Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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communication service providers and producers of cultural commodities, are increasingly

global, integrated and concentrated. Thus information practice is at the nexus o

contradictory trends towards

individualism

and corporate power, and the ideals and

romises of the information age must be understood within current structures o

information production and use.

The genesis of the information revolution may be located in the dawn of the industrial

age, when processes of production, distribution and consumption became increasingly

complex and geographically far-flung. Management and control of these industrial

rocesses required methodization of data creation, information management and decision

making. This methodization took the form of increasingly refined bureaucratic practice.

Bureaucracy consists essentially of two processes. The first is rationality in which

activities, entities and decision processes are abstracted and formalized into information

systems. Information production is largely the representation and formalization o

henomena. That is, phenomena are examined and evaluated according to their role in a

articular rational process. Some ontological model is applied to the phenomenon to

articulate it into constituent parts. Decisions are made regarding which parts are

important enough to note and record, and what formal relations hold among those parts.

This involves judgments that are informed not only by explicit, goal-oriented criteria, but

also by deeply held and unexamined cultural beliefs. The second essential structure o

ureaucracy is specialization, in which decisionmaking power is assigned to particular

organizational nodes, and communication flow is channeled and restricted to those nodes.

These three facets of information—its administrative purpose, its inherent valuation and

representation of subjects, and its unequal distribution—make information production

and processing a focus of struggles over representation and power.

The use of information technologies such as wireless phones, hand-held computers and

remote access to databases and services via the World Wide Web has made it possible for

many workers and consumers to free themselves from the geographic bounds of the

office and the shopping

mall

. However, as those technologies transgress geographic

ounds, they extend administrative bounds. Workers and consumers alike become subject

to oversight as their location and activities are tracked through their media use. This

information then becomes the property of the overseer, and may be used to rationalize the

roduction and consumption processes in ways which benefit capital. In the case of the

management/labor relationship, the information may be used to extract from workers

their knowledge of how to do things, and formalize that knowledge into automated

“expert systems,” thus transferring to capital the embodied assets of labor. Similar

rocesses occur when consumer data is collected, evaluated and manipulated into

demographics and patterns of consumption. In each case, management has greater access

to knowledge about a population than that population itself has. In addition to the

modeling of the activities of a subject population, information and surveillance are used

to act upon individuals in that population—to control the flow of work to individuals, to

trigger fraud control processes in credit-card systems, to offer (or to choose not to offer)

discounts on purchases, etc. In these ways, information is used both to model human

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 586

behaviors and to impose that model on human populations.

Similarly, informational practices are used to convert communal resources to private

resources as cultural practices are captured, recorded, commodified and sold back in the

form of popular cultural products.

Finally, information is a structuring element of markets themselves. Markets are in part

defined by the ability of the participants to interact with one another and to understand

current market conditions. Imbalanced access to information resources (including

networks and databases) produces imbalanced market power. For example, corporate

capital, able to access data and communicate globally, acts in a global labor market,

while laborers themselves are often able to access only local resources, and so operate

only in a local market. Thus information resources give corporate capital the power to

negotiate the global labor market as a set of local markets, while labor is able to negotiate

only their own local market.

Information products, such as databases, software, network services, video games and

entertainment, enter the market economy as inputs to the production process, as vehicles

of distribution, and as consumer items in themselves. However, information products

offer special problems in this process of commodification, and significant social,

economic and technical resources are being spent in order to alleviate these problems. For

example, it is notoriously difficult to restrict the use of information to those who have

aid for that use. This difficulty is compounded by the increasing immateriality o

information—rather than purchasing a medium such as a book or compact disc

containing certain, more or less permanent, information, users are increasingly likely to

access information via electronic networks in the form of a recordable, reproducible and

malleable electronic pattern. Organizations in advanced information economies are

responding to these problems of commodification by developing encryption technologies

capable of metering the use of information services, or limiting their use to certain

eople. Other responses include the propagation of copyright and database protection

laws and treaties which ensure that corporate gatherers of information have legal recourse

to establish and defend property rights in their information holdings.

Further reading

Gandy, O. (1993)

The Panoptic Sort,

Boulder: West-view.

Lyon, D. (1994)

The Electronic Eye,

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.

Mosco, V and Wasko, J. (eds) (1988)

The Political Economy of Information,

Madison:

University of Wisconsin.

Poster, M. (1990)

The Mode of Information,

Chicago: University of Chicago.

DAVID J.PHILLIPS

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in-line skating

Commonly referred to as rollerblading after the company created in 1980 by two

hockey

players in Minnesota who, wanting to train in the off-season, converted an in-line skate to

meet their needs. With refinements like a braking device and new materials to make the

oot lighter, they created a skate that could be used by professional athletes and

recreational skaters alike. By the late 1990s more than thirty manufacturers created skates

for a worldwide market; in the United States alone, there are more than 29 million skaters

and roughly a quarter of all households own in-line skates, making this the fastest

growing sport of the 1990s. In-line skating also spawned its own professional sport, roller

hockey.

ROBERT GREGG

inner city

Under various designations, American urban cores long have been centers of interaction,

consumption and power. Since the 1960s, the positive “down-town” has overlapped with

the problematic inner city divorced from affluent outward expansion. Other related terms

(Central Business District, or specific usages like the Loop, Center City Midtown, etc.)

have taken on varied political and social meanings.

Since colonial times, the city has been a place where people of diverse social and

cultural backgrounds have come together. Despite differences in status and wealth, neat

separations often proved impossible until innovations in transportation allowed cities to

expand in the nineteenth century re-mapping wealth, culture and race. By the 1920s,

social scientists of the Chicago School recognized different urban functional zones. Park

and Burgess’ studies, for example, identified a central business district containing

olitical, economic and cultural services for the city (although limited residence). Around

this stood factories and working-class immigrant homes in a transitional zone o

abandoned wealthy residences. This model suggested that the inner city was constantly

renewed by new immigrants, while those who assimilated moved outward.

Relations between groups living and working at the urban core were not always

friendly As groups moved out, tensions could erupt between those who shared neither

heritage, language, nor skin color. In other cases, the mingling at the urban center

alarmed those who governed the city. Hence

Los Angeles’

downtown, where

Asian

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 588

Americans, African Americans

and

Latino/as

met, was dismantled over time,

separating

ethnic enclaves

and precluding joint political action.

Many aspects of the “inner city” as a problem were exacerbated by

urban renewal

and

upheavals of social movements of the 1960s. Here, government and private interventions

often worked at cross-purposes.

Highways

as routes to communicate between central

areas and suburbs, for example, often dissected vibrant areas around the business district.

Destruction of decaying houses and factories in the core also created open scars in the

tightly knit fabric of the city In this chaos, riots broke out from Los Angeles to

Washington, DC,

often laying waste to whole sections and driving out businesses,

employers and residents.

In the 1970s and 1980s,

gentrification

brought predominantly white suburbanites in to

restore the older homes at the center which previous generations had abandoned.

Unfortunately this often forced the eviction of other ethnic populations who found no

housing near the center nor opportunities to move further out. Still, “success stories” like

Philadelphia, PA’s

Society Hill or

Savannah, GA’s

Historic District enriched the “inner

city” alongside corporate towers and public buildings.

Modern theorists increasingly argue that post-industrial cities, defined by services and

information rather than heavy production, no longer require the same spatial

concentrations of the past. Government offices, corporate headquarters and even sports

teams have left behind aging infrastructures in order to be closer to a larger group o

suburban

consumers in suburbs and

edge cities

. Downtowns may be defined in terms o

“special” places like

museums,

cinemas, restaurants and markets. Yet the inner city has

become associated with danger, poverty and

homelessness

for those who avoid it, and

with waste and with rage for those who inhabit it.

