Although a greater body of literature than can be presented here would be needed to
establish conclusively the claim that LIS imposes specific limitations upon IP studies,
the disciplinary culture of complaint exhibited in these few examples is nonetheless
suggestive. First, much LIS literature interprets IP as a species of government policy and
often, even more restrictively, as government policy for government documents. Second, due
to the high proportion of STI policy documents, many writers restrict IP studies to
problems of federal (usually American) production, organization and dissemination of
scientific and technical information. This narrow institutional and disciplinary focus
restricts the range of those who enact or are affected by information policies to
government agents, such as ministries, departments, agencies, committees and the
federally-supported disciplinary élites implicated in STI.
Pausing for a moment at these two limitations imposed by much LIS literature on IP
studies, we can easily understand the reasons for complaint. Indeed, we need only pursue
the implications of some of the important insights readily available in the literature.
Even in 1975, for example, when they wrote that it "is important to get more in
return for this investment", Aines and Day recognized that information, specifically
STI, is a commodity. But if information is a commodity, then there is an obvious answer to
the question of why North American government information policy is so ineffectual.
Rationalization, planning and management of commodities to maximize return on investment
does not, especially in North America, take the form of direct government control, but is
instead left to appropriate commodity markets. Information systems may appear to operate
without national planning when: (i) information is a commodity; (ii) the private sector,
not the government, controls commodity exchange; and (iii) national planning is defined as
government planning. If information policy is defined as a species of federal government
policy, then, in the prevailing context of political and economic arrangements in which
the state is little more than a facilitator of private capital accumulation, the absence
of rational, independent, coordinated, national information policies should come as no
surprise.
This naïveté about the political economy of information surfaces in a third
limitation imposed by LIS thinking about IP studies: its narrow epistemological focus.
Formulating information policy that works, and that policy makers respect, is often
defined as the epistemological problem of establishing the proper knowledge base for a
specific academic discipline. Thus much LIS literature is fixated on the problem of
clarifying the conceptual basis of IP, and getting the right disciplines involved. To no
one's surprise, information science keeps turning up as central to the new field. But the
political realities of the state's role in commodity exchange relegate to merest fantasy
such musings about the salience of sound research to policy development and
implementation.
A fourth limitation of LIS thinking is its fixation on instrumental issues. Much of the
literature proposes studies in aid of technology implementation, improving communication
between government departments, increasing access to government documents, facilitating
STI transfer, and similar problems related to the engineering concerns of government
information management. This focus on technical and managerial maximizations of
information flow efficiencies reaches it apogee in Hernon and McClure's enumeration of
over 300 policy issues setting research problems pertaining just to questions about
government provision of public information (Hernon, McClure 1987, Appendix H). Research
proposals such as these are submitted, however, in a context of conflicting tendencies: on
the one hand, a clear recognition of the impotence of policy recommendations and on the
other, a touching faith that logical, epistemological and disciplinary rigour will set
things right.
A fifth, and perhaps the most important limitation imposed by LIS on IP studies is
occlusion of issues concerning the relations between information and power. The focus on
instrumental problems and epistemological issues concerned with establishing and policing
borders between disciplines deflects attention from questions of how power is exercised in
and through the social relations mediated by information, how dominance over information
is achieved and maintained by specific groups, and how specific forms of dominance—especially those of race, class, sex and gender—are implicated in the exercise of power
over information. Perhaps it is more important, before becoming fixated on how to improve
a carburetor, to ask where the car is going, or even whether we should be driving cars in
the first place.
