. Managers have to create a learning environment to support this kind of change. I think this is what the author means by "informated organization.

Chapter 20 Panopticism (Foucault)

To me, this piece is one of the hardest to understand. The idea of Panoptican doesn't seem to be very hard - after listening to Greg's interpretation. But in this chapter, Foucault seems to have broadened this idea to a more general sense, and have made many new claims out of it. But to be honest, I do not quite get it - maybe due to the superabundant metaphors and abstract/difficult words...

My questions are, for instance: how to understand "certainty" and "uncertainty" in this article? what are the differences between sovereignty and discipline, and between discipline and social norms? What does Foucault mean by "carceral archipelago"? There just seem to be too many concepts that I can not understand right away. I'll have to listen to the lecture and class discussion.

Chapter 19 The Degradation of the practical arts (Lasch)

Is technology simply a tool or does it have values? I used to lean toward the first view, that is, technology is just a tool (of course, I'm not under corporate sponsorship). However, after reading this chapter, I have to say, Lasch's argument that technology is not neutral is very powerful and persuasive. He talks about control, as we have read about Taylorism, and claims that many of the newer technologies origined from the need of managerial control. This argument is very hard to refute. However, should we limit our view of technology to the recent 100 years or so, or should we think about technology as something accompanying the human histroy? It's really hard for me to think of technology as social control in the Stone Age. And I really think that "control" is only part of origin of technology and application of technology.

Chapter 18 The Digital Divide (P. Norris)

If the last chapter is about information per se, this chapter is more about information on the Internet or information technology, and the relationship between the Internet and the digital divide. Among the three kinds of divide - the global divide, the social divide, and the democratic divide, the emphasis is clearly on the last one. For the first two divides, Norris is more concerned with describing the potential problems/porspects and the different views of these problems/porspects from cyber-optimists, cyber-skeptics, and cyber-pessimists (which, by the way, is a pretty useful classification). He does raise many interesting questions. For example, after talking about social divide, he asks whether there are 'special barriers' in using the Internet compared to the old mass media, given there is no absolute social inequialities.

While he raises questions instead of putting forward arguments and giving evidence to the first two divides, he does analyze and argue about the application of the Internet in the democratic divide. This is a middle ground between change everything and change nothing: "digital technologies have the capacities to strengthen the institutions of civic society mediating between citizens and the state, especially the power of insurgents"(p.280). In Lessig's word, we can make a choice about the code...

Chapter 17 Data Deprivation (Schiller)

This chapter is mostly about information rather than information technology. Many of Schiller's arguments reminds me of the critics of the information society in the first part of the reader. Large corporations dominates and controls the information flow, while giving people the impression of free speech or free expression. But whose freedom is it? This resembles the argument that "corporate planners ... tailored images and slogans that helped depict identities, attitudes, and lift-styles" (Winner, Chapter 4, p.49). This is largely a economic matter: only these large corporations can afford to deliver the messages using mass media (the next chapter raises a good counterargument against this).

However, Schiller goes beyond the "deregulation", "privatization" and "expansion of market relationship" in economy field, and talks about the actual information flow in scholoarly information communication and government documents and records. If in universities and governments, public/social records is now serving the financial or political purposes of certain people/institutions, then what is left free for the general public? Schiller cites data from ALA, which is great. :)

As summarized in the end, "deregulation of economic activity, privatization of functions once public, and commercialization of activities once social" are possible sources of the digital divide. But is this a necessary product of information society?

The Geography of the Internet industry - second half

The second half of the book, actually starting from part of Chapter Four, is dominated by the "venture capital", so it is much more about economic geography than physical geography as Greg put it. After showing the correlation between the "clustering pattern of the Internet industry" and the involvment of venture capital investing using statistical method in Chapter 5, Zook goes on to analyze in Chapter 6 why venture capitalists play such an important rold in the geographic characteristic of the Internet industry. The heading of this chapter, "Finance and the brokering of knowledge", reminds me of knowledge management. Although this term KM is not really mentioned in this book, but the idea is everywhere, especially in Chapter 4 and 6.

I find one interesting thing: although the preface of the book is written by Castell and the author does cite Castell from time to time, this book does not give me the impression of "space of flow". Instead, it's a book about space of local over global, and space of concentration, which seems quite different from the flow that Castell talks about. Maybe I didn't really understand the idea of flow?

The Geography of the Internet industry by M. A. Zook

This book is pretty interesting and easy to read, at least for the first half of it. The thesis has been very clear: geography has been playing a significant role in the development of Internet and Internet industry, which is to the contrast of the "commonly held assumptions that physical locations would become irrelevant"(p.3).

