In the story of how we are governed, and how we govern ourselves, is there a place for how we speak, watch, write, read, listen, gesture? Is there a place for thinking about communication in how we are governed and govern ourselves as workers, consumers, lovers, voters, and in many other roles?
In one sense, this is an easy question to answer: in the twenty-first century it is received wisdom that more and better communication is the answer to all problemsâin business, in politics, and in our private lives. But in another sense, it is much harder to establish what role all the things we call communication have in how we are ruled: things as changeable and unremarkable as news reports, billboards, radio talk, advertisements blurring into the background of daily routines, countless screens showing countless creatively orchestrated sounds and images, the speeches of officialdom, familiar phrases and turns in a workplace discussion, the patterns and topics of household conversations, textings, a book, a company report. How do we keep sight of the actual mundanity of all these activities and artifacts, avoid inflating their importance out of keeping with the moments of their production and use, and yet grasp their consequences beyond the instrumentality of these occasions?
This book sets out to answer this question: to pull into view the myriad, unassuming ways that communication is part and parcel of power and how it is exercised, to consider how the lives of people are shaped through the applications and uses of communication technologies. 1 It deals with how these technologies have been and are now used to change the ways people are governed, and indeed brought to participate in their own government. To do this, it provides multiple histories of the uses of different media that help us to understand their role in pervasive modern forms of power. Thus, the book is concerned with both the communication and media of politics and power and the politics and power of communication media. It focuses on how politics and power rely on communication media to operate, and how communication media are integrated with different scales of politics and power.
Such an investigation responds to where we find ourselves in the twenty-first century, surrounded with claims about the all-determining importance of communication, especially new forms of communication. The latest social media revolution grabs the headlines and is said to be transforming how people learn, become informed, earn, and play. Such claims occupy public discussion, are repeated with increasing regularity, and then suffer the fate of either becoming clichés or dismissed as overblown, with counterclaims about the eternal verities of human psychology, human biology, plain old human nature, or simply common sense being the real key to understanding current events and forms of life. Communication fades to a surface expression of these deeper verities and explanations.
Caught up in a seesaw of hyperbole and relegation, just how the significance of communication can be plausibly grasped is perplexing. The accelerated development and spread of diverse applications of new media and communication technology both contributes to this situation and provides one reason for seeking to remedy it. In this sense, the book responds to the current phenomena of communicative abundanceâof broadband, of digital economies, of ubiquitous computing and organizational surveillance, of mobile media and social mediaâlocating them in a history of the present and the role of communication in it.
But looking at the proliferation of new communication devices does not answer the question of how and in what ways communication matters. Instead, we make a case for taking note of the connections, often unlikely, between communication media practices and the ways in which the dispositions, capacities, and activities of various populations are formed, shaped, and regulated. In so doing we describe such connections as they exist now but also in different times and places, revisiting episodes in earlier histories of print, broadcast, telegraphic, and other media.
Thus, at a time when great store is put on communication literacy in education, in business, and in democratic politics, we hope to make a particular contribution to and argument about the shape this literacy can most usefully take, making sense of communication through exploring it as bound up with technology, with power, and with the lives of specific populations. To do this we must begin by saying exactly what we mean by communication, by technology, by power, and by population: this is the chief work of this introductory chapter. First, we start where we imagine most of our readers areâeither at home with or, alternatively, still grappling, negotiating, or otherwise dealing with broadband.
âConnectedâ: Whatâs in a Norm?
Communication in the twenty-first century means a myriad of things, but while much is routinized and normalized, how people access the digital application of the Internet is not quite soâor, rather, it is on the cusp of being normalized for many people but utterly not for many more again. Whether you have been living during the past 10 years or so in the UK, in Australia, in South Korea, or Singapore will make a considerable difference here, as well as who you are and where you have lived in these countries. For a person living in Singapore, âalways onâ fast broadband access is highly likely to be a daily norm. The Singapore Government began its broadband policy in 1996, and by 2014 broadband access at home was a matter of course for 88% of the population. In South Korea 97.2% of all households had broadband access by 2011. In the same year, the figure was 80.4% for the UK, and only 72.6% in Australia and lower again at 68.2% for households in the United States (US) (OECD 2017). What broadband access meant, country by country, has been something else again. In 2014, for example, actual download speeds for fixed broadband ranged from a median of 50.67 megabytes per second in Korea, to 23.89 in the UK, 14.18 in Australia, and 21.23 in the US. Just which households, whether they were in cities or in rural areas, and which people within households were accessing these speeds for using the Internet, adds another several layers of contingency.
Broadband access as a norm means moving beyond calculations of how long it will take to look something up on the web relative to other information sources, and, fairly quickly, abandoning those other sources (doorstop telephone directories, for instance); it means taking for granted a plethora of entertainment options (and the opportunity to move away from television schedules); and it means teleworking becomes a possible âsolutionâ for a white collar workerâs workday. As a norm, use of broadband differentiates a household in its practical operation in a host of small activities (making appointments, receiving invitations and invoices, banking, news sourcing, paying tax, delivering work or study documents, and so on)âthat is, conducting itself in ways that become normative with this technologyâfrom one that is not so arranged. One household is, thereby, more, and the other less, âconnected.â As the Australian telecommunications company, Telstra, put it in their early broadband advertising, âHome Sweet Ăber Connected Home: Connection makes life richer, more interesting and more funâ (Telstra 2011). One household is more, the other less, technologically adept and future oriented, even more, and less, respectively, part of the twenty-first century. The time in which you are living, apparently, is not simply objective calendrical time but is dependent upon your capacities for telecommunication. Letâs qualify that: the state of your householdâits relation to the current moment and to the future and its possibilitiesâis dependent upon your capacities for telecommunication, according to the conducts and the rhetorics associated with this specific norm. (We step into and take up those rhetorics offered to us, although not always and not uniformly: it depends how persuasively and persistently their material circulation, and perhaps what others we have available to us.) Of course, households with broadband access but with multiple occupants may also be differentiated internally in terms of their adherence to this norm, especially along generational lines.
The capacity to embrace this norm has, unsurprisingly, been tied to income. Around 2011, the proportion of their salary that most Africans paid for broadband services was tenfold that paid by people in Europe and North America (Muente-Kunigami 2014), and although mobile broadband has driven increased access in recent years, in 2013, for people in 25 of the 135 countries with mobile access, it cost more than a monthâs pay to buy a yearâs mobile broadband service (Gulati et al. 2016, p. 2153). Embracing this norm is also tied to infrastructure provision. Elected governments, charged with running national economies, are involved here, although political views on the virtue of such involvement and its advisable extent are sharply divided. Again in Australia, the Opposition communications spokesman has in the past described the Labor Federal Governmentâs National Broadband Network as the âlast bastion of communismâ and âthe telecommunications version of Cubaâ (Yeates 2011) because of the level of public expenditure it involved. This hyperbole aside, a number of governmentsâSingapore, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Greeceâhave taken ownership or control of next-generation broadband networks (Economist Intelligence Unit 2011), in contradistinction to countries such as Japan, South Korea, and many European countries where facilitation of market-driven infrastructure provision is the preferred policy. Even in China, the Economistâs Intelligence Unit reports the governmentâs role is one of providing stimulus rather than control.
Regardless of the different policies adopted by their respective governments, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and also Sweden have led the way in either funding or encouraging private rollout of near-ubiquitous high-speed broadband. Whether through ownership, stimulus, partnership, or regulation, governments are major drivers of broadband infrastructure, regarding it as important to their economiesâ gaining or keeping a competitive edge. In a range of countries around the world, governments and organizations have developed or are embarking on policies to facilitate what are called, with some degree of interchangeability, digital and creative economiesâthe economic activities and relations that networked technologies make possible, âthe global network of economic and social activities that are enabled by platforms such as the internet, mobile and sensor networksâ (Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy 2009, p. iv).
The âdigital economyâ is a particular and increasingly central aspect of knowledge economies. In turn, the networks and interoperability of the digital economy in the current Web 2.0 period foster the promotion of âthe creative economy,â characterized by a distributed creativity capable of providing leadership for innovation across all economic sectors. Digital and creative economies, about which we say more in Chapters 3 and 4, are the forms of economic life that are underpinned by broadband. These economies are the sectors that governments searching for new avenues of productivity, growth, and competitive advantage in the financialized environments of the twenty-first century are persuaded to invest in, financially and rhetorically.
While all this attention to broadband acquaints us with the communication preoccupations of national governments and of affluent and relatively affluent populations, whether people have access to the Internet at all (and where: home, schools, work) has divided populations, nationally as well as intranationally, even more decisively than the twenty-first century, rich-country norm of high-speed broadband. In 2016, less than a third of Indiaâs population had access to the Internet, regardless of the raw numbers; in Sweden, 98% of the population was online. For all the talk of the Internetâs pervasive presence, usage is far from universal or uniform.
In sketching just a few selected aspects of twenty-first century media and communication useâutilizing the Internet; how it is accessed; the geopolitical, generational, economic, and infrastructural conditions of such use and access; the emerging economic formations within which such normalized Internet activity may be counted and valued; and the differentiation of household and divisions of populations which ensueâour immediate objective here is to demonstrate this bookâs agenda. We write about communication and technology because of their connection with power: what gets to be said, envisioned, argued over, instated, arranged, done, and made part and parcel of peopleâs lives and how they are able to live them. To approach communication and technology in this way is to highlight rather than sidestep the problems, large and small, that accompany them. To ask, which problems, for whom? To be interested in the situations in which problems arise and require negotiation and decidingâand which may indeed produce welcome possibilities along with unwelcome pressures. Much talk about new communication technologies has habitually veered into futurology, or championed and boosted the ânew,â or bemoaned a lost past the new has despoiled. But, as an increasing volume of scholarship has shown, things are more complicated than that and less amenable to one-sided positions, if the full array of social relations within which communication technologies are caught up is brought into view. The rationale for this book is to contribute to developing an attention to communication media that brings these relations and these problems, in their different scales, into view. These are p...