In an important remark, Aines and Day noted that "there has been a long period of
incubation and development of information systems throughout the world, even though
national planning has been minimal" (Aines, Day 1975, 4). Their comment suggests that
somehow, somewhere, even without direct government action, sufficient power and control is
exercised over the constituents of information systems that discernible, more-or-less
well-defined networks nonetheless emerge and stabilize. And when we think about the
information flows swirling around us, whether cultural, academic, financial, industrial,
commercial, institutional, or their many hybrids, we realize that they do have specific
forms and structures. Let us therefore call any more-or-less stable system or network
in which information flows through determinable channels—from specific producers, via
specific organizational structures, to specific consumers or users—a régime of
information. Radio and television broadcasting, film distribution, academic
publishing, libraries, transborder data flows, the emerging infobahn: these are all nodes
of information networks, or elements of specific régimes of information.
A legitimate and pressing objective of information policy research is the perspicuous
representation of régimes of information: how they originate and stabilize; how they
determine social relations, and how specific forms of power are exercised in and through
them. The description of an information policy therefore becomes the description of
the genealogy of a régime of information. Because it recognizes that information
policy is made and unmade every day in complex, interacting social practices, research of
this kind transcends LIS's narrow disciplinary conceptions of IP. It also de-centres the
study of policy instruments and their effects, because specific IP instruments or
documents are but one kind of element in a régime of information, and one whose relations
to the others may not be taken for granted, but instead become objects of investigation.
The complexities of régimes of information suggest that they are rarely, if ever,
adequately represented by smooth flows from one discrete stage to the next, e.g. from
perceptions of issues to explicit policy formulation, followed by implementation feeding
back to perceptions. Instead, describing a régime of information means charting the
agonistic processes that result in tentative and uneasy stabilizations of conflicts
between social groups, interests, discourses, and even scientific and technological
artifacts.
The theoretical framework for IP studies must be sufficiently rich to comprehend the
complexities of these interactions. The actor (or actant) network theory (ANT) of Latour
and Callon (see, e.g. Latour 1988, 1992, 1993; Callon 1986) offers a promising set of
analytical resources for this purpose. Developed as an analysis of scientific and
technological artifacts, ANT's theoretical richness derives from its refusal to reduce
explanations to either natural, social, or discursive categories while recognizing the
significance of each (see, e.g. Latour 1993, 91). Following the work of Hughes, ANT
insists that "the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the
interaction of heterogeneous elements as these are shaped and assimilated into a
network" (Law 1990, 113). The construction, or "association of unhelpful
elements into self-sustaining networks that are . . . able to resist dissociation"
(Law 1990, 114) involves the hard work of negotiating and resolving conflict:
Elements in the network prove difficult to tame or difficult to hold in place.
Vigilance and surveillance have to be maintained, or else the elements will fall out of
line and the network will start to crumble. . . . there is almost always some degree of
divergence between what the elements of a network would do if left to their own devices
and what they are obliged, encouraged, or forced to do when they are enrolled within the
network. (Law 1990, 114)
The complex, network-dependent nature of artifacts is captured by ANT's conception of
them as hybrids, or quasi-objects. They are hybrids because they are
simultaneously real, discursive, and social. Latour's point is that the properties
attributed to social and natural elements (he adds discursive elements in his later work;
see Latour 1993) are the products of practices of construction and maintenance of a
network. It follows, therefore, as Pickering explains, that "those properties cannot
count as the explanation of practice" (Pickering 1992, 21). For example, if nature,
or the "real world", is distinguished from the social or the discursive only as
a consequence of practice, then the properties of "reality" are unavailable in
explanations of those practices. Thus, taking a specific example from Hughes, if the
"natural" properties of Edison's incandescent lamp are the consequence of the
construction of the American electrical light network, then they can not explain its
construction; the American electrical light network is not the way it is due to the
properties of the incandescent lamp.
In addition, "nature and society are intimately entangled" in the practices
of network construction. "Practice is where nature and society and the space between
them are continually made, unmade, and remade" (Pickering 1992, 21). Thus, not only
are an artifact's properties unavailable in explanations of network construction, but the
lines between the artifact's natural, social and discursive aspects are themselves
continually redrawn in the processes of network construction. Neither nature, nor society,
nor language can provide explanatory closure for scientific or technological
artifacts,
because the distinctions between their natural, social and discursive properties are the
tentative and shifting outcomes of the practices whereby the network that determines an
artifact's stability and form is constructed.