As a human center where diverse Americans have met and established their claims, the

inner city has been the cradle of a multicultural experience. Yet, as

television

and

cinematic representations from the

Detroit, MI

Robocop

(1987) and the Los Angeles

Blade Runner

(1982) suggest, these areas can also be identified with the ex-urbanites’

worst nightmares.

ee also:

Main Street; urban planning

GARY McDONOGH

insurance

American Medical Association; automobiles; banks and banking; healthcare

Entries A-Z 589

integration

Civil Rights movement; segregation

intellectuals/culture wars

The culture wars at the beginning of the twenty-first century have their roots in earlier

conflicts within the intellectual elite. These, in turn, are framed by a wider tradition o

populist anti-intellectualism, whose advocates associated the intellectual elite with a

European, “un-American” culture.

Within the intellectual elite at the turn of the twentieth century—men like John Dewey,

Randolph Bourne, Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Croly and W.E.B.

Du Bois

(all of whom

drew on ideas from either Germany or Britain)—divisions arose about the extent to

which an intellectual tradition should be forged that was more responsive to the

experiences of Americans living in a society shaped by large influxes of immigrants and

the presence of

African Americans

amidst a majority European population. For the first

half of the twentieth century

New York

City remained the bastion of intellectuals with

satellites in Harvard, Yale and the other

Ivy League

colleges.

Both the progressive era and the New Deal witnessed the collaboration between

government and intellectuals, and the rise of government and

foundation

-supported

think tanks

for developing public policy. The late 1930s witnessed the coming to the US

of many European intellectuals escaping the Nazis, many of whom were Jewish, as well

as some Marxists. The intellectual milieu was shaped also by the arrival of leftist thinkers

like C.L.R.James and other African and

Caribbean

immigrants who saw the United

States as reinvigorated by the Popular Front and by its potential as a worldwide anti-

colonial power. These intellectuals had significant influence, especially in universities

and colleges, but this would be more than matched in American culture by the

antiintellectualism embodied by the emerging

McCarthyism

in the 1940s.

During the early years of the

Cold War,

many left-leaning intellectuals like Max

Eastman, Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and Edmund

Wilson

veered away from Marxism

and socialism, endorsing purges of communists and Popular Front leftists. Into the

vacuum rushed resurgent liberal optimism, embodied in modernization theory One of the

standard bearers of this theory was W.W. Rostow, whose “non-communist

manifesto” (

Stages of Economic Growth,

1960) was endorsed within the

Kennedy

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 590

administration and by the foundationsupported development agencies. Other sociologists,

like E.Franklin

Frazier

and Daniel Patrick

Moynihan,

and urban analysts like Lewis

Mumford,

who developed modernization-inflected social theories, also proved very

influential among policy-makers.

The 1960s saw the beginnings of the culture wars with significant fragmentation

occurring within the intellectual elite. First came the rise of the New Left critique (for

example, Herbert

Marcuse

and Noam

Chomsky)

of the militaryindustrial complex, the

countercultural, beatinspired critiques of

suburbia

and the

“organization man,”

along

with the SDS-led assault on the university as a tool of the establishment. Then African

American intellectuals (for example, James

Baldwin,

Amiri

Baraka

and Ralph

Ellison

began to receive more widespread attention in tandem with the growing

Black Power

impulse and the campaigns for black-studies programs on college

campuses

around the

country. Feminist intellectuals, likewise, emerged out of the women’s movement,

invigorated by Betty

Friedan’s

Feminine Mystique

(1963), but also reacting to the

misogyny they witnessed within the New Left. Robin Morgan’s 1970 anthology of the

women’s liberation

movement,

Sisterhood is Powerful,

pointed towards a radical

feminism that gained strength during the 1970s.

Simultaneously conservative intellectuals began to coalesce around the

John Birch

Society

and William F.Buckley Jr.’s

National Review,

infusing the

Republican Party

with new energy especially the presidential campaign of Barry

Goldwater

and the

California

gubernatorial campaigns of Ronald

Reagan

. These new Republicans, seeing

themselves as part of a “silent” or “moral” majority drew strength from

backlash

against

the

Civil Rights movement, busing,

legalization of

abortion

and what they saw as the

lack of

patriotism

of the left, spawning neo-conservatives within the women’s

movement, like Phyllis

Schlafly,

and

black conservatives,

like Thomas Sowell.

