Networks, Media and Relfexivity in the 21st
Century
The movement, the flows of capital, money, commodities, labour, information and images across time and space are only comprehensible if `networks' are taken into account because it is through networks that these subjects and objects are able to gain mobility.
Whatever form of institutional governance is dominant,
whether markets, hierarchies, the state or corporatism, the subjects and
objects which are governed must be mobile though networks.
The formulations of economic geography are useful here. Thus Brunn and Leinbach conceive of the `world as a map of "bridges" of communication and transport, comprising dense networks, sparse networks and blanks' (1991: xvii).
The issue for us in this context is what are becoming the modal changes in this mapping in the post-organized capitalist order; that is, where and what sort of the `cobwebs' of connections on these maps are becoming denser, and which are becoming relatively sparser.
Networks are made up of a few basic elements: of `bridges' or `links' which connect the points in a network. These bridges stand out in lesser or greater relief from a `backcloth' or `support structure'.
The entities that move along these links are called `traffic'. This traffic can be transmitted or not. Communications, including documents, are transmitted traffic. Other traffic is mobile, not through transmission, but via transportation, whether of capital, labour or information.
The points connected by links in a network are 'simplices' (Gould 1991: 25-6). Simplices can be individuals, they can be organizations, they can be terminals, transmitters or receivers.
There are six principal `media' used in telecommunications to move information from one place to another along such bridges and nodes.
Such information consists either of electronic signals or of hard copy information.
Each medium is more or less valuable in terms of cost, speed of transmission, accessibility to small users, volume of information that can be delivered ('bandwidth'), and reliability.
The six media are, first, transportation. These include mail and express services, and are cheap and accessible to small users (UPS, FedEX, US Postal Service), but slow. They are important for original copies of documents.
Second, there is wire cable. The advantage is sturdiness, the disadvantage is the low volume of information that they can carry and hence they cannot carry enough information to transmit images easily. These media are the telephone, Internet modem 56K, etc.).
The third medium is co-axial cable: bandwidth is large enough to carry images as well as voice and data. This is reliable but expensive. These media would be cable TV, DSL Internet connections.
The fourth is the micro-wave channel which has a large bandwidth and is cheap, but is unreliable in that signals can be intercepted and affected by atmospheric conditions. Recent successful use of microwave is in cellular telephones, Satellite TV dish antennae. This medium is better suited for mass, than point-to-point, communications (Abler 1991: 31-2). Earth satellites involve cheap transmission and are well-suited for isolated areas. For example, INTELSAT (International Telecommunications Satellite Organization), which began in 1964, involves 100 countries and has over 400 earth stations (Janelle 1991: 62).
Finally, there is fiber-optic cable which has a large bandwidth. It can simultaneously handle some 40,000 conversations, and transmit 246 bits of information per second (Janelle 1991: 61; Mulgan 1991). Fibre-optic cables also boast superior signal quality, but their problem is expense. And their advent is not at all favourable to isolated areas, either in the Third World or rural areas in advanced societies.
Given the context of these new technologies, the transition from organized to disorganized capitalism brings with it processes of globalization, localization and stratification, which we shall now address sequentially.
The media of mobility during the epoch of organized capitalism (1832-1970) were railroads, telephone via wire cable, postal services and later road networks.
All of these brought `time-space convergence' and `time-cost convergence' mainly on a national scale (although their role in the British Empire should be noted).
By contrast the mobility media of disorganized capitalism (1970’s-21st century) are fibre-optic cable, satellite communications and air transport. These have led to time-space and time-cost convergence on a global scale.
Early organized capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century saw the creation of national railway networks. These themselves were one of the preconditions of an effective mass national postal network.
And just prior to the First World War the constitution of effective national telephone networks followed. In the US the interconnections of all these are exemplified in the career of Theodore Vail who was chief executive of AT&T from 1878 to 1887 and from 1907 to 1919.
Before 1878 Vail was Superintendent of Railway Mail Operations for the US Post Office. In the decade leading up to World War I, he was at AT&T the chief initiator of the integrated national telephone network (Abler 1991: 37).
Time-space convergence brought about by `space-adjusting technologies' refers to the diminution of time it takes for mobility from one place to another.
Organized capitalism's transport via railroads, auto routes and a postal service dependent on trains led to just about as much saving of mobility time between two relatively small towns as between two large ones.
However, contemporary airlines drastically alter this state of affairs. Now time-space convergence basically lowers the time it takes to get between major airports, whereas in Europe travel between places with minor airports is often faster by train. Space-adjusting technologies in the post-organized capitalist era mean that travel from a major city in Britain, Germany or Italy to, for example, Paris (the most thickly 'cobwebbed' air hub of all Europe) takes less time than travel to a provincial town in their own country.
