Tina Ignasiak
One reading from this week features
the work of James R. Beniger, with an excerpt from his book, The Control Revolution,
published in 1986 by the Harvard University Press. Beniger was a
respected author decorated with degrees from many prestigious schools. He
was a graduate of Harvard University and held a Ph.D from Princeton, where he
also taught. Beniger was also a freelance art critic for the Boston Globe
and worked as a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal. Most recently,
he was a professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University
of Southern California, until his passing in 2010. Beniger was incredibly
interested in how and why information-communication technologies change and
evolve, as can be seen in The
Control Revolution.
In the
excerpt from the book we were assigned, Beniger traces the roots of the
"information society" in the economic and business crises created by
the Industrial Revolution. According to Beniger, this all begins with the
"crisis of control." The Industrial Revolution became an
explosion of information and the transportation of this information across the
globe. However, at this time there was no way to control all of this new
information, and therefore the concepts of the Information Society was born.
Beniger
states in the book "the concept of control are the twin activities of
information processing and reciprocal communication"(Beniger 53). To
process all this new information technologies of control were created and
enhanced. Bureaucracy and rationalization became important features in
the government and economy. Examples of this include standardized paper
forms and the introduction of time zones. Once bureaucracies and
rationalizing began to work together to organized all this new information,
other control technologies were being created to deal with the "three
distinct areas of economic activity: production, distribution, and consumption
of goods and services"(Beniger 61). These included infrastructures of
transportation (railroads), the postal system, and catalogs. Based on all
of this Bengier concludes that the Information Society has not been created
because of recent changes in our economy and society, but from increases in the
speed of processing that began in the Industrial Revolution.
The Control Revolution has
received many highly acclaimed reviews and awards. In 1986, it received
the Associated of American Publishers Awards for the Most Outstanding Book in
the Social and Behavioral Sciences. It also received a full-page review in
the New York Times Book Review, who wrote "The book offers a skillful cross-disciplinary
synthesis that draws on hundreds of scholarly studies in the history of
technology, business history and social science… [A] challenging, highly
readable work". The Journal of American Studies called it "A
masterly treatment of some of the most important development in the
making of modern society", and in 2007 it won the
Internal Communication Association’s Fellows Book Award for "having
stood the test of time". Based on all these reviews, the vast
variety of material covered in the book, and the esteemed background of James
R. Beniger, this is a highly reliable source of information regarding the control revolution.
Other Sources:
http://sociology.berkeley.edu/james-beniger-1971
http://www.amazon.com/The-Control-Revolution-Technological-Information/dp/0674169867
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