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118 MEDIA POLICY AND GLOBALIZATION
of the new source of energy, electricity (Mattelart 2001: 43–4). It would
signal an era where social relations, translated into non-hierarchical networks
of support, would be brought forth through the qualities of flexibility
and ubiquity inherent in electricity (Mattelart 2001: 43–4). Around
the same time, Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomaraswamy expressed the
term of ‘post-industrial’/ism as the development of a society that would
move away from the hierarchical and oppressive organization of industrialism
towards a decentralized, culturally diverse second renaissance
(Mattelart 2001: 43–4). The ‘redistribution’ of cultural wealth, specifically
understood as High Culture, was also Lloyd Wright’s architectural
philosophy that would bridge social units of the polis (after the ancient
Greek definition of polis (city), as the space where polites (citizens) gather
and interact), through the use of modern technology, in an organic web
of networks, therefore promoting a new form of sociability, a new form
of decentralization (Mattelart 2001: 46). It is rather significant that the
question of culture, whether perceived as High Culture or as ‘ways of
life’, keeps returning to the quest for human liberation through technological
advancement. These technocentric accounts of the political and
the social dimensions of the cultural occupy the mind of futurists and
early utopians, who see the political possibility of decentralized networks
in the technological capability of electricity, later broadcasting and currently
computers. Braman’s (1998) correlation of questions of cultural
identity and expression as inherent in the development of the stages of
the IS can be seen through this particular but largely agreeable strand
of thought that traces such questions to the almost unavoidable ‘dismantling’
of the shackles of industrial force.
Nevertheless, the socialist-utopian metaphors of ‘organic spaces’ and
decentralized democracies have almost been capitulated by mercantile,
mass production, mass-culture-driven informational capitalism. Although
a very strong strand of intellectual workers has continued to
draw parallels between the decentralizing and anonymizing capabilities
of information and communications technologies and the freedom acquired
through these qualities, an equally strong web of pre-positioned
constraints prove to hurdle this transition. Modern-day believers in the
emancipatory capacities of technology, among them feminist thinkers
such as Dale Spender (1995) and Donna Haraway (1991), extend the liberational
attributes of incorporeal interaction to gender dynamics. For
these theorists, computer-mediated communications allow the building
of networks among marginalized voices and the integration of the previously
marginalized into the web of social relations free from the chains
of gender. Time and again, the visions of liberation maintain their power
to capture the best political and cultural manifestos, 1 regardless of their