Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

5 Policies for a new world or
the emperor’s new clothes?
The Information Society
Third-generation mobile phones, broadband connections, wireless
applications, cybercommunities, cyberwars, cybersex, e-commerce, e-
democracy, e-learning: this is some of the language that has come to
describe the era of accelerated tele/communications and transactions.
These terms have not escaped from a science fiction movie, although
some of them have their origins in science fiction novels, but from the
consultative papers of ‘think tanks’ and government policy documents.
They have become part of everyday advertising, policy, newspeak and
even casual conversation, in global cities across the North–South
divide. These are the terms of a particular form of capitalist economic
organization of social relations that adheres to two overarching qualities
of the new Information Age: speed and universality. CEO of Microsoft,
Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999) not only embodies the
ideas and policies that characterize the era of the Information Society and
the Knowledge Economy, it also constitutes a manual for the direction
of future technological development, policy, economic organization and
even social relations. Speed, instant capital transaction across geographic
nodes that would have taken hours and days to cross through physical
means, almost ‘cancels’ the concept of time as an obstacle or expense for
transnational companies. Spatial universality is also a new achievement
for the global enterprises of the twenty-first century. Telecommunications
have enabled those connected to premium translocal networks the liquidation
of time/space. The beneficiaries of the transcendence of
time/space are to be found among transnational corporations that can do
business literally around the clock across the globe. This ‘transcendence’
has adverse consequences for the labourers of the new Information Society
whose labour hours – once regulated and largely defined – spill over
into the private sphere and invade leisure time. The wonders of technology
that would liberate desk-chained analysts and mothers engaged in
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