Media Policy and Globalization - Blogs Unpad

114 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
paid work are overshadowed by a series of intrusive practices, from the
toxic production of microchips by young Asian and Latina women in Asia
and the Americas to the ‘flexible’ office that does not cease to work when
‘out of office’. Gates’s informationist manifesto calls for the literal and
metaphorical reform of the human organism to fit the technologized business
of the new millennium. What are the characteristics of this new organization
of social relations? What does it mean to live and work in the Information
Society? How knowledgeable is the Knowledge Economy and
most importantly, in which ways has communications policy sought to address
the new demands for structural and cultural adjustment, nationally
and transnationally?
This chapter explores the nexus of the myth-policy of the Information
Society (IS). It maps the trends in designing policy for the Information
Age by concentrating on the visions of IS developed in the EU and the
USA. It examines the dominant (often partially competing) institutional
visions of the IS on the world stage in the last 20 years, and the ways in
which they have fallen short of addressing pressing questions of redistributive
justice. As we shall see, ‘deviating’ versions of a socially conscientious
IS vision, deriving from different political geographies, clash
with more deterministic ones. Social aims seem to lose ground constantly,
when economic aims are present. Once again, we are approaching questions
of policy through the examination of the struggle for symbolic as
well as material hegemony. The legitimacy of the IS visions rests on the
articulation of ideas and the construction or apprehension of ‘facts’ by the
various institutional actors engaged in the practice of shaping policy. We
will analyse major policy concerns by situating them within the context
of their conceptualization, justification and implementation. For that, we
turn our attention to the symbiotic relationship between state actors and
corporate actors and the role of the market in ‘liberating’ consumers from
the state through IT technology. As the powerful discourse of ‘deregulation’
or the reality of reregulation of neoliberal trade takes the helm, it
produces the discursive conditions for the reregulation of neoliberal subjects
as we discussed in Chapter 1. The market discourse subsumes both
the state and civil society in an attuned process of legitimating market-led
development.
A telematic history of civilization – and its policies
The benefits of the NII [National Information Infrastructure] for the
nation are immense. An advanced information infrastructure will enable
U.S. firms to compete and win in the global economy, generating