Dan Schiller's Presentation on Digital Capitalism

The next briefing session in the ICR's Initiative on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, will be held on Friday, February 27, at 1:30 p.m. in the Peterson Conference Room (231 Gregory Hall). The very distinguished speaker will be Dan Schiller, Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at UIUC. The title of his talk is: Digital Capitalism 2004: Retrospect and Prospect.

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 reading:

first two chapters of Digital Capitalism by Dan Schiller (MIT 1999) and/or the introduction to Continental Order? Integrating North America for Cyber-Capitalism. (Rowman and Littlefield 2001) (pp.1-34), co-edited with Vincent Mosco.

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.