...so began one of the opening lines of the old TV series The Prisoner , a fascinating series created by Patrick McGoohan to explore the "boundaries of freedom." Today, information (especially the mass media) is controlled by a few huge multinational media corporations, who maintain a monopoly on its propagation.
It turns out that information will be one of the big battlegrounds of the 21st century. But the Information Age will not be one big rosy garden growing up around the Great Information Superhighway. Many sociologists have noted that the generation of accurate information has become a key part of most economic systems, and that control of the means of information has become as important as the means of production. Not surprisingly, the slogan "information wants to be free" is a threat to this emerging global order of info-commodities.
Will the "Superhighway" bring us true information at our disposal? Or "infotainment," that curious spectacle involving the blurring between news, simulation, and entertainment? The techniques for the manipulation of digital information are more powerful than anything previously utilized. Digital photos can be "morphed" or altered and texts rapidly "filtered" of undesirable phrases. Disinformation and misinformation will grow on the Infobahn, as will "information anxiety," the feeling of being unable to cope from the constant bombardment by information.
Thanks to the Infobahn's ability to replicate information rapidly, rumors, lies, and hoaxes will spread like viruses, propagated through millions of churning faxes, teletypes, sattelites, and ISDN lines. Privacy may vanish as personal information of all kinds is traded on the open market, going to the highest bidder. The visual allure of propaganda will become more compelling. Early filmmakers knew of the mystical ability of the moving image to capture the minds of people, and hypermedia makers have not forgotten this fact.
Will all of us be fed "McInformation" or "Information Lite," of the USA Today variety? The kind that your head sits down to "eat" and still leaves feeling empty? The kind that's accompanied by colorful pie charts, sharp graphics, and gripping headlines that tell you absolutely nothing meaningful? Will the spoken word be cut up into easy-to-digest 'sound bites,' reducing each one of us to 'talking heads' capable only of out-of-context spurts of information?
Bill McKibben and Neil Postman have looked carefully at these issues, and concluded that not everything is so shiny and bright in the coming Information Age. Madison Avenue has been "buying up" semioticians and communications theorists left and right, having given up subliminal messages for academic theories of signification and desire. America has been carved up into dozens of slices of market profiles, turned into a portfolio of consumption preferences and groups which respond to different signifiers.
Of course, there have always been people who have struggled in the information war. The Situationists practiced detournement , the process of inverting items from mass culture to increase their ironic value. Today, groups like AdBusters keep up the good fight. If you don't want InfoLite, check out the alternative press. It's one of the few places where information remains one hundred percent additive-free.
But the question remains as to who will shape the content of the 500 + channels coming soon to your house and mine. Will public-access, public-interest programming vanish in the buzz and blur of supersaturation narrowcasting? Right now, there are mergers going on all over the country between cable, telephone, and radio (wireless) companies, with big media monopolies angling to grab up as much of the (publicly owned) media spectrum as they can. There are ominous trends for the future. Already, many public schools are blitzed with "Channel One," which hits schoolchildren with tons of advertising jingles, urging them to eat junk food and buy Nikes.
If people don't start claiming some of the Infobahn as public roads, they are going to find themselves paying through the nose just to find an onramp. The Internet is already hierarchically structured, because it was originally designed for military C3I coordination, as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) network. It also bears the hierarchical stamp of science, with all the influence that the NSF has had on it. With all the multinational corporations gobbling up all the lanes, the problem will get worse, not better. There are efforts to stem the corporatization of the Matrix - with people trying to create community free-nets and public-access networks. But if people don't make themselves heard in the paving of the Infobahn, they will find it may just be a road to ruin.
Steve Mizrach