Radio broadcasting and a régime of information currently under construction—the
"information superhighway", or the infobahn—are hybrids, or quasi-objects.
They are simultaneously discursive, real, and social. What does this mean, and how does it
help us study information policy?
From ANT's perspective, the form and stability of what we now call radio is a
function of practices of enrolling heterogeneous elements into a network. The analysis of
radio therefore opens out onto a régime of information. The description of this régime
will include natural elements, such as tubes, transistors, wires, and transmitters. It
will include social elements, such as class differences between producers and consumers,
the interests of large corporations, the concentrations of capital available for
accumulation of profit in broadcast media. It will also include the many ways radio was
imagined, discussed, and represented. The properties of radio are the outcomes of
practices that stabilized the lines between radio's natural, social and discursive
properties. Radio is therefore a hybrid: it is a real, social and discursive
artifact.
The study of radio broadcast policy, an example of a specific IP study, involves the
description of the régime of information, or the network, of which the artifact of radio
is an element. Relevant questions are: Why did radio not take the form of a many-to-many
noncommercial medium of communication, something like yesterday's CB radio? How did it
stabilize as a commercial, few-to-many broadcast medium?
According to ANT, neither reality, society or language can by themselves provide
explanatory closure. The real, objective, scientific properties of radio fail to account
for radio's final form because they may be easily deconstructed by appealing to the social
relations among scientists and engineers, and to the social practices that delegated the
construction of a passive audience for advertising and popular culture commodities
to just one among a variety of competing assemblages of wires, transistors, and technological
artifacts. The properties of radio, taken to be real and natural, are the products of
practices determined by the social relations imposed by commodity production and
consumption. A naturalistic, scientific reductionism also ignores the many discursive
practices that create and maintain specific meanings in support of the few-to-many,
broadcast form.
Yet specific scientific and natural facts are invoked, and the lines between nature and
society are redrawn, when the reality of these social relations are at stake. What are the
true interests of corporate capital, and how are they decided? Have late twentieth-century
societies transcended class antagonisms? Does radio empower consumers by providing
important information about consumer products, or does it position consumers as passive
recipients of a corporate message? Settling the instabilities of the social relations
mediated by radio is also part of its construction. The realism about nature so readily
revoked by social constructivist accounts of scientific and technological artifacts is
just as readily invoked in the construction of social structures. Thus the problem of
establishing the real and objective social relations implicated in broadcast radio is
delegated to the real properties of specific assemblages of scientific and technological
artifacts. Explanations that fail to extend scepticism about the reality of nature to the
reality of society easily overlook the crucial role of scientific and technological
elements of networks.
Discourse is also crucial, but it too occupies no privileged theoretical position. Many
discursive elements are mobilized to manufacture consent for broadcast radio as a régime
of information, and to construct the radio audience as a network element compliant with
network structures already in place. Discursive practices contend to represent radio as a
locus of consumer desires, dreams, longings and fantasies, and to position radio as
indispensible to culture and daily life. But the instabilities of these discursive
properties are settled by invoking stable properties of nature and society. Thus to speak
about rhetorics, texts, and representations is not to inhabit a realm purified of nature
and society, excluding all but signifiers and their relations. The discursive properties
of radio are the products of the practices involved in constructing and maintaining the
network in which radio as we know it today—a
hybrid, a quasi-object simultaneously real, social, and discursive—emerges as a distinctive, more-or-less stable element. ANT's insistence on the
interpenetrations of the discursive, the social and the real avoids a discursive
reductionism in which reality and social relations disappear, as Brian Palmer puts it, in
a "descent into discourse" (Palmer 1990).