Further shifts away from class to identity politics occurred in the 1980s with the

demise of the Soviet Union. Francis Fukayama announced, prematurely “the end o

history” and the triumph of capitalism, the proof of which ought to have been found in

the success of Harvard economists in bringing

Russia

into the world economy At the

same time, cultural politics continued, animated by

Afrocentrism,

and the emergence o

new immigrant populations,

Asian Americans

and

Hispanics,

who began to organize

olitically to combat discrimination and exclusion. Calls were made for the development

of ethnic and multicultural studies, along with new

Latino/a

and Asian American studies

programs matching the firmly established African American studies programs.

In the 1990s, new layers were added to these cultural wars. Divisions began to emerge

etween advocates of traditional methodologies and disciplines (such as Arthur

Schlesinger, Joyce Appleby, etc.) and those taking the Foucauldian turn to

poststructuralism and

postmodernism

(for example, Edward

Said,

Gayatri Spivak and

Homi Bhabha). The political positions taken by intellectuals on either side of this divide

have varied from the conservative to the class-

ased intellectuals of the more traditional

school, and from the politically quiescent and academy-focused to the left leaning and

politically engaged among postmodernists.

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During the 1990s, also, the term “public intellectual” gained widespread currency.

With its echoes of the Gramscian organic intellectual this has been an attractive concept

for American intellectuals, who, since the progressive era, have been more politically

engaged than their European counterparts. Unlike the largely white sociologists of the

1950s, however, many of the new public intellectuals have emerged within the ethnic and

African American studies programs, and have been very visible in centrist magazines

from the

New Republic

Vanity Fair

. Some public intellectuals have received withering

criticism for being celebrity intellectuals, pulling down salaries sometimes more than

double those of their peers, and for helping to establish a veritable free-agency system

within universities that are prepared to negotiate huge contracts to secure the latest talent.

While the complaints have been widespread, they have been most bitter in response to

the newfound prominence of African American intellectuals, who, until the 1950s, had

een largely excluded from the leading universities in the country But the success o

Henry Louis

Gates,

Jr., bell

hooks

and Cornel

West

has not been greeted with approval

even from all African Americans. In the

Village Voice,

for example, Adolph Reed (also a

lack public intellectual) has accused such intellectuals of being the progeny of Booker

T. Washington. But, with the publication of his similarly conceived assault on W.E.B.Du

Bois (1997), Washington’s main political opponent, Reed has left the

fin-de-siècle

intellectual with that old dilemma: what is to be done?

ROBERT GREGG

Internet

The Internet is presented by the highest government authority as “a global matrix o

interconnected computer networks using the Internet Protocol (IP) to communicate with

each other” that “encompass[es] all such data networks and hundreds o

applications” (Clinton and Gore 1997). Its model of a decentralized network, open to all

and to all sorts of information, with “smart” receivers

(computers)

that interact with each

other has captured popular as well as technocratic imaginations as the “information

super-highway” for a post-industrial service economy. By the late 1990s, some foresaw it

absorbing all other forms of communication into a new model, alternative both to the

telephone system and to

mass media

. Others saw it as a new world of capitalism, domain

of e-commerce and volatile, com stocks.

The Internet originated in the workaday world of engineers, who conceived and built

technologies for sharing scarce and distant computer resources in the 1960s. Beginning

with remote access and transfer of electronically stored data, successive additions o

electronic mail (1972) and electronic bulletin boards, known as Usenet (1980), spread

computer networking from research labs throughout universities, while increases in

capacity made it available for less technical, even avocational uses. Non-engineers began

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 592

creating databases that could be accessed over the Internet from anywhere in the world,

and creation of the “user-friendly” World Wide Web in 1990 finally made it accessible to

the public. From four computers linked in a demonstration of the software (TCP/IP) that

enabled the Internet in 1977 to 200 in 1983, the number of computers linked on the

Internet grew to over 6 million in 1995 and continued increasing at 16 percent per month.

