Popular accounts heralded the close of the twentieth century as the dawn of an “information age.” In some utopian visions, technical and economic infrastructures of communication and data exchange, such as the Internet, promise a society of empowered, mobile and resourceful individuals. At the same time, information industries, such as hardware and software manufacturers, data collectors and managers, communication service providers and producers of cultural commodities, are increasingly global, integrated and concentrated. Thus information practice is at the nexus of contradictory trends towards individualism and corporate power, and the ideals and promises of the information age must be understood within current structures of information production and use.

The genesis of the information revolution may be located in the dawn of the industrial age, when processes of production, distribution and consumption became increasingly complex and geographically far-flung. Management and control of these industrial processes required methodization of data creation, information management and decision making. This methodization took the form of increasingly refined bureaucratic practice.

Bureaucracy consists essentially of two processes. The first is rationality in which activities, entities and decision processes are abstracted and formalized into information systems. Information production is largely the representation and formalization of phenomena. That is, phenomena are examined and evaluated according to their role in a particular rational process. Some ontological model is applied to the phenomenon to articulate it into constituent parts. Decisions are made regarding which parts are important enough to note and record, and what formal relations hold among those parts.

This involves judgments that are informed not only by explicit, goal-oriented criteria, but also by deeply held and unexamined cultural beliefs. The second essential structure of bureaucracy is specialization, in which decisionmaking power is assigned to particular organizational nodes, and communication flow is channeled and restricted to those nodes.

These three facets of information—its administrative purpose, its inherent valuation and representation of subjects, and its unequal distribution—make information production and processing a focus of struggles over representation and power.

The use of information technologies such as wireless phones, hand-held computers and remote access to databases and services via the World Wide Web has made it possible for many workers and consumers to free themselves from the geographic bounds of the office and the shopping mall. However, as those technologies transgress geographic bounds, they extend administrative bounds. Workers and consumers alike become subject to oversight as their location and activities are tracked through their media use. This information then becomes the property of the overseer, and may be used to rationalize the production and consumption processes in ways which benefit capital. In the case of the management/labor relationship, the information may be used to extract from workers their knowledge of how to do things, and formalize that knowledge into automated “expert systems,” thus transferring to capital the embodied assets of labor. Similar processes occur when consumer data is collected, evaluated and manipulated into demographics and patterns of consumption. In each case, management has greater access to knowledge about a population than that population itself has. In addition to the modeling of the activities of a subject population, information and surveillance are used to act upon individuals in that population—to control the flow of work to individuals, to trigger fraud control processes in credit-card systems, to offer (or to choose not to offer) discounts on purchases, etc. In these ways, information is used both to model human behaviors and to impose that model on human populations.

Similarly, informational practices are used to convert communal resources to private resources as cultural practices are captured, recorded, commodified and sold back in the form of popular cultural products.

Finally, information is a structuring element of markets themselves. Markets are in part defined by the ability of the participants to interact with one another and to understand current market conditions. Imbalanced access to information resources (including networks and databases) produces imbalanced market power. For example, corporate capital, able to access data and communicate globally, acts in a global labor market, while laborers themselves are often able to access only local resources, and so operate only in a local market. Thus information resources give corporate capital the power to negotiate the global labor market as a set of local markets, while labor is able to negotiate only their own local market.

Information products, such as databases, software, network services, video games and entertainment, enter the market economy as inputs to the production process, as vehicles of distribution, and as consumer items in themselves. However, information products offer special problems in this process of commodification, and significant social, economic and technical resources are being spent in order to alleviate these problems. For example, it is notoriously difficult to restrict the use of information to those who have paid for that use. This difficulty is compounded by the increasing immateriality of information—rather than purchasing a medium such as a book or compact disc containing certain, more or less permanent, information, users are increasingly likely to access information via electronic networks in the form of a recordable, reproducible and malleable electronic pattern. Organizations in advanced information economies are responding to these problems of commodification by developing encryption technologies capable of metering the use of information services, or limiting their use to certain people. Other responses include the propagation of copyright and database protection laws and treaties which ensure that corporate gatherers of information have legal recourse to establish and defend property rights in their information holdings.