Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1

Digital, Communication, and Culture

Éric George

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119687313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Digitalization is a long and constant sociohistoric process in which all areas of societys activities are reconfigured. Digitalization of Society and Socio-political Issues 1 examines the transformations linked to the development of digital platforms and social media, which affect the cultural and communicational industries. It analyzes the formation of Big Data, their algorithmic processing and the societal changes which result (social monitoring and control in particular). Through critical views, it equally presents the various ways in which technology participates in relations of power and domination, and contributes to possible emancipatory practices.

PART 1
Digital Technology, Big Data and Societal Transformations

1
For an Archaeology of the Cult of the Number

“Each ‘piece of news’ brings together movements of different origins and rhythms. Today’s time is a combination of yesterday, the day before yesterday and in times past.” This remark made by the historian Fernand Braudel in the 1950s about the need to free oneself from the cult of the present in order to understand the course of the world has not lost its relevance (Braudel 1958, p. 19). Quite the contrary. The digitalization of society tends to intensify the infinite race in the service of the present. It is the long duration and the simultaneous existence of different temporalities that give meaning to the trilogy I published in the 1990s: Mapping World Communication (1994), The Invention of Communication (1996) and Histoire de l’utopie planétaire (1999 – History of Planetary Utopia). The influence of the short-time view, or “presentism”, encourages us to grant a patent of novelty, and therefore of revolutionary change, to what in reality reflects structural evolutions and processes that have been going on for a very long time. This is what Nicholas Garnham (2000, p. 118), one of the pioneers of the political economy of communication and culture, also reminded us on the threshold of the millennium: “As Braudel has reminded us in relation to the flexibility of capital within a space of flows, the answers are more likely to be inscribed in the durée of capitalist development than on the Information Superhighway.” What I propose here is to retrace the path of a social project that risks generating, if we do not address its gray areas, a way of managing populations that is far from being emancipatory for all humanity.

1.1. Governing by numbers: an old and a new figure

Governing by trace, numbers, data, files or algorithms. These expressions, which have appeared over the past two decades, the logic that is at work in the digitalization process of contemporary society (Mattelart 2010; Marzouki and Simon 2010; Rouvroy and Berns 2013; Supiot 2015; Bonditti 2017). These expressions refer to the new rationality of government based on the market economy and are focused on the quantifiable individual. They are the product of various critical approaches that have sometimes developed from philosophy, law, political science, from sociology, information science, political economy of communication and even sometimes from mathematics or statistics. However, this diversity does not mean that there is not yet much to be done to decompartmentalize disciplines and fields of study.

The idea of a society governed by numbers appears to be brand new. However, it goes back long before cybernetics unveiled its potential and the notion of information made its way into the language and culture of modernity (Mattelart 2003, 2017, 2018). It is therefore already weighed down by a long history. It is indeed due to the Scientific Revolution, during the 17th and 18th Centuries, that the thought of the quantifiable and measurable became the prototype of any true discourse in the West. Mathematical thinking outlines the horizon of the quest for “perfectibility” or “progress” of human societies towards a “better state”. It appears to be the model of thought in general. For the astronomer and physicist Galileo (1564–1642), for example, the whole creation is a book written in the language of mathematics and it is necessary for understanding anything in this world. Hope inspires belief in the power of numbers. Thus, when the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) built “new knowledge compasses” by reducing numbers to the simplest principles, such as 0 and 1, in order to save thought, he hoped to contribute to the rapprochement of peoples, to the unification not only of Europe but of the “entire human race”.

The same utopian faith in perfectibility framed the project of “universal language”, a language with “geometric certainty”, which the revolutionary philosopher and mathematician M.J.A. de Condorcet (1743–1794) set out in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (English title: Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind) (1793). He believed to have found, in the work of the Swiss Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) on the abstract logic of the probability calculation, the philosopher’s stone of a moral and political science as “precise and exact” as the “physical sciences”. Using past experience, i.e. the observation of the frequencies of events, “social mathematics”, or “mathematized social science”, as it is called, would make it possible to predict the future, in order to show the most probable historical scenario. The “Fragment sur l’Atlantide” (Fragment on the New Atlantis) with which Condorcet’s Esquisse ends is a surprising evocation of the future of humanity. In it, he outlines a “Universal Republic of Sciences”, a symbol of the “brotherhood of nations” through knowledge, guaranteeing a “general illumination of minds” (Condorcet 1988).