The "information superhighway", or the infobahn, is a régime of information
currently in the making. Although not yet fully stabilized, the amalgam of social
relations, science and technology, and discourses implicated in it is perhaps already too
familiar. The political economy of information which, as Golding and Murdock explain, is
"interested in the ways that communicative activity is structured by the unequal
distribution of material and symbolic resources" (Golding, Murdock 1991, 18),
provides an indispensible analysis of the social relations governing the infobahn's
construction. Recognizing that the value of information "stems uniquely from its
transformation into a commodity—a resource socially
revalued and redefined through progressive historical application of wage labour and the
market to its production and exchange" (Schiller 1988, 41), political economy directs
attention to the role of capitalist social relations in stabilizing the form of the
infobahn.
Social relations, however, are not the only elements of the network comprising this
régime of information. In the terminology of ANT, all elements of the network, even the
nonhuman, are actants, since all exercise some form of agency. Thus scientific and
technological artifacts are enrolled to delegate some of its crucial aspects. For example,
the decisions between merely downstream versus both upstream and downstream communications
capabilities, on which so many of the social and cultural characteristics of the network
depend, are delegated to the properties of telephone wires, coaxial cables, and
fibre-optic cables. The differences between the social properties of (i) an infobahn
deploying coaxial cable feeding into a single fibre-optic cable from some 500 households,
(ii) one deploying one fibre-optic cable for every six homes, and (iii) one adding
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) technology to standard telephone lines are
analogous to the differences between few-to-many versus many-to-many radio broadcast
systems (see Piller 1994). In both cases, the régime of information, thus an information
policy, is built by practices in which nature and society are intertwined.
Discursive interventions further contaminate the already impure practices that draw and
police the infobahn's uneasy borders between nature and society. These include the
mountains of text, graphics, video and film—including legislation, committee minutes, special interest position papers, Prime
Ministerial and Presidential press conferences and speeches, Web sites, articles in
newspapers, Wired, Mondo 2000, Future Sex and their sister
periodicals, television programmes, and much more—that together generate a degree of sympathy for the radical conclusion that the infobahn
is a pure simulacrum, a mere signifier sans referent, floating freely through the
degenerated hyperreality emanating from the implosion of the real. Although this régime
of information indeed depends upon settling discursive relations between
"infobahn" and other signifiers articulating consumer wishes, hopes, fears,
fantasies and desires, the practices of its construction are not purely discursive. They
are contaminated by those designed to stabilize the position and agency of specific social
actors and specific scientific and technological artifacts.
ANT has been vigorously debated in the research community of the social studies of
science and technology (see, e.g. Collins, Yearly 1992; Callon, Latour 1992). But debates
about the theoretical questions that currently remain open—the possibilities of antifoundational theory; scepticism about realism; the possibility of
a symmetric metalanguage transcending realism, social constructivism and discourse
analysis—should not prevent IP studies from taking
advantage of ANT's benefits. Its rich analysis of the real, social, and discursive factors
that are implicated in the construction of any scientific or technological network
supports the interpretation of IP as the set of practices that stabilize and maintain a
régime of information. It therefore brings within the purview of IP a wider range of
issues and actors than are disclosed by the LIS perspective. Its explicit methodological
recognition of the ways in which science and technology, social relations, and discourse
are confounded and mutually implicated supports analyses beyond those of a naive
instrumentalism concerned merely with information flow efficiencies. Its treatment of
network elements as hybrids or quasi-objects embodies a methodological rigour which
refuses to reduce explanations to either the natural, social, or discursive realm. Its
acceptance of impure practices which intermingle these categories shifts the analytical
focus away from the objects currently populating IP studies, whose reality is taken for
granted and whose "effects" are charted by causal analyses. The object of
analysis becomes the processes by which these objects and their relationships are
constructed. Such an analysis widens the scope of IP studies, because it includes the
assemblage of agonistic power relations that constitute a régime of information.
One of the reasons for studying information policy is to make intelligent and socially
responsible interventions in the exercise of power and control over information. ANT's
rich analysis of the complex and tentative nature of the policies—whether implicit or explicit—that result in the
stability and maintenance of régimes of information can identify multiple points of
intervention. It is not limited, like much LIS writing in this area, to the narrow range
of actions available to a mode of analysis that takes prevailing régimes as given,
closed, and natural.
1 Burger, for example, devotes a book to the problem of identifying
the proper disciplines that can offer the appropriate knowledge to evaluate information
policy recommendations (see his 1993). Exhibiting the faith that slides easily into an
academic occupational hazard, Hernon thinks that with our eyes firmly fixed on a totemic
diagram depicting an "overlapping set relationship" between information science,
public policy and government information, the "field develops its theoretical base,
and research becomes central to the development and maturity of the field"
(Hernon
1989, 22).
2 It would be wrong to say that political issues are completely
ignored. Hernon and McClure devote almost two pages to them in their 1987 (see pp.
188-190).
3 In two paradigmatic papers of ANT, Callon attributes agency to the
scallops of St. Brieuc Bay in France (Callon 1986), while Latour insists on the agency of
doors (Latour 1992).
Aines, Andrew A., and Melvin S. Day. 1975. National planning of
information services. Eds Carlos A. Cuadra and Ann W. Luke. Annual Review of
Information Science and Technology 10:3-42.
Bishop, Ann, and Maureen O'Neill Fellows. 1989. Descriptive analysis
of major federal scientific and technical information policy studies. In U.S.
scientific and technical information (STI) policies: Views and perspectives, Charles
R. McClure, and Peter Hernon, 3-55. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Burger, Robert H. 1993. Information policy: A framework for
evaluation and policy research. Information Management, Policy, and Services; McClure,
Charles R.; Hernon, Peter. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Callon, Michel. 1986. Some elements of a sociology of translation:
Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Power, action and
belief: A new sociology of knowledge?, ed. John Law, 196-233. Sociological Review
Monograph, no. 32. London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Callon, Michel, and Bruno Latour. 1992. Don't throw the baby out with
the Bath school! A reply to Collins and Yearly. In Science as practice and culture,
ed. Andrew Pickering. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, H. M., and Steven Yearly. 1992. Epistemological chicken. In Science
as practice and culture, ed. Andrew Pickering. Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press.
Doty, Philip, and Sanda Erdelez. 1989. Overview and analysis of
selected federal scientific and technical information (STI) policy instruments, 1945-1987.
In U.S. scientific and technical information (STI) policies: Views and perspectives,
Charles R. McClure, and Peter Hernon, 3-55. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Golding, Peter, and Graham Murdock. 1991. Culture, communications, and
political economy. In Mass media and society, Eds James Curran and Michael
Gurevitch, 15-32. London and New York: Edward Arnold.
Hernon, Peter. 1989. Government information: A field in need of
research and analytical studies. In United States government information policies:
Views and perspectives, Eds Charles R. McClure, Peter Hernon, and Harold
Relyea.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex. 3-24.
Hernon, Peter, and C. R. McClure. 1987. Federal information
policies in the 1980's: Conflicts and issues. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of power: Electrification in
Western society, 1880-1930. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
—— 1990. The evolution of large
technological systems. In The social construction of technological systems: New
directions in the sociology and history of technology, Eds Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P.
Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, 51-82. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1988. The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
——, 1992. Where are the missing masses?
The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In Shaping technology/building society:
Studies in sociotechnical change, Wiebe E. Bijker, and John Law. Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press.
——. 1993. We have never been modern.
Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Law, John. 1990. Technology and heterogeneous engineering: The case of
Portuguese expansion. In The social construction of technological systems: New
directions in the sociology and history of technology, Eds Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P.
Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, 111-34. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Palmer, Bryan D. 1990. Descent into discourse: The reification of
language and the writing of social history. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
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Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
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from the information superhighway, but will they get it? Macworld October, 96-105.
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