`Time-cost convergence', the diminution in cost of communications of a certain length between places, is now globalized rather than nationalized as satellite and fibre-optic cable forge links between global cities in different countries rather than connecting places within a country.
`Relative location', that is, how one is connected, becomes more important than `absolute location' (Brunn and Leinbach 1991: xvii).
We will now consider localization in the context of these technological shifts. Telecommunications networks globally are thickest within Europe and between north America, Japan and Europe, that is, along the most important trade routes.
But they are as conspicuous within the confines of the global cities, on the level of the area about the size of a `local loop' telephone exchange.
Sometimes this thickening of circuit and switching capacity of networks is in particular locations within these cities. New York, perhaps the most `wired' city in the world, contains the world's largest urban teleport, providing bulk access to micro-wave, satellite and fibre-optic transmission channels.
This provides circuitry to a set of effectively strategic `smart buildings' with the latest inter- and intra-office telecommunications facilities, from express courier pick-up boxes to satellite dishes (Abler 1991: 33).
Smart buildings such as the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center serve as nodes for the New York Teleport's network. The entire New York agglomeration has been a focus for investment in fibre-optic cable, of which there are more than a half dozen systems .
It should be noted that this sort of localization is a localization, not in the traditional and pre-modern utopia of nations, but in the much more cosmopolitan and international networks of global cities.
These interlocking set of processes entails a transformed stratification of core and periphery, one that differs both from the classical paradigm of middle class and working class, and also from the world systems theory of the stratification of rich and poor nations.
In our account the core comprises the heavily networked more or less global cities, as a `wired village of non-contiguous communities'.
And the periphery consists of isolated areas in the same countries, in the former eastern Europe or in the Third World.
In terms of time-space convergence, the disparity between core and periphery in a restructured world order is, we think, likely to grow greater.
Moreover, globalization, where its tentacles do reach, should not be understood as any sort of symmetrical process.
Transformation into the powerful and the relatively powerless is partly decided by who is doing the transmitting and who is doing the receiving of information. Information is usually transmitted from those places in which the cobwebs (networks) of communication media are thickest.
Even between advanced countries there are enormous differences on this count. For example, as late as 1983 the USA constituted 38 per cent of the world's total telephone stock. The US postal service delivered 320 million pieces per day, about four times as much mail per day per individual as in western Europe (Janelle 1991: 58).
Likewise, in 1981 44 per cent of all books translated were from the English. In that year some 18,000 books were translated from English into other languages, and only about 1,200 books were translated into English (Janelle 1991: 57-8).
In terms of mail,
phone calls, faxes, television programmes, radio shows and movies the advanced
Western countries, and overwhelmingly the two Anglo-Saxon cultural giants (US,
Britain) in influence, though surely not in value), transmit
disproportionately more than they receive.
This is most stunningly evidenced in the international press agencies, in which only four truly world-wide companies are operative AP and UPI in the USA, Reuters in Britain and Agence-France-Presse (AFP).
These agencies are large organizations, AFP comprising 171 fulltime journalists and 1,200 stringers in 167 countries and territories. AFP is made use of by 12,000 newspapers and 69 national news agencies.
It sends 3 million words per day by cable, radio and satellite. Information is collected world-wide by the agency journalists and channelled into Paris, where it is sorted, rewritten and translated into other languages before retransmission throughout the world (Janelle 1991: 60).
In all organizations, institutions and fields, such as the firm, the university, the family and the `field' of social scientists, more information transmission stems from those with power located near the core while those at the periphery tend to be on the reception end.
Power in the above sense seems to be a matter of the acceptance or rejection of transmitted communications in the form of speech acts (1981
They Global Transmissions like CNN) do not exercise power immediately through the acceptance of such speech, MTV music or information by receivers, but from communications constituting the very media within which one assents or rejects.
That is, information communicated from the core affects not so much what those on the periphery will classify, but their very classificatory categories themselves.
Popular culture and communication affects the self much as `muzak' does. That is, it is there, it is pervasive, but it is not the object of judgment - one does not assent to it or reject it.
Globalized popular information and culture, functioning as it does in our daily lives, thus becomes everybody's `elementary forms of religious life'. It imparts form to an unreflected, relatively immediate and internationalized habitat. It assures us what is important and what we should be concerned about.
Moreover, not only are networked flows of communications
highly stratified, so too are the equally networked flows of subjects in the
forms of upper, middle and lower classes of people.
The professional-managerial classes of the advanced societies are the most footloose. They circulate at greater distances back and forth on holiday and internationally at work.
Here they perform the sort of advanced services which can be separated from the means of service production, such as consulting, finalizing a merger, checking out a recently acquired foreign subsidiary, giving papers at international conferences and so on (experiencing David Lodge's `small worlds': 1983).
Thus for this class social life is intrinsically partially 'touristic' (see Urry 1990c).
