Dan Schiller's Presentation on Digital Capitalism (2/27/04)

As part of our ongoing series on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, our February 27 presentation was entitled "Digital Capitalism 2004: Retrospect and Prospect." The distinguished speaker was Dan Schiller, Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC.

ABSTRACT: The movement toward an informationalized society is not winding down, despite the bursting of the Internet financial bubble. During the present extended transition, indeed, information and communication are being stamped with a radically changed social identity. Three features of this shift stand out: First, the process of capitalist development is, at last, truly gripping world communications and information, in their entirety - even as information and communications become a general platform for continued capitalist development. Second, the stewards of this encompassing "digital capitalism" are enfolding national networks into systems that are planned and applied on a transnational basis. Intertwining in a third basic trend, these processes accelerate an existing tendency in the political-economy of informational provision. In different ways, market-deepening initiatives around networks are transforming an array of information-rich activities into commercial commodities. Whether these developments will impel a new round of economic expansion remains, however, an open question.

BACKGROUND READINGS: (1) Schiller, Dan (1999). Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. MIT Press. (chapters 1-2)
(2) Schiller, Dan, and Vincent Mosco (Eds.) (2001). Continental Order? Integrating North America for Cyber-Capitalism. Rowman and Littlefield. (Introduction, pp.1-34).

Dan Schiller is Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC. He is a leading historian of communication whose interests center on telecommunications history and on the role of cultural production in the socio-economic development of the market system. He is the author of several influential books, including Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System and Theorizing Communication: A Historical Reckoning.