However, the enthusiasm for the quantifiable and the measurable did not meet with unanimous approval among the revolutionary circles of 1789. They themselves were divided on the “geometrical utopia”. “Mathematical rage” is denounced. He was accused of ignoring life itself (Julia 1981).

1.2. The invention of the calculable individual

The pragmatic management of industrial society will test the “romanticism of numbers”, to use Max Weber’s expression.

It was not until the mid-19th Century that probability calculation was associated with statistics, according to the historians of the politics of large numbers (Desrosières 1993). Many of them are the work of the Belgian Adolphe Quételet (1796–1874), a pioneer in demography, the science of the state of populations and their flows, and the architect of the institutionalization of censuses and national and international statistical systems. He was “the man of the universalization of the calculation of probabilities – which is the universal exchanger” (Ewald 1986, p. 147). The risk technology developed in previous centuries by private insurance institutions was being transformed into “political technology”. “Probabilistic reason” paved the way for a new mode of social regulation based on predictability, which Ewald calls “insurance society”. Moral statistics helped define the profile of the “average man”, in relation to whom the normality and deviances of a society were defined. The premise was that mathematical rules govern the occurrence and distribution of social pathologies and that these rules provide the legislator with tools to regulate flows in the face of “disruptive forces”, i.e. everything that has a moral influence on people and determines them to act in one direction rather than another. Hence the research on innate tendencies towards crime, suicide and other indices of social instabilities. This led to the development of crime tables that provided information on the greater or lesser likelihood of committing a crime according to season, climate, gender, age, region and social group. Delinquency thus became the laboratory of carding and biotypology. Anthropometry or the science of measuring the human body and the “different faculties of individuals” was able to provide nomenclatures, indices and profiles that guided police officers, judges and forensic doctors in their hygienist mission of monitoring and standardizing “dangerous classes”. The biotype “born criminal” or “delinquent man”, forged by forensic scientist Cesare Lombroso, served as a reference to profile the multitudes in motion. Irrational, impulsive, emotional, hypnotized by the leaders, crowds can only be prone to crime. Delinquency was beginning to “function as a political observatory”. What the positivist anthropology of delinquency then aimed to achieve through their criminalization were the newly conquered democratic freedoms of association and expression that have marked their emergence on the public scene, these “egalitarian chimeras”, according to psychopathologist doctor Gustave Le Bon, author of the classic book on “crowd psychology”. It was in this context that the first biometric identification techniques were developed at the end of the 19th Century, beginning with fingerprints (Mattelart 1994, 2010).

Extending biometric identification techniques to the entire population was the dream of the inventors of forensic science as well as of the assembly of legal scholars and doctors who, until the eve of World War I, gathered at international congresses on criminal anthropology in the major European capitals. For more than a century, however, Western democracies refused universal registration for fear of violating the privacy and fundamental rights of citizens. And many will have gone so far as to reject the very idea of an identity card for their nationals, except for certain categories, such as workers, nomads, itinerants and gypsies, who were imposed various types of passes, small notebooks, booklets or anthropometric traffic logs. On the other hand, the peripheral areas of the world will have offered life-size fields of experimentation to colonial empires. In the 1890s, British eugenist Francis Galton was able to study digital drawings, the first steps in the discovery of fingerprints, because a senior official of the Victorian Empire administration in Bengal provided him with a sample of the indigenous thumbprints he had collected for nearly four decades to authenticate public records.

With the exception of periods of war and crisis, it can be said that surveillance will only become a mass phenomenon when the imperative of security requires a policy that embraces the entire population.

1.3. Control as a mass phenomenon

The industrial era is over. We are on the same level in the age of cybernetic imagination. Surveillance and control have become a mass phenomenon, the individual has become quantifiable, devices have become sophisticated and universalized, and the usage of digital information technologies has become hybrid: military or civil, commercial or public. The very nature of soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: About the Digitalization of Society
• PART 1: Digital Technology, Big Data and Societal Transformations
• PART 2: Digital Technology and Changes in Cultural and Communication Industries
• PART 3: Digital Technology and Cultural and Communicational Practices
• Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement