Free Labour in the Network Culture - Essay Example

Business (strategy) Network Culture by Tiziana Terranova and Biocapital by Kaushik Rajan are twovery good pieces of writings and major contributors of information on the respective subjects. Although the focus of this paper is on few chapters, these two books have been discussed in details with the special focus on Rajan and Terranoba's concerns with society being subjected to a biological strategy. For Network Culture, the focus of the paper is on chapters three and four, while chapters two, five, and six of Biocapital are come under discussion with the learning experience of Rajan in his investigation in Hyderabad and Bombay, in Silicon Valley, and in the company GenEd about the relationship between science and capitalism, and between nationalism and globalisation. The paper has explored Terranoba's views on free labour and discussed how she explained the new concept of new world of information. Network Culture Tiziana Terranova's Network Culture is written at a post-dot.com conjuncture, at what time e-mail, discussion groups, e-zines, and blogs are daily informational tools used en masse. In an era of email lists and discussion groups, e-zines and weblogs, bringing together users, consumers, workers and activists from around the globe, what kinds of political subjectivity are rising What kinds of politics turn out to be possible in a time of information overload and media saturation What structures of power and control operate over a self-organising system like the Internet There have been many books written in the consequences of the dot.com crash that have reinterpreted the crippling economic fall down with critical hindsight. Such manuscripts tend to re-evaluate the overjoyed energies that built Silicon Alley and Valley and re-situate the utopian visions of the new economy in an endeavour to comprehend what went wrong. Terranova's book explains how the politics of the Information Age will break down all barriers. Cyber-politics prediction reached its height between the period of 1995 and 2000. Information technology is no longer in fashion, as it was just a few years ago, to gush eagerly about politics in the age of the Internet. During the last period of 1990s, many commentators were influenced that a new day had dawned in the life of our republic. Some people were of the view that direct democracy was just around the corner, as tens of millions of British people in "chat rooms" would form, in one author's words, "a committee of the whole, made up of all citizens online." Others saw enormous increases in voter contribution, the increase of a more informed and active population, and a decline in the significance of money in politics. It seemed for a moment as though the whole thing was about to change, and for the better. That moment has passed, and the subject seems to have been dropped. It may be too soon to pick it up again in full. The influence of IT on our politics has not been playing out as anyone fairly expected, and to say that we now know the shape of the future would be to repeat the error of earlier prognosticators. The forecasts of a new world of cyber-politics were not entirely unreasonable. After all, IT makes information more widely available and communication easier, and almost the whole thing in politics has to do with information and communication. A functioning democracy requires an informed electorate, and it seems rational that a new means of providing access to information might very much help citizens stay informed. An election movement aims to convey ideas and arguments, and it seems only sensible that a new and more well-organized way to communicate might radically reshape campaigning. Empowered by the information technology with the help of Internet and the personal computer, citizens could now know more, participate more, and influence the system more directly and efficiently. Terranova is not worried with any one historical happening; Terranova is not engaged in an analysis of a singular juncture in the history of information technology. Instead, Terranova is concerned with the "terrain of the common," an aspect of contemporary culture that "arises out of affective investments and works through an inventive and sensitive political intelligence on the . . . terrain of the contemporary politics of communication" (p. 157). Moreover, Terranova's interest in the terrain of the common is tied to a precise cultural formation she terms "network culture," which she observes to be "characterized by an unprecedented abundance of information output and by an acceleration of informational dynamics" (p. 1). In the book, Terranova investigated the political aspect of the network culture in which people now exist, and explores what the new forms of communication and organisation might mean for our understanding of power and politics. Tiziana Terranova engages with key concepts and debates in cultural hypothesis and cultural politics, using examples from media culture, computing, network dynamics, and Internet activism within the anti-capitalist and anti-war activities. Suggesting that the book is "an attempt to give a name to, and to further our understanding of, a global culture as it unfolds across a multiplicity of communication channels but within a single milieu" (p. 1), Terranova, in the book, constructed a academic platform, in the Deleuzian and Bergsonian tradition, from physics and biology, computing and cybernetics, and philosophy, privileging process over structure and non-linearity over linearity. Accordingly then, the title of the book, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, is to some extent misleading or ambiguous. Instead of interrogating the relations of power governing information technology and practices surrounding the Internet, Terranova is more worried with the processes and the non-linear sequence of actions that have assembled into this cultural moment she describes as network culture. Chapter three, Free Labour, and chapter four, Soft Control, are further subdivided into sections. The chapters overflow with material groundings and theoretical