CHAPTER 1

Capitalism, Technology,
and the Digital Discourse

Expressions of wonder and awe in the face of new technology domi-

nate public discourse and are indeed hard to contain. From new media
technology to the Internet, from Google to global positioning systems
(GPS) and cellphones—the overwhelming feeling of novelty and inge-
nuity embodied in these technologies—many of which are experienced
firsthand by millions of individuals around the world—can easily slide
toward what Vincent Mosco calls The Digital Sublime (2004), a fascina-
tion with (if not fetishization of ) technology and its tremendous impact
on our everyday life experience. The digital discourse is indeed precisely
that body of knowledge that epitomizes this contemporary awe and the
feeling that network technology changes everything, remaking society in
its own image. But, as I have already pointed out in the Introduction,
notwithstanding the tremendous ramifications of network technology on
contemporary society, technology is not only the material basis of society
but also its ideological foundation. Technology discourse is not a trans-
parent vignette on reality but rather a direct influence on the construction
of reality and is therefore worthy of analysis in its own right.

The Discourse on Technology

TECHNOLOGY AND “POST” THEORIES
I understand the discourse on technology as a cognitive map, a struc-
ture of feelings, and an episteme; that is, a body of knowledge that is
inextricably intertwined with technological reality, social structures, and
everyday practices (Foucault 1994; Jameson 1991; Williams 1978). The
digital discourse is a public discourse that situates network technology
at the center of an emancipatory social transformation. This thesis has
been crystallized within a few theoretical frameworks, most notably
E. Fisher, Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age
© Eran Fisher 2010
16 Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

postindustrialism, postmodernism, and posthumanism, and is the bed-

rock of media studies and, more recently, cyberstudies (Webster 2005).
For the postindustrialists, the determining role of knowledge, informa-
tion, and technology in the productive process and the corollary decline
of the working class and rise of a professional-technocratic elite—bent on
rational planning and affiliated with neither capitalists nor workers—also
implies the substitution of a rational, technocratic political sphere for the
ideological politics of class struggle and the strengthening of civil society
(Bell 1999; Machlup 1962; Porat and Rubin 1977; Touraine 1971).
For the postmodernists, the dissociation between signifier and signi-
fied and the constitution of an “empire of signs” (Barthes 1982) or a
“hyperreality” (Baudrillard 1983) “media-ted” (Lash 2002) by network
technology is at the heart of a radical social break and a move to a new
“mode of information” (Poster 1990). Like the postindustrialists, they,
too, uphold the emancipatory potential of this informational transforma-
tion: liberation from grand narratives, from essentialist and authoritar-
ian bodies of knowledge about the world, from metaphysical ontologies,
and from the determination of signs (Baudrillard 1975, 1981; Foucault
2002; Lyotard 1984). In the same vein, posthumanists are excited about
the constitution of new subjects defined by new advances in information
and communication technology. The informationalization of the body
and the networking of identities allow for a more negotiated and indeter-
minate construction of one’s identity, for the overcoming of essentialist
categories not just in discourse but in practice, and for more degrees of
freedom in choosing one’s identity, which in turn opens up new opportu-
nities for equality, especially for previously underprivileged subjectivities,
such as women (Gaggi 2003; Haraway 1991, 1997; Hayles 1997, 1999;
Turkle 1997). To sum up, postindustrialists, postmodernists, and post-
humanists all locate network technology at the heart of a radical break in
social life that helps transcend the Achilles’ heel of industrialism, modern-
ism, and humanism, respectively.

THREE APPROACHES TO THE RELATIONS BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

The approach I take in this book can be seen as a critique of these three
prominent theoretical formulations inasmuch as I ask to shift our atten-
tion from the social effects of the materiality of technology to the social
effects of the ideological facet of technology and investigate technology
discourse. To understand the status of “technology discourse” as a socio-
logical object of study, we need to locate this mode of analysis within
the broader field of the social study of technology. Three theoretical
approaches have been proposed to account for the relationship between