Consumption in an Age of Information

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2007), "Consumption in an Age of Information", Library Review, Vol. 56 No. 3, pp. 247-248. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530710736046

Communication, consumerism, and information are all such familiar concepts today that we often fail to see connections between them (or we simply assume they are there). For information specialists, especially those who interest themselves in crossovers between information and cultural practices and critical theory, many interesting challenges lie in this area. Cohen (California Institute for the Arts) and Rutsky (San Francisco State University) suggest, in this timely collection of eight articles by several hands, not only that consumption has come to define meaning and knowledge, but also that information has so shaped consumption (in the form of mediation) that we cannot understand consumption without also understanding information. Add to that the critique that for most information production and distribution, a capitalistic context defines what information and knowledge really are, and beyond that what exchange‐value and identity are, and we have a well‐argued postmodern critique of information and knowledge.

Cohen rightly identifies four writers without whose work we would have only a vague idea of what this shift is: Lyotard (on postmodern knowledge and the death of grand narratives), Deleuze and Guattari (on over‐coding in mediation in the context of technological – and here digital – determinism), and Baudrillard (on the simulation and schizophrenia inherent in our understanding of supply and demand). Like so many collections of this type, chapters are best read non‐sequentially, so this last chapter is the place to start. From there Cohen infers that we form judgements and establish autonomy only inside an interpellative frame of disjunction, and that this makes ostensibly “fixed” meanings, like science and book prizes and university education, fluid in the sense that Bauman defines reality as liquid. Information, consumerism, and communication converge on this spot, making exegesis of any one dependent on the others.

Yet that is not all: information arises in and from an environment shaped by capitalism; it is part of the cycle of production‐intellectual rights‐dissemination that produces texts for global audiences and endows such texts with commodity value. This means that audiences create meanings by engaging with texts, and that the economics of information shape consumption and meaning. Sean Cubitt's chapter on media audiences develops this theme, while Rutsky argues that “information wants to be consumed”, adapting Stewart Brand's (of The Media Lab, Viking, 1987) “information wants to be free”. Rutsky's contribution is the strongest and most analytical, suggesting that information has been commodified, represents the flow of capital, circulates to generate a return on investment (especially in software), and depends for its value on consumption (just as consumption depends for its value on information). If cultural commodities are corporately owned (as he says they are), consumers and readers lose control over products and channels, and face the dilemma of expecting choice (and so freedom) in the act of consumption only to find ourselves a consuming subject with a merely virtual gaze). Digitization has, arguably, accelerated this process.

James Wiltgen extends this argument by using Foucault's conjunction between knowledge, power and legitimation to suggest that the act of consuming information today is one poised between cynicism and piety, a self‐justifying capitalism that is politically charged and an example of neo‐Darwinism (above all in terms of US economic muscle). The implications of such a “market ontology” for control and identity are crucial for understanding the role of information. Two other pieces, Mark Poster on advertising meanings and Tom Lutz on the multiple temporalities of postmodern “knowing”, shed further light on cultural consumption in an age of information. A short (translated) interview with Baudrillard, on the death of the sign, plays a prefatory role in the book, while the introduction by the editors show not just that meta‐texts are now commonplace but also that the work of writers like Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, and Heidegger, have a place in understanding information that is often forgotten by mainstream informationalists. Berg's unique publications list merits further investigation, as its works on cultural studies explore such boundary country as this. An eclectic text likely to interest some professionals and any student where cultural studies is formally studied.