frameworks to support Terranova's explanation of network culture. Chapter three offers a historical analysis of free labour and information theory, highlighting the foundational theorists and their works, with a focus on the innovations carried out at the Bell Labs during the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter offers a contemporary assessment of network culture, focusing on the material and socio-economic conditions that developed over the previous 30 years. In particular, chapter two and three discuss the key moments in the structural evolution of the Internet, and chapter three interrogates the fundamental arguments surrounding the concepts of "knowledge worker" and "free labour" in the digital economy. Chapter four, much like chapter one, relies a lot on academic underpinnings rather than on material examples; it details the evolution of biological computation or developing intelligence and self-controlling systems, such as cellular automata. Finally, chapter five traces the association between the intensification of communication and the emergence of the masses, which Terranova refers to as social entropy. Terranova cross-examines information in relation to network culture, telling that information is no longer characterized by the transmission of something from a source to a receiver. Of particular significance in Network Culture is Terranova's investigation of the meaning of information, arguing against the common assumption of information as the content of communication. Terranova argues information ought to be conceived of as informational dynamics: "the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuation and micro-variations, entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic processes" (p. 7). Terranova argues that character attributed to contemporary culture should be conceived of as informational. As informational processes increasingly take on attributes of information, it is only proper to imagine and perceive of these processes in terms of their informational dynamics (p. 7). To maintain her claim, Terranova investigates three themes on informational cultures: information and noise, limits of possibility, and non-linearity and representation. The lack of similarity between five chapters of the book becomes one of the basic flaws of this work. Although she specifies in her introduction that she privileges non-linearity, she nevertheless maintains a certain level of linearity, as the chapters follow a loose, yet evident, historical timeline. The fact that Terranova devoted an entire chapter to information theory is fairly surprising given that it is not integrated into the rest of the book. For instance, she outlines in great detail C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver's "Mathematical Theory of Communication," to the point that it appears as though this text will be basic to the entire manuscript, yet it is only briefly mentioned again almost 50 pages later. In addition, the fact that Terranova manages to fit an implausible amount of rather complicated theoretical detail into 157 pages suggests that her work is not geared toward a complete and working definition of network culture, as it is more of an effort to think through the concept of network culture. For the reader to critically assess the concepts Terranova presents, however, needs a complicated comprehension of the theoretical frameworks at hand. In the chapter three, Terranova proposes a compelling argument supporting the proposal that free labour is not restricted to the Internet or digital economy, and that it is instead an significant, yet still unacknowledged, source of value in advanced capitalist societies. All the same, to dismiss Network Culture for being a lot infused with different theories is to miss the value of the work. The text offers precious insights and points of departure for thinking through basic concepts in communication studies. For instance, in the analysis of free labour in the digital economy, Terranova does not just isolate the phenomenon in relation to the digital economy; rather, she questions the meaning of this type of "free" experience in relation to the cultural economy at large. Her observations point to the possibility that the digital economy is a functioning model for the future of capitalist production. Terranova has not argued for the abolition of "old media." Rather, she has proposed networked multitudes as a point of departure for critically re-examining conventional concepts upheld by old media, such as the public sphere, democracy, and mass culture, in an attempt to emerge forth onto the terrain of the common, that is, "the constituent terrain of the contemporary politics of communication" (p. 157). In addition of importance to communication studies is Terranova's argument for a new medium of communication that is freed from "old media" baggage (p. 135). This, for Terranova, is encompassed in a "networked multitude," which possesses its own means of communication and is freed from the oppression of broadcasting - and is therefore capable to "challenge the phony public sphere of television and the press" (p. 135). Yet this is not accomplished by separating and opposing network culture to that of the manipulated "mass" (p. 150). More importantly, there is a mass in network culture, "as well as segments and micro-segments, and an informational dimension that links them all" (p. 153). Terranova is worried with demonstrating that network culture is neither situated in the past nor in the future, but is constituted by what occurred prior to its modern form and will consequently affect the emergence of its future form. Perhaps, then, the work could have more appropriately been titled "Networking Culture: Affective Politics for the Emergent Information Age." However, as a philosophical investigation into the emergence of network culture, Network Culture manages to achieve what Terranova sets out to do, which is to "give a name to, and to further our understanding of, a global culture as it unfolds across a multiplicity of communication channels but within a single milieu" (p. 