Moreover as 'gentrifiers' in urban centres they consume tourist-like services while more or less at `home'.
The intermediate classes of skilled manual workers and more routine white collar work (the middle third of the `two-thirds society') have been tourists largely on fixed holidays in the summer.
So they circulate back and forth once per year, in the case of Britons to the Mediterranean, or increasingly to Miami, Las Vegas, Hawai’i.
The new post-organized capitalist, largely immigrant, underclass do not circulate but move.
And they tend, with the occasional trip back to country of origin, to stay.
They come to perform the low value-added services that the global city's new upper class consumes (Sassen 1988).
The one-third of Third World immigrants (and now also `second world' immigrants) `shine the shoes', in the words of Noam Chomsky, of the two-thirds in the two-thirds society.
We have just outlined the changing economies of signs and space in the wake of organized capitalism.
We have examined the accelerated and ever wider-ranging trajectories of objects (goods, capital, money, communications, commodities) as well as subjects (labour, immigrants, tourists) in the recent past.
The scenario painted is exhilarating yet its implications are disturbing.
They are that this acceleration, which simultaneously 'distanciates' (puts distance between) social relationships as it 'compresses' time and space, is leading to an emptying out of subjects, people, relationships and objects of meaning. This accelerated mobility causes objects to become disposable and to decline in significance, while social relationships are emptied of meaning.
In our view this spatialization of contemporary 21st century life is less damaging in its implications than many of these writers suggest.
This is because the implications for subjects, for the self, of these changes is not just one of emptying out and flattening. Instead these changes also encourage the development of 'reflexivity'.
The modernization and post-modernization of contemporary political economies and life produce, not just a flattening, but a deepening of the self.
Such a growing reflexivity of subjects that accompanies the end of organized capitalism opens up many positive possibilities for social relations - for intimate relations, for friendship, for work relations, for leisure and for consumption.
Beck lays down a challenge to the doomsday scenarios of post-modern political economy, society and life in the 21st century by developing the concept of reflexive modernization.
He argues that the solution to the negative consequences of late modernity is not the rejection of modernity but its radicalization.
Late modernity not only brings commodification (turning
everything into commodities to be bought and sold) and the domination of
techno-scientific instrumental rationality, but also opens up possibilities
for individuals to reflect critically on these changes and their social
conditions of existence, and hence potentially to change them.
Beck argues that we are in the midst of a transition from
an industrial society to a `risk society' (1992a, b). We are moving from a
social situation in which political conflicts and cleavages were defined by a
logic of the distribution of goods to one in which these cleavages are
increasingly defined by the distribution of 'bads', that is, of hazards and
risks.
Societies constructed around the distribution of goods were national societies.
The risk society by contrast knows no national boundaries, as for example the effects of Chernobyl spread over much of Europe (six years later the consequences are still being felt in parts of the Lake District in north west England).
The risk society is the demise of the national society; it is the world of the Brazilian rain forests; the world in which the use of fire extinguishers in India, for example, affects the ozone layer for everyone else (Beck 1992x: 42).
The risk society is not a class society since the rich are also subjugated to ecological hazards.
In practice however the poor are the worst affected, and the result is especially a sharper international cleavage between the Third World and the advanced societies. Third World countries often quite rationally decide that the remedy of prevailing economic misery is more important than the abstract issue of ecological and cosmic destruction.
The consequences are that their populations will be hit hardest by environmental degradation, especially if they function as the world's 'dustbin'.
The result for the advanced countries, besides ozone layer problems, may be a veritable exodus of 'eco-refugees' and 'climatic asylum seekers' into the wealthy North in future decades.
In place of the class-versus-class cleavage of industrial
society, the risk society is more likely to pit sector against sector.
Sectors may be 'risk winners' such as chemicals, biotechnology, the nuclear industry and many heavy industrial sectors. Or they may be 'risk losers', such as the food industry, tourism, fisheries, some of the retail trade and many services.
Beck stresses that the risk society is also importantly an industrial society. It is the industrial sectors, often those stemming from the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, which have created massive environmental hazards.
Further, even if the majority of individuals in the advanced countries consume and produce 'services' rather than industrial goods, nonetheless the absolute amount of goods that are industrially produced and consumed is greater than ever in the advanced and especially in the developing countries.
Beck's analyses are based on a three-stage periodization, of preindustrial, industrial and risk societies. Each of these three types of society contains risks and hazards, but there are qualitative differences between the types of risk involved in each.
In pre-industrial societies, paradigmatically, risks were not 'man'-made. They were 'natural', such as from childbirth, famines, epidemics, cropdestroying weather. And if they were synthetic, such as casualties in war, they did not follow directly from techno-economic progress.
Modern industrial society, 'which brings uncertainty to every niche of existence', changes all this. Hazards and risks are no longer 'externalized' onto the gods or fate; that is, external agents can no longer be held accountable. There is instead a new modern social accountability for the consequences of hazards and risks.
