ONLINE JOURNAL #1!!!

As our first week of class commenced, we dove into the broad and integral topic of globalization. We examined what globalization meant to us, as students of communications, and we addressed its numerous definitions and facets; all of which seemed like crucial places to begin the course and introduce us to the course material. International communication comes to the forefront of our new global age and the process of instantaneous information sharing and transmission across vast boundaries highlights one of the most fascinating elements of our modern global society. Our readings for this week proved to be a good overview as many of the philosophical and theoretical approaches utilized in the study of communication were briefly reviewed.
One of our duties we learned for this course was to create weekly online blogs, which we would develop and post throughout each forthcoming week. As a communication student, new to blogs, I was a little intimidated I must admit. Firstly, I didn't know if I would have much to say in response to some of the weekly readings and secondly, not only that, I was intimidated that most people would get incredibly bored with my comments. However, with this said, after reading Thussu’s intro and second chapter, I have confidently been enlightened by some of the material and prove to have some strong critical thoughts and opinions.
Recent technological innovations, especially with regards to the speed, volume and cost of information processing, storage and transmission, have radically changed the world as we know it. Computing and digitalization breakthroughs have lead to a restructuring of Western life in particular. We now live in a global society, described accurately and theoretically as the ‘information society’; an emergent network that centers and thrives on the exchange of information. The internet has evidently been the major player whose existence has facilitated the intense interconnectedness we now experience. We can now access and disseminate large masses of information with the touch of a mouse or the click of a button. With this said, just as the internet has been met with radical debates over its benefits and drawbacks, so has theories regarding our emergent ‘information society’. Not only does our information society provide the opportunity to further democracy, allowing almost anyone to gain access to all types of information world wide, it also provides a framework in which many people can be exploited.
It was raised in the text that there was concern about new technologies being utilized for personal or political surveillance. Surveillance, in my opinion, is an incredibly pertinent topic that greatly affects our modern era dominated by technology and information sharing. The topic of surveillance brings to mind the famous scholar Michael Foucault and his concept of panoptic, disciplinary power. If any of you have taken Cote’s communication theory class, than this concept should be very familiar. To explain breifly, the idea of the panopticon comes from the late 18th-early 19th c. political economist Jeremy Bentham, who described the use of a ‘central tower’ within a prison to describe the forms of disciplinary power used to control society and aid in its functioning. Foucault- “[Disciplinary power is] how we surveil someone, control his conduct, his behavior, his aptitudes, intensify his performance, multiply his capacities, put him in his place where he will be most useful” (Cote lectures). In the late 18th and early 19th century, various institutions acted as disciplinary powers, including the church, the family, the factory etc, essentially surveilling and indirectly controlling individuals and society. But with the turn of the 21st century there came intense interconnectedness and the development of multiple networks greatly increased the need to find new ways to control society to ensure economic stability. It was no longer the institutions that would be able to surveil society, rather new systems had to be developed to monitor and surveil the flows between the newly abundant networks. Invasive, and in my opinion unethical, forms of surveillance and control such as SAP and ERP systems are just two examples of modern disciplinary powers. European software giant SAP established a ‘four-wall’ monitoring and control system, in which senior management could keep track of every imaginable element of their business, not to mention every single employee. Enterprise Resource Planning systems and other software have been constructed to essentially discipline and control working practices—which means anticipating all contingencies—and forcing them to flow through their ‘proprietary coding’. Basically with the use of new digital technology made possible by our newly advanced information society, the CEO and senior management now become the electronic eye, surveilling every move their workers make. Something just doesn’t seem right about that. Instead of trusting ones employees or letting them act on an individual level, companies are purchasing software to monitor every movement their workers make- and essentially exploit their individual work habits. Almost like a modern assembly line of workers don’t you think? Modern businesses are utilizing the technological and digital advances of our society to gain as much information through whatever network is possible to ensure as much control as possible. What makes this even more scary, is that this information can be processed and acquired internationally. What a worker in Germany is doing can be immediately transmitted and viewed by his manager or corporate owner on the other side of the world, in the US for example. There are obviously incredible benefits to this type of information transmission, but what I find most problematic is that it is not always consensual and it is not always necessary. This type of information surveilling and transmission has severe negative consequences when utilized to gain information on a personal level, and to be honest, I find it exploitative. Companies that purchase software to monitor and ‘spy’ on their employees I am sure could find more practical uses to ensure structured and organized employee output. Either way, the issue of personal surveillance and the transmission of other types of information provide a whole other topic of discussion, possibly for next week. However, with this said, hopefully this brief blog, - and my comments regarding new business surveillance- has provided some insight into a few of my thoughts for this week when reflecting on our class discussions and course readings.