User:Birgit bachler/readings2/poster databases
FOUCAULT AND DATABASES. PARTICIPATORY SURVEILLANCE
Mark Poster, from The Mode of Information (1990)
Foucault & Databases by Mark Poster
The database creates a new language situation opposed to the classical television: Databases do not address one individual, they require the individual's input and serve as a repository of messages. Mark Poster links the structure of databases and their relation of society to Michel Foucault and in particular his analysis of discourse, whose theory problematizes the interdependence of language and action.
"All information in all places at all time" , the absolute subject and an impossible ideal. He cites and mentions the following resources:
- Gutenberg Two - The New Electronics and Social Change by Godfrey and Parkhill from 1983, evoking what is increasingly becoming an emblem of futurists: "In the comfort of home, seated before a computer equipped with a modem, the individual has access to all the information in all the world's databanks."
- Gustave Flaubert, 19th century french writer farcically portraying the search for total, perfect knowledge.
- Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) featuring a character reading an entire library from A to Z "in a similar quixotic quest".
In his own view the more contemporary fantasy assumes that print will entirely be digitally encoded and stored, publicly available for everyone. That this information will be used by individuals without political implications and nothing of significance will be lost during that process, concluding all these assumptions to be highly suspect.
James Rule, 1974, concluded that databases "enable detailed reconstruction of the daily activities of any individual". The Privacy Act, 1974 raises a general social problem of the mode of information, including dramatic changes in the reproduction, transmission, storage and retrieval of information that profoundly affect the entire social system.
"Drastic changes in the means and relations of communication are making a shambles of the delicate balance in the social order that was negotiated and struggled over during the epochs of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and twentieth-century welfare statism. Relations between national and local governments, between these and economic, educational, religious, media and familial institutions, between all of these and individuals, in short the entire social infrastructure must be re-calibrated and synchronized to the databases of the mode of information."
Assuming the reproduction of 1 Judeo-Christian bible took 1 medieval monk 1 year, with a 1990's state-of-the-art 9600 baud rate modem one person could download 52.560 books.
The Enlightenment dream of an educated society, wherein all knowledge is available to the least individual is now technically feasible.
"New gadgets are developed in the context of existing needs, shaped by perceptions of situated individuals; they are restricted in their production and dissemination by ruling powers, and resisted by hegemonic cultural patterns and individual fears."
The aegis of private property makes all efforts to keep material goods under the control of self-interested private individuals. We are being convinced that information is a commodity and properly controlled by market forces, capitalists assumes that resources are scarce and therefore have to be controlled by market mechanisms. information is not scarce but plentiful and cheap - the market inverts itself by restricting the flow of information and producing the scarcity that economists tell us is a fact of nature. Poster states the problem is that information is too easily reproduced. Now information is not inseparable from their packages anymore (books, music film). The threat against sony's VHS recorder reveals that capitalists not only wanted control of the airwaves and the content what is sent on them but also control of the viewer. "Video recorders undermine the control and discipline of the viewer by the broadcaster". With the example of video tapes Poster states that consumers are producing better copies of recordings than the commercial corporations do when using better tapes, maintaining their equipment better and dubbing in real-time. Digital reproduction takes sounds, images and language out of the register of material being. Analog to digital transformation means the transformation from naturally organized matter into manipulable electrons. The relationship of capitalism and language used to rely on the fact that reproduction was only possible by the transformation into heavy, inert shapes of matter, that capitalism was preeminently designed to control. Electronically mediated communication devices took capitalism's ability to control language.
The effort of industry to retain the commodification of information is illustrated through home networking as available since the mid 1980s in France. By providing the consumer with vast databases to view and order products in the convenience of the home new databases are generated each time the consumer orders a product. This information provides detailed information about the customer to the corporations. Kevin Wilson calls this the return channel in an interactive system, that will reveal the consumer's identity to the industry and generate an invaluable portrait of consumer activity for marketing purposes. These systems will create a cybernetic cycle of production and consumption.
The production process results in a database containing demand information based on the information of the consumer and the product.
The chapter Talk, Print and Electrons refers to the dichotomy of the oral and the written opposed to electronic language. Anthony Giddens (born 1938) distinguishes between "talk" and "speech" and argues that talk suggests social activity, is rooted in the daily intercourse of human beings in concrete contexts. He argues that writing lacks the complexity of situated talk. Textual complexity is different from verbal complexity. "The theory of the talking agent obscures the profusion in contemporary society of language practices which include no talking agents, language practices such as the database." By only focussing on the discussion on the binary opposition speech/writing the distinctive importance of electronic language is overlooked.
What characterizes advanced societies of the 20th century is the emerge of new language experiences that are electronically mediated, neither fitting easily in the parameters of speech nor writing. May '68 events indicate by their exceptional character the power of the mode of information, of electronically mediated language, to subdue collective conversations in a context of social change, what Jürgen Habermas calls "the public sphere". >> The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, 1962
Habermas and Giddens both see talk as a ground of free action. For Giddens talk can create a moment of outward and inward directed criticism and for Habermas talk requires one Enlightenment-like social individual who can autonomously yet collectively judge rightness, know truth and feel compassion. Spoken language contains conditions for the possibility of an emancipated society "created and composed of free, rational individuals."...
"Confusion over just where reality is and what it might mean are likely accompaniments not of a bourgeois reading public but of a mass viewing audience, one quietly monitored by the silent accumulation and processing of gigabytes of data. The strength of the poststructuralist position then corresponds not to the force of writing over speech but to the penetration of the world of everyday life by electronically mediated language".
In The Oral, The Written and the Electronic Poster distinguished these 3 groups of terms and states that the introduction of new methods of communication require for their analysis language-based theories. The choice for either speech or writing lies in the presence or absence of one party of the communication, the physical presence of the transmitter/receiver. Writing cultivates critical thinking, writing and print is part of the Western experience with its value of reason, freedom, and equality, its institutions of science, democracy, capitalism or socialism.
The chapter Foucault, Discourse and the Superpanocticon come to the point of surveillance and how the differences between speech, writing and electronic language are amplified to what he calls "the major form of power in the mode of information". The vanishing possibility to fix language of everyday life to space/time coordinates becomes a major problem for the dominant groups. Development and spread of movements is not anymore necessarily mediated or manipulated by a centralized institution. Poster names the example of the "suggestion box" at IBM that was made available digital. This changeconfronted IBM with workers having the ability to place insubordinate criticism instantly and anonymously . "In association with the rise of of electronically mediated languages new forms of power have emerged, structures which systematically elude the liberal concept of tyranny and the Marxist concept of exploitation". He states that liberals see tyranny as a political act and Marxists see exploitation as an economic act. "The emergent forms of domination in the mode of information are not acts at all but language formations, complex manipulations of symbols". Foucault: " In basically any society there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body... There can be no possible exersise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association."
Poster concludes that discursive truth is essential to the operation of power in the social field. He compares and juxtaposes the term discourse with Max Weber's "Zweckrationalität". Weber connects written knowledge to institution that carry out power through reason and domination. He focuses on the actions as a form of consciousness and his view is free of analysis of language. Weber sees social sciences not connected to bureaucracy and not as a historical problem. Weber strives for "objectivity" while Foucault focuses on the language in written texts and sees their formation according to rules in social science disciplines as problematic. "The value of Foucauldean analysis rests with the conviction that the close reading of scientific discourse may uncover language patterns which, when associated with practices, position those practices in definite ways and legitimize the patterns of domination inherent in those practices."
Poster exercises the relevance of discourse analysis at the hand of Foucault's writings on prisons. With the term "technologies of power" Foucaults describes the way discourse organizes practice into structures of domination. The panopticon is used to see the normed transformation from the strictly divided state of a prisoner into a non-prisoner. For Jeremy Bentham the panopticon "imposed social authority on the prisoner in a constant, total manner." For Foucault the prison imposes the technology of power, the "micropolitics" of the norm. In modern societies power is imposed by "continual monitoring of daily life, adjusting and readjusting ad infinitum the norm of individuality. Modern society may be read as a discourse in which nominal freedom of action is canceled by the ubiquitous look of the other." (p.91) The Panopticon granted one-way visual access to the prisoners and its completeness of total surveillance required the keeping of files, a meticulously kept dossier. Poster criticizes that Foucault neglected to take notice of the conditions of surveillance in the late 20th century: "The population as a whole has long been affixed with numbers and the discipline of the norm has become a second nature". "Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance"
Today's databases constitute a Superpanopticon. Not only technological change is part of this process but also populace being trained and disciplined to surveillance and to participating in the process. Here poster names examples such as filling out forms, giving away data by paying with credit cards, by using the Internet. One may see similarities in the reorganization from the early 1920s onward to be a participating and surveilling consumer which slowly results in reciprocal control of the population by itself.
Aside to the advanced technology of speed, accuracy and computational power, digital encoding of analog data also imposes binary reduction on the information which results in loss. The analog inscription of a sound wave on a magnetic tape resembles the characteristics of the original while binary encoding will always result in a simple grid containing a complex pattern of 0s and 1s that does not bear direct relation to the sound waves. "Digital encoding derives its peculiar strength from the degree to which it restricts meaning and eliminates ambiguity or noise".
The possibilities of imperfect reproduction magnifies through history from written, to printed, to electronic copying of text. The printing machine eliminated the or reduced the sensuous link between producers and product, with electronic reproduction this process advances. Poster sees in the embodiment of new mediums (paper book > monitor) a loss of a level of meaning in for example the Bible. He contends that the database imposes a new language on top of those already existing and that it is "impoverished, limited language; one that uses the norm to constitute individuals and define deviants."
"A database arranges information in rigidly defined categories or fields". After mentioning possible categories Poster states that this information in a database constitutes individuals according to these parameters. He plays with the idea of replacing politically charged information with numeric values, so that no field in a database contains ambiguity. "The structure or grammar of the database creates relationships among pieces of information that do not exist in those relationships outside of the database".
Citing Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" he sees a shift from torture to discipline playing a central role in representative democracy. The discourse of databases, the Superpanopticon, is " a means of controlling masses in the postmodern, postindustrial mode of information". This reveals that population is participating in its "own self-constitution as subjects of the normalizing gaze of the Superpanopticon." "We see databases not as an invasion of privacy (...) but as the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self".