Beck notes that modernity 'finds its counter-principle in a social compact against industrially produced hazards and damages, stitched together out of public and private insurance agreements'; this social compact which simultaneously involves a 'consensus on progress' gives rise to a 'normative system of rules for social accountability, compensation and precaution'(class action lawsuits against cigarette, gun and chemical companies) (1992x: 61-4; 1992b: 98100).
The insurance principle understands hazards to be 'systematically caused and statistically describable'. What this amounts to is a sort of 'security pact' which, through 'making the incalculable calculable', 'creates present security in the face of an open uncertain future' (1992x: 33-4; 1992b: 100-1).
Beck reserves the title 'risk society' for those societies in which, first, risks become the axial principle of social organization, and second, take on a very specific form, becoming incalculable, uncompensatable, unlimited and unaccountable.
In contemporary risk societies this social compact, this
security pact of an earlier modernity, is shattered. The present age of
'nuclear, chemical and genetic technology' is instead an 'uninsured society'
with diminishing protection. The risk society brings down all of the 'four
pillars' of industrial society's risk calculus.
The first, compensation, is impossible with global irreparable damage which cannot in principle be limited.
The second, precautionary aftercare, is precluded by the impossibility of anticipatory monitoring of results.
The third, limitation, is violated by the time-space dimensions of contemporary ecological catastrophes, events of wave upon wave without an end, affecting also future generations.
The fourth, accountability, faces demise with the great increase of difficulty in enforcing the 'polluter pays' principle (Beck 1992x: 27-8; 1992b: 102-3). The consequence is a sharp erosion of industrial society's social compact, the crisis of today's welfare states and the new tendency to externalize risks again onto some sort of mythic belief that everything will turn out fine.
The dominating principle of the risk society is
knowledge.
The implications are the transformation of the political sphere. Beck speaks of an alliance between the scientists and capital. (Beck 1991). The result is the transfer of political power from parliament, parties and legal institutions onto corporate bodies of scientists.
What is needed, he claims, is a new set of political institutions, in a political sphere now deprived of its own foundations in the rationality of law, democracy and assumptions of progress; and in a public sphere in which there has been a shift to the quasi-governmental power of research laboratories, chemical factories, courts and editorial offices.
Most important in this is the struggle for the symbolic power to define what risk is.
What is needed is an American Constitution like division of powers specifically tailored to the present age. Thus the political constitution of risk society would institutionalize redistributed `boundaries of scientific proof'.
Bodies whose membership cuts across the professions in a true inter-disciplinarity would provide a forum for the proposal of systematic alternatives, for dissenting voices and dissenting experts.
This could take the form of a sort of ecological `upper house', partly structured on corporatist lines, that would constitute a `public science', a `second centre for the discursive checking' of scientific results (1991: 51; 1992b: 119).
Its composition would be of a set of smaller bodies consisting of science and business, science and consumer representatives, technology and law, and the like. Key here in this recasting of accountability is the division between the producers and evaluators of hazards.
Although Beck does ascribe importance to the new social movements and to enlightened middle-class opinion of the public sphere, pivotal as agents of reflexivity in the risk society are the less well-educated petty bourgeoisie and workers of everyday life.
Crucial is `the fact that everyone between the Alpine cottages and the North Sea mudflats now understands and speaks the language of the nuclear critics' and nuclear disaster (1992b: 115).
A major influence are the institutions of the mass media which create a symbolic imagery for popular opinion through their `images in the news of skeletal trees or dying seals' (1992b: 119).
The media do this in spite of themselves through following their own `postmodern' interests of spectacularization. That is, the unanticipated consequence of the `spectacle' created by the media is not to trivialize, but to create for public opinion a collection of images and symbols that people respond to underpinning their new reflexivity.
For Beck, then, reflexive modernization comes paradigmatically with the questioning of science through knowledge, or the self-reflection of knowledge on knowledge.
The sheer overwhelming nature of hazards in the risk society encourages this.
The solution he proposes is thus not a retreat into the mythification of the powers of these hazards, but a reflexive radicalization of modernity. More specifically, reflexivity arises in attempting rationally to deal with and understand contemporary risks - risks that are incalculable, unaccountable, uncompensatable and unlimited.
Much of the rest of Risk Society is devoted to the analysis of how the decline of three particular structures, class society, the classic nuclear family and mass industrial production, leads to a process of individualization (1992a: 87-90).
This process forces men and women to take decisions over their lives that they previously did not have to take, whether or not to have children, to separate or divorce, how to sort out families in circumstances of second marriages, whether ever to marry at all, whether to prefer the same sex and so on (1992a: 105-24).
Also people are obliged over their more flexible work lives. This individual decision taking and self-led initiative in life is a major dimension of the Risk Society.