The maps, graphics, and data in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 are self-evident in showing the geography of the Internet and Internet industry. The author then goes on to interpret the phenomenon from different perspectives. Chapter 4 talks about economic clusters, knowledge management, and venture capital. Though the author puts everything pretty straightfoward, I feel that the arguments are not persuasive enough. The author successfully cited a lot of theoretical analyses, but his own arguments are submerged. Plus, when he talks about producing tacit knowledge and transferring tacit knowledge, I feel that they are pretty much the same thing. Chapter 5 is much better, because it is centered on a particular issue, rather than mix things together.

Chapter 14 The Three Jobs of the Future (Reich)

This chapter is short and interesting especially from an outsider's point of views. The author claims that Americans are on longer in the same large boat, but on different smaller boats. I don't really know a lot about American societies so I might be wrong, but it seems to me that it has always been the case because the social-economic polarization has always been a big issue - of course not only to the US but a lot of other developed and developing countries... The concept of 'value' that the author emphasizes here is very helpful for the understanding of the competitiveness in the global market. But this concept is a little vague...

Chapter15-Economic structure of knowledge societies

Though being the longest chapter among the four, this piece is really easy to read and understand. And I do think the theme of this chapter particularly important to understand the information society. In Bell's chapter, I read about work, class, and professionalization, which is really illuminating. Stehr further discusses these issues, as well as other ecomonic issues that did not appear in Bell's chapter. The analysis is really systematic and easy to follow. It'll be great if Stehr talks more about the impact of the economic structure of the developed countries on the developing countries.

Chapter 16 Forms of Technological Embodiment

This chapter differs with others in this book radically: it is not a society-level analysis, but a feministic "body theory" study. It focuses on the transformation of the conception of the human body, rather than the significant macro issues in the "globalizing", "informational" or "network" society.

Although many pieces that we've read touched on the transformations of human lives, this is the first time in this semester that we read about things so micro and so close to our everyday lives: fashion magazines, cosmetic surgeries, online communication, virtual reality technology, electronic database... By recounting a science fiction, the author introduces her body theory – the postmodern forms of technological embodiment: (1) the marked body which bears the cultural identities, (2) the laboring body which reproduces materials and culture, (3) the repressed body which means the repression of the material body, and (4) the disappearing body which signals the increasing replaceability of body components. Focusing on gender and racial analysis of hi tech, the author provided a new perspective for us to understand the transformation in the information society.

Chapter 13 Mobile Sociology

I admire Mr. Urry very much for his wonderful writing, but I kept feeling that this piece is a little too dense to read. There are a lot of metaphors, especially when he talks about “global fluids” (p.197). Too many metaphors without specific examples and evidence gave me some headache.

He did make a good analysis of the transformation of society, emphasizing “globalization”. However, is there anything new? Anything different or beyond Castell’s description and analysis expect for more metaphors?

Urry claims that the “complex” nature of the society (or societies) makes all the classic sociological theories useless (p. 197), and only “complexity theory” is helpful for understanding the societies. I really doubt this. When were the societies not complex? Although they might have not been so complex in the global sense before the last century, it has always been extremely complex, at least on local levels. If the class theories worked for the “older” societies, I don’t see why they will totally lose their power in the globalizing world.

Last but not least, there is no society? Well, it makes some sense if we wanna emphasize the globalization. But, the society defined here is completely based on nation state. When we talk about “human society” or “western society”, we don’t merely mean the nation-based societies. Besides, although I agree that the world is becoming a globalizing society, there are still so many things that are particular to a certain societies (regions, nations, whatever) and worth studying, I believe, by sociologists.

Digitizing the News (Boszkowski)

One great thing about the book is that, as Greg talked about "How to read a book in one minute", the author lays out the whole book in the first chapter: the thesis, theories, methods, main findings, and the content of each chapter. It's so explicit that I can get an idea about the whole book without going into every details of each chapter.

Although I am not familiar with the journalism profession and do not know much about American media and newspaper, this book is still interesting to me. And many points can be related to other readings and Lessig's book. The thing that I like most is that the author grasps the dynamics of this particular soical process of "appropriating new media". For example, the first main empirical finding is that "print papers have enacted a culture of innovation that led them to react to social and technical developments rather than more proactively contribute to these developments, focus on protecting the print franchise rather than on prioritizing nonprint publishing, and empasize smaller but more certain shorter-term benefits", where the readers can see one aspect of this process. Then the empirical case studies show another aspect (or aspects, more precisely) of the process. The social process in the American Dailies is like a miniature of the "information society", and the dynamics in it reflects the dynamics in the whole society.