Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System [Hardcover]

Dan Schiller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 26, 1999

Cyberspace not only exemplifies but spearheads the greater political economy of which it has become such a critical part. The networks that comprise cyberspace were originally created at the behest of government agencies, military contractors, and allied educational institutions. However, over the past generation or so, a growing number of these networks began to serve primarily corporate users. Under the sway of an expansionary market logic, the Internet began a political-economic transition toward what Dan Schiller calls "digital capitalism."

Schiller traces these metamorphoses through three critically important and interlinked realms. Parts I and II deal with the overwhelmingly "neoliberal" or market-driven policies that influence and govern the telecommunications system and their empowerment of transnational corporations while at the same time exacerbating exisiting social inequalities. Part III shows how cyberspace offers uniquely supple instruments with which to cultivate and deepen consumerism on a transnational scale, especially among privileged groups. Finally, Part IV shows how digital capitalism has already overtaken education, placing it at the mercy of a proprietary market logic.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

One of the great early claims of cyberculture was that the Net constituted a realm distinct from the "real world," with a life and laws all its own. This book argues strongly to the contrary. Not only is cyberspace an integral part of the real world, Dan Schiller insists, but it exists primarily to serve powerful real-world economic interests--none of which are necessarily aligned with the principles of individual freedom and equal access commonly touted as the Internet's defining values.

In Schiller's reckoning, it was neither Al Gore, the Pentagon bureaucracy, nor a subculture of long-haired hackers that brought digital networks into being. Rather, it was large corporations in the '40s and '50s that were looking to expand operations across national borders. Through big business's economic demand for sophisticated networking tools, and more importantly, through its direct political demands for deregulated digital telecommunications, these corporate interests carved out the technosocial realm we now know as cyberspace. The Internet thus stands as both symptom and fulcrum of the broader trend toward globalization that is the hallmark of the political economy of the late 20th century.

In Schiller's view, that trend is a decidedly bad thing, and he spends much of the book outlining what he sees as its deleterious effects on economic equality, media culture, and higher education. These are unabashedly anticapitalist sentiments, but whether or not you agree with them, Schiller's account of the relationship between corporations and cyberspace demands to be reckoned with. --Julian Dibbell

From Publishers Weekly

"In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy and the market economy." So begins The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, the latest salvo from David C. Korten (When Corporations Rule the World). In four sections of three or four chapters each, Korten lays out how it happened and what we can do about it, using model communities that have already begun to "treat money as a facilitator, not the purpose, of our economic lives." 25,000 first printing. (Berrett-Koehler and Kumarian, co-publishers, $27.95 300p ISBN 1-57675-051-5; Mar.) Can the Net really foster, as in Bill Gates's phrase, "friction-free capitalism"? How about "robust direct democracy"? In Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Marketing System, Dan Schiller, professor of communications at UC-San Diego, turns a skeptic's eye to the screen. After reviewing how Internet technology differs from previous forms of telecommunication (and how a "Neoliberal" agenda drove its development), Schiller examines its ever-closer ties with commerce and prognostications for educational revolution. His conclusion: "Digital capitalism has strengthened, rather than banished, the ago-old scourges of the market system: inequality and domination." (MIT, $29.95 320p ISBN 0-262-19417-1; Apr.) Oxford professor of politics John Gray has been an acknowledged influence on Margaret Thatcher, and his writings were appropriated by Britain's New Right. It was thus astonishing to U.K. readers that, in False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Gray does an about-face and argues against a market untethered to cultural foundations within particular societies. Updated with a chapter on the controversy it sparked on its U.K. release, the American version further stresses the all-too-apparent instability of global markets. (New Press, $25 272p ISBN 1-56584-521-8; Apr.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (March 26, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262194171
• ISBN-13: 978-0262194174
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,989,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Good Read!, May 10, 2001

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Rolf Dobelli "getAbstract" (Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System (Paperback)

Dan Schiller's book is an exhaustive history and analysis of network deregulation, the Internet, and the emerging global economic order. In this academic work, Schiller examines the social and political issues of the Internet, the new economic landscape. He is, above all, a critic of the political realities that shaped the Internet. He laments its lack of social and "welfarist" features and argues that a system created by market forces to serve market forces can only exacerbate existing inequities. His dry, academic tone still reveals a little emotion, making it clