Beniger 1986
Beniger, James. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society. Harvard UP, 1986.
Human society seems rather to evolve largely through changes so gradual as to be all but imperceptible, at least compared to the generational cycles of the individuals through whose lives they unfold. Second, contemporaries of major societal transformations are frequently distracted by events and trends more dramatic in immediate impact but less lasting in significance.
Page 2
…society is currently experiencing a revolu- tionary transformation on a global scale. Unlike most of the other writers, however, I do not conclude that the crest of change is either recent, current, or imminent. Instead, I trace the causes of change back to the middle and late nineteenth century, to a set of problems— in effect a crisis of control—generated by the industrial revolution in manufacturing and transportation. The response to this crisis, at least in technological innovation and restructuring of the economy, occurred most rapidly around the turn of the century and amounted to nothing less, I argue, than a revolution in societal control.
Page 6
Beginning most noticeably in the United States in the late nineteenth century, the Control Revolution was certainly a dramatic if not abrupt discontinuity in technological advance. Indeed, even the word revo- lution seems barely adequate to describe the development, within the span of a single lifetime, of virtually all of the basic communication technologies still in use a century later: photography and telegraphy (1830s), rotary power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), trans- atlantic cable (1866), telephone (1876), motion pictures (1894), wireless telegraphy (1895), magnetic tape recording (1899), radio (1906), and television (1923).
Page 7
Along with these rapid changes in mass media and telecommuni- cations technologies, the Control Revolution also represented the be- ginning of a restoration—although with increasing centralization—of the economic and political control that was lost at more local levels of society during the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, control of government and markets had depended on personal relationships and face-to-face interactions; now control came to be reestablished by means of bureaucratic organization, the new infrastructures of trans- portation and telecommunications, and system-wide communication via the new mass media.
Page 7
Inseparable from the concept of control are the twin activities of information processing and reciprocal communication, complementary factors in any form of control. Information processing is essential to all purposive activity, which is by definition goal directed and must therefore involve the continual comparison of current states to future goals, a basic problem of information processing. So integral to control is this comparison of inputs to stored programs that the word control itself derives from the medieval Latin verb contrarotulare, to compare something “against the rolls,” the cylinders of paper that served as official records in ancient times.
Page 8
So central is communication to the process of control that the two have become the joint subject of the modern science of cybernetics, defined by one of its founders as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the…
Page 8
Because both the activities of information processing and commu- nication are inseparable components of the control function, a society’s ability to maintain control—at all levels from interpersonal to inter-
Page 8
Pen
Page 8
national relations—will be directly proportional to the development of its information technologies.
Page 9
‘Technology may therefore be considered as roughly equivalent to that which can be done, excluding only those capabilities that occur naturally in living systems.
Page 9
Like these earlier revolutions in matter and energy processing, the Control Revolution resulted from innovation at a most fundamental level of technology—that of infor- mation processing.
Page 9
Information processing may be more difficult to appreciate than matter or energy processing because information is epiphenomenal: it derives from the organization of the material world on which it is wholly dependent for its existence.
Page 9
…bureaucratic organization tends to appear wherever a collective activ- ity needs to be coordinated by several people toward explicit and impersonal goals, that is, to be controlled. Bureaucracy has served as the generalized means to control any large social system in most in- stitutional areas and in most cultures since the emergence of such systems by about 3000 B.c.
Page 13
Nevertheless, bureaucratic administration did not begin to achieve anything approximating its modern form until the late Industrial Revolution.
Page 14
Rationalization must therefore be seen, following Weber, as a complement to bureaucratization, one that served control in his day much as the preprocessing of information prior to its processing by computer serves control today.
Page 15
Tne reason why people can be governed more readily qua things is that the amount of information about them that needs to be processed is thereby greatly reduced and hence the degree of control—for any constant capacity to process information—is greatly enhanced. By means of rationalization, therefore, it is possible to main- tain large-scale, complex social systems that would be overwhelmed by arising tide of information they could not process were it necessary to govern by the particularistic considerations of family and kin that characterize preindustrial societies.
Page 15
In short, rationalization might be defined as the destruction or ig- noring of information in order to facilitate its processing.
Page 15
The rapid development of rationalization and bureaucracy in the mid- dle and late nineteenth century led to a succession of dramatic new information-processing and communication technologies. These inno- vations served to contain the control crisis of industrial society in what can be treated as three distinct areas of economic activity: production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Page 16
Machinery itself came in- creasingly to be controlled by two new information-processing tech-
Page 16
nologies: closed-loop feedback devices like James Watt’s steam governor (1788) and preprogrammed open-loop controllers like those of the Jac- quard loom (1801). By 1890 Herman Hollerith had extended Jacquard’s punch cards to tabulation of U.S. census data. This information- processing technology survives to this day—if just barely—owing largely to the corporation to which Hollerith’s innovation gave life, Interna- tional Business Machines (IBM). F…
Page 17
The resulting flood of mass-produced goods demanded comparable innovation in control of a second area of the economy: distribution. Growing infrastructures of transportation, including rail networks, steamship lines, and urban traction systems, depended for control on a corresponding infrastructure of information processing and telecom- munications.
Page 17
This coevolution of the railroad and telegraph systems fostered the development of another communication infrastructure for control of mass distribution and consumption: the postal system.
Page 17
The mechanism for communicating information to a national audience of consumers developed with the first truly mass medium: power- driven, multiple-rotary printing and mass mailing by rail.
Page 18
Although most of the new information technologies originated in the private sector, where they were used to control production, distri- bution, and consumption of goods and services, their potential for controlling systems at the national and world level was not overlocked by government. Since at least the Roman Empire, where an extensive road system proved equally suited for moving either commerce or troops, communications infrastructures have served to control both economy and polity. As corporate bureaucracy came to control in-…
Page 20
One major result of the Control Revolution had been the emergence of the so-called Information Society. The concept dates from the late 1950s and the pioneering work of an economist, Fritz Machlup, who first measured that sector of the U.S. economy associated with what he called “the production and distribution of knowledge” (…
Page 21
The same report introduced the neologism telematics for this most recent stage of the Information Society, although similar words had been suggested earlier—for ex- ample, compunications (for “computing + communications”) by An-
Page 25
Crucial to telematics, compunications, or whatever word comes to be used for this convergence of information-processing and commu- nications technologies is increasing digitalization: coding into discon- tinuous values—usually two-valued or binary—of what even a few years ago would have been an analog signal varying continuously in time, whether a telephone conversation, a radio broadcast, or a television picture. Because most modern computers process digital information, the progressive digitalization of mass media and tele- communications content begins to blur earlier distinctions between the communication of information and its processing (as implied by the term compunications), as well as between people and machines. Dig- italization makes communication from persons to machines, between machines, and even from machines to persons as easy as it is between persons. Also blurred are the distinctions among information types: numbers, words, pictures, and sounds, and eventually tastes, odors, and possibly even sensations, all might one day be stored, processed, and communicated in the same digital form.
Page 25
In this way digitalization promises to transform currently diverse forms of information into a generalized medium for processing and exchange by the social system, much as, centuries ago, the institution
Page 25
of common currencies and exchange rates began to transform local markets into a single world economy. We might therefore expect the implications of digitalization to be as profound for macrosociology as the institution of money was for macroeconomics.
Page 26
…of control and the resulting Control Revo- lution is that particular attention to the material aspects of information processing, communication, and control makes possible the synthesis of a large proportion of the literature on contemporary social change.
Page 26