Class Warfare in the Information Age

Class Warfare in the Information Age PDF

Author: Michael Perelman

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780312177584

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Mention of class struggle evokes images of a grimy age in which bygone captains of industry callously oppressed armies of overworked and underpaid proletarians. This dark portrait of class conflict stands in sharp contrast with the glorious promise of an information age. In Class Warfare in the Information Age, Michael Perelman shows how class conflict continues to remain a contemporary issue. He challenges the notion that, with the help of the modern computer and telecommunication technologies, we can look forward to life in a well-educated society in which anybody with even a modicum of intelligence and discipline can enjoy a more than comfortable existence. In a relatively jargon-free economic and political analysis, Perelman reveals how the efforts of business to profit from the sale of information will result in the reduction of access to information, rather than an increase. He demonstrates how the treatment of information as a commodity will cause it to be more regulated and less accessible. In the future, Perelman argues, it will still be a class-based privilege to access and afford information, and the rights of individuals will disintegrate as the power of the corporate sector grows. Class Warfare in an Information Age is a refreshingly critical work which forces readers to rethink the conventional hype surrounding the information superhighway.

Class Politics in the Information Age

Class Politics in the Information Age PDF

Author: Donald Clark Hodges

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780252025839

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"Class Politics in the Information Age uncovers the origins, development, aims, means, and moral and political hypocrisy of the new class of professionals. In line with a broad consensus that expertise has replaced capital as the decisive asset in the informational economy, Hodges asserts that professionals have replaced capitalists as the premier exploiting class. The dictatorship of the proletariat predicted by Marx is, the United States, a dictatorship of experts."--BOOK JACKET.

Digital Dead End

Digital Dead End PDF

Author: Virginia Eubanks

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-09-21

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0262294699

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The realities of the high-tech global economy for women and families in the United States. The idea that technology will pave the road to prosperity has been promoted through both boom and bust. Today we are told that universal broadband access, high-tech jobs, and cutting-edge science will pull us out of our current economic downturn and move us toward social and economic equality. In Digital Dead End, Virginia Eubanks argues that to believe this is to engage in a kind of magical thinking: a technological utopia will come about simply because we want it to. This vision of the miraculous power of high-tech development is driven by flawed assumptions about race, class, and gender. The realities of the information age are more complicated, particularly for poor and working-class women and families. For them, information technology can be both a tool of liberation and a means of oppression. But despite the inequities of the high-tech global economy, optimism and innovation flourished when Eubanks worked with a community of resourceful women living at her local YWCA. Eubanks describes a new approach to creating a broadly inclusive and empowering “technology for people,” popular technology, which entails shifting the focus from teaching technical skill to nurturing critical technological citizenship, building resources for learning, and fostering social movement. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Capitalism and the Information Age

Capitalism and the Information Age PDF

Author: Robert D. McChesney

Publisher: Monthly Review Press

Published: 1998-12-01

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780853459897

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Are the new technologies of the information age reshaping the labor force, transforming communications, changing the potential of democracy, and altering the course of history itself? Capitalism and the Information Age presents a rigorous examination of some of the most crucial problems and possibilities of these novel technologies. Not a day goes by that we don't see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of "globalization." How is all of this reshaping the labor force, transforming communications, changing the potential of democracy, and altering the course of history itself? Capitalism and the Information Age presents a rigorous examination of some of the most crucial problems and possibilities of these novel technologies.

Technologies of Government

Technologies of Government PDF

Author: Benjamin Baez

Publisher: IAP

Published: 2014-09-01

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1623967945

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In this book, Baez examines a series of governmental “technologies” that he believes strongly characterize our present. The technologies that he addresses in this book are information, statistics, databases, economy, and accountability. He offers arguments about the role these technologies play in contemporary politics. Specifically, Baez analyzes these technologies in terms of (the sometimes oppositional) rationalities for rendering reality thinkable, and, consequently, governable. These technologies bear on the field of education, but also exceed it. So, while issues in education frame many of the arguments in this book, the book’s also has usefulness to those outside of field of education. Specifically, Baez concludes that the governmental technologies listed above all are coopted by neoliberal rationalities rendering our lives thinkable and governable through an array of devices for the management of risk, using the model of the economy, and heavily investing in the uses of information, statistics, databases, and oversight mechanisms associated with accountability. Baez leaves readers with more questions than they might have had prior to reading the book, so that they may re-imagine their own present and future and thus their own forms of self-government.

Working-Class Network Society

Working-Class Network Society PDF

Author: Jack Linchuan Qiu

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2023-09-19

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 026254931X

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An examination of how the availability of low-end information and communication technology has provided a basis for the emergence of a working-class network society in China. The idea of the “digital divide,” the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a critical seedbed for the emergence of a new working class of “network labor” crucial to China's economic boom. Between the haves and have-nots, writes Qiu, are the information “have-less”: migrants, laid-off workers, micro-entrepreneurs, retirees, youth, and others, increasingly connected by cybercafés, prepaid service, and used mobile phones. A process of class formation has begun that has important implications for working-class network society in China and beyond. Qiu brings class back into the scholarly discussion, not as a secondary factor but as an essential dimension in our understanding of communication technology as it is shaped in the vast, industrializing society of China. Basing his analysis on his more than five years of empirical research conducted in twenty cities, Qiu examines technology and class, networked connectivity and public policy, in the context of massive urban reforms that affect the new working class disproportionately. The transformation of Chinese society, writes Qiu, is emblematic of the new technosocial reality emerging in much of the Global South.

Class Warfare in the Information Age

Class Warfare in the Information Age PDF

Author: Michael Perelman

Publisher: MacMillan

Published: 2000-03-01

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 9780333912980

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In Class Warfare in the Information Age, Michael Perelman shows how class conflict remains a contemporary issue. He challenges the notion that, with the help of modern computer and telecommunication technologies, we can look forward to life in a well-educated society in which anybody with even a modicum of intelligence and discipline can enjoy a more than comfortable existence. Perelman reveals how the efforts of business, to profit from the sale of information, will result in the reduction of rather than an increase in access to information. He demonstrates how the treatment of information as a commodity will cause it to be more regulated and less accessible. In the future, Perelman argues, it will still become a class-based privilege to access and afford information, and the rights of individuals will disintegrate as the power of the corporate sector grows.

Information and American Democracy

Information and American Democracy PDF

Author: Bruce Bimber

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-02-24

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9780521804929

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This book assesses the consequences of new information technologies for American democracy in a way that is theoretical and also historically grounded. The author argues that new technologies have produced the fourth in a series of 'information revolutions' in the US, stretching back to the founding. Each of these, he argues, led to important structural changes in politics. After re-interpreting historical American political development from the perspective of evolving characteristics of information and political communications, the author evaluates effects of the Internet and related new media. The analysis shows that the use of new technologies is contributing to 'post-bureaucratic' political organization and fundamental changes in the structure of political interests. The author's conclusions tie together scholarship on parties, interest groups, bureaucracy, collective action, and political behavior with new theory and evidence about politics in the information age.

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