1). Terranova demonstrates that network culture is not an isolated example that begins and ends with the digital economy. Following in the tradition of such scholars as Adrian Mackenzie, Luciana Parisi, and Brian Massumi, Terranova attempts to overpass the gap between theories of emergence and modern culture. In conclusion, Terranova's Network Culture explains that the non-linear network dynamics that link diverse modes of communication at different levels (from local radio to satellite television, from the national press to the Internet, from broadcasting to rumours and conspiracy theories) offer the conditions within which another politics can come out. This other politics, Terranova's work suggests, does not entail the production of a new political discourse or ideology, but the creation of micro-political strategies able to stand up to new forms of social control. Biocapital Kaushik Rajan's Biocapital is one of the most important and a major academic contribution to science studies and political economy. Bio-capital is an ambitious book; its theoretical scope has the potential to remake conversation in the human sciences. There is really nothing like the argument and synthesis Rajan offers, which is astonishing given how important his topic is. Rajan focus in Biocapital is on two cities of India - Bombay and Hyderabad. Bombay is the most populated city in the all of India and the home of world-renowned Bollywood, yet there are still many that have never even heard of the city. This is mostly due in fact to its recent name change; the majority of people around the world still refer this city as Bombay but in 1995 the major city went under a name change and now goes by the name of Bombay. Present-day Bombay was originally a group seven islands, and artefacts found near Kandivali, in northern Bombay indicate that these islands had been inhabited since the Stone Age. Rajan's Biocapital sees the emergence of Hyderabad as a "Hi-Tec City" acquires significance in the context of the liberalisation process that has been going on in India. The city was founded in the late 16th century on the banks of Muai river as the capital of the Golconda Kingdom. It fell to Mughals in 1687, and was a provincial capital till 1763 when the Nizams made it a full-fledged capital. The Princely State of Hyderabad merged with the Indian Union in 1948. It became the capital city for the state of Andhra Pradesh in 1956 after the linguistic reorganisation of states in India. The old city (also called walled city) has all the features described typical of a Muslim/Islamic city. The city has a number of historic monuments (Golconda Fort, Qutab Shahi Tombs, Charminar, Mecca Masjid, Falaknuma Palace etc.) and water bodies built by its successive rulers over a period of nearly three centuries. Hyderabad appears to be getting set to emerge as an "Informational City" in India. It is difficult to say at this stage whether the development of information technology at Hyderabad may qualify it to be called Informational City since the latter is the urban expression of the whole matrix of determinations of Informational Society, as the Industrial City was the spatial expression of the Industrial Society. The characteristic of the Informational City is determined by the pre-eminence of the space of flows over the space of places. In this case, the space of flows refer to the system of exchange of information, capital, and power that structures the basic processes of societies, economies and states between different localities, regardless of localisation. Given the deformities in the Indian urban system as discussed earlier, the liberalisation policies, and the increasing role of the multinational companies in the national economies of the Third World countries, it may be possible to apply the term "Informational City" to the cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad in the coming years. A "Hi-Tec City" (Hyderabad Information Technology and Engineering Consultancy City) has been under construction and its first phase was completed in December 1998. Some of the leading software companies have shifted into the "Hi-Tec City." It is expected to have "computer controlled environment." A new Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) was started in 1998. This is more or less like a private university, the first of its kind in India. In chapters two, five, and six of Biocapital, Rajan has drawn on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug expansion in the two countries, investigating the practices and objectives of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the method, he illuminates the global flow of thoughts, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives. Grounding analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic investigation and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Rajan tells that modern biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they come out. Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period spanning 1999 to 2004. Bringing Marxian theories of value into discussion with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, Rajan traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first. His ethnography tells his theoretically sophisticated investigation into how the modern world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what Rajan calls techno-scientific capitalism. Reading of Rajan's Biocapital can fill anyone with the intellectual and personal excitement. Biocapital gives a fervent, thoroughly argued road map to dense and consequential worlds. Rajan explores in details what many others only promise; i.e., the co-productions of meanings, values, and bodies in rising regimes of bio-capital. In the course of shaping ethnographic and academic inquiry into what he calls 'lively capital,' Rajan gives his readers lively value in every sense." References Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life. Publisher: Duke Univ. Press 2006 Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age Pluto Press. 2004. Read More

 

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