In 1991 the National Science Foundation that had sponsored the Internet project lifted

restrictions on commercial use, which surpassed

education

and research uses by 1993.

Business uses and stock investments based on such usages dominated discussion of the

Internet by the end of the decade.

Users soon noticed that the Internet obliterates geography and puts potentially

eripheral places on a par with what have been centers. Scandinavian and provincial

land-grant universities were enthusiastic adopters, and USENET, the software for open

discussion of thousands of topics, was invented in Australia, a leader in online libraries.

Visions of “virtual” libraries in cyberspace, and thus of a newly leveled playing field,

accessible instantly anywhere in the world, motivated such efforts. At the same time,

minor technologies for video conferencing, chat and what amounts to telephone calls via

the Internet accelerate pressures to deregulate telephone monopolies and restructure

telecommunications

around functions (such as delivering a signal or providing content)

rather than around enduses, such as watching

television,

talking on the phone or

transmitting data.

Convergence is not uniformly welcomed. If it’s illegal, it’s on the Internet:

pornography

and political oppositions found controversial outlets, followed by

rinciple that all communication and information is equal, and boundaries everywhere are

threatened. The US Congress passed a Communications Decency Act in 1995 that the

Supreme Court

ruled to be an unconstitutional infringement of 1st Amendment rights to

free speech in 1997. Threats of piracy and politics spread worldwide: Singapore employs

censors, and China declared that the Internet will be “just for business” in that country,

while the government newspaper of Iraq denounced the Internet as an “American means

to enter every house in the world” and “the end of civilizations, cultures, interests, and

ethics” (Associated Press, February 17, 1997).

Such anxieties mark shifting boundaries and fragmentation of authority in the

postmodern

world. Generally fears of electronic surveillance have given way to

oosterism, led by US government promotion of a national information infrastructure.

onetheless, liberal humanists tied to older means of communication share concerns over

information free-for-all with parents at home and with authoritarian regimes overseas.

Consumer advocates fear false marketing as well as well-targeted ploys;

children

and

women are often portrayed as particular victims of Internet predators.

What the Internet fosters is a broad creolization and emergence of intermediate

communities and mixed discourses that both increase alternatives and make them more

public. In this respect, the Internet resembles less the

mass media,

with which it is often

compared, than the print capitalism that brought ethno-linguistic communities into the

Entries A-Z 593

early modern period. It favors horizontal or what enthusiasts call “virtual” communities

of special interests that can be worldwide and almost instantaneously accessible. This is

probably a more important impact of the Internet than visions of tele-commuting,

cyberselves or wired democracy.

It is easy to overlook how the Internet itself is a cultural product and socially

organized, just as anxieties overlook how much it changes in going public. The Internet is

actually a collection of technologies that began as work-arounds and embody work habits

and values of engineers. E-mail, discussion groups and the World Wide Web fit into an

overall communications ecology and enhance the relative power or ability of users to

reach others, to form a public, to bypass conventional gate-keepers and, in some cases,

establish new publics. Increasingly expectations that it may be the leading edge o

economic development, whether or not of a “third wave” or “information age,” are the

Internet’s license. This has underpinned competition for control of access providers, as

well as competition among businesses on and off the net. New Internet giants like Yahoo,

Amazon.com and others are surrounded by service providers, “navigators” and other

commercial sites. These are advertising heavily in print and televisual media, producing a

continual crossover as well as concerns about changes in local business (and the tax

structures based on them).

The Internet’s social structure has evolved from an engineering experiment into

government-by-steering committee, while its culture has long since expanded beyond

engineering values to those of the marketplace in a larger context set by deregulation and

capitalist triumphalism. These values and structures are, in turn, further modified by say

sinicization or similar domestication elsewhere as, for instance, exemplified in the

overwhelming focus on the self that dominated thinking about the Internet in our society.

In all, the Internet has become a lightning rod and laboratory for the linkage o

community

to communication in the post-industrial society