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very interesting stuff, shakran and charlatan...nice.
when i saw the mcnews story, there were a couple options that presented themselves right away as to how to pitch it. one was: this is a murdoch station, the other this is a creeping of advertisement into information, which would de facto have set up information as otherwise separate. emphasizing the first would have lead into setting up fox as a departure in kind from tendencies in television news--which i don't think it is. murdoch represents an extension of tendencies already present. the blur of the time infotainment/advertising and the blur of the line information/conservative ideological filter simply make explicit tensions that are continually at play. emphasizing the second would have lead into a kind of naive position that would separate information from the capitalist context within which it circulates, which it condenses and expresses and, at times, works against as a form of immanent critique, when it seems to me the relation information/markets is more complicated because the two are of a piece.
on this last point---these days i work manage academic databases in the context of a for-profit--one of my functions is to figure out information to "target"--the company would buy rights to host a particular set of contents from a publisher, typically an academic journal---given that these journals operate in a gift economy insofar as the writers are concerned, but in a lucrative relation insofar as libraries are concerned....
if you are within the population of a university that pays tuition in general, then you have access to the particular open system of information circulation....
one of the things i have been doing is working out how to extend french-language contents (notice this horrifying rhetorical migration)---i think that it's silly that there's so little in the way of french stuff on these databases---the company seems to react to extending this as indicating that they should try to move into france as a market---which resulted in my being dispatched into the aether to work out parameters.
in general, information is framed as a public good, an element of the commons, in france. you see the same thing in the european union plans to integrate information collection across europe--what this means really is that the institution that pays shifts---in the american model, libraries pay to enable open access for the population that pays to acquire access. in the euro-model the state pays to enable open access to libraries which enable open access for the citizenry.
the mass dissemination of information is itself a captialist creation and it's preconditions and logic reflect those of the dominant economic ideologies--the american model is more classically liberal, information as a market element; the european union (for simplicity's sake) is a more social-democratic approach to information.
so one way of thinking about what's at issue here is whether information as a market element or information as an element of the commons is preferable.
personally (this is not a shock) i think that information should be a public good, an element of the commons. if large-scale democratic process presupposes that the citizenry has access to information that enables it to relativize the existing order as an aspect of being able to pass judgment on the actions of the state, and on the people who animate the leviathan, then it follows that information as a public good ensures a more democratic situation and does information that is a market element.
but neither abstracts information from the circulation of capital, from the cash-money environment.
it's more a matter of different types of relations within that environment.
in the american model, information is a commodity like any other.
it is a problematic commodity (it isn't obvious how to determine exchange value) so ends up being a bit atavistic in its internal logic (reputation---branding---is key, but as an end in itself, rather than as a means) but it is a commodity nonetheless.
in a more social-democratic context, there is at least a torsion introduced into the information-commodity relation by placing information into the commons, by framing it as a public good.
it is early in the morning and this is what i am thinking about---but i've run out of time so will leave this here.
i think there are conclusions this is heading toward, but given that neither model for thinking about what information is amounts to anything magical, it's also may ok to leave this dangling in mid-air...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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