Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

Expressions of wonder and awe in the face of new technology dominate 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 ingenuity 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 fascination 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 transparent vignette on reality but rather a direct influence on the construction of reality and is therefore worthy of analysis in its own right.

After locating in the previous chapter this research on contemporary technology discourse in its theoretical and sociological field, this chapter will attend to its empirical and methodological facets. The immateriality and vagueness of the notion of the digital discourse—the object of study in this book—demands that we first describe what it is, where it can be found, and what it looks like. The chapter then goes on to present Wired magazine as a suitable case study for the analysis of the digital discourse. Finally, the chapter discusses the methodological approach employed to analyze this case study.

In critical social theory, technology occupies a central role in the organization and distribution of power. Foucault, for example, sees the capilarization and disciplinarization of power in modernity as tied to science and technology. The shift from overt authoritative control to implicit disciplinary control entails the emergence of disciplining techniques. Subjectification and self-disciplining through the construction of a panoptic space is a prime example of such technique (Foucault 1995). Technologies, even in the narrowest sense of tools or machines, are a particular case of Foucault’s indivisible knowledge/power nexus; they are a phenotype of both knowledge and power and cannot be analyzed solely in terms of one or the other (Foucault 1994). More recently, Bruno Latour upheld the indivisibility of knowledge—in the form of technology—from social relations, stating that “technology is society made durable” (Latour 1991), and Castells concurs, saying “technology is society, and society cannot be understood and represented without its technological tools” (Castells 1996, 5).

Part II of the book offered an analysis of the digital discourse pertaining to the intersection of network technology with key sites of the new capitalism: the market, work, production, and the human. It underscored how the digital discourse constructs a spirit of networks that legitimizes new constellations of power, new modes of work, new relations of production, and new ways of being. Part III of the book offers two concluding discussions that highlight two theoretical and sociological dimensions of the digital discourse. Chapter 7 registers and explains the technologistic facet of the discourse on network technology. It further asks, “What is the social meaning of a discourse that revolves on technology as its axis of understanding and presentation?” Chapter 8 summarizes the main findings of the book, reiterates its central arguments, and delves into the ideological and political dimensions of the digital discourse as the new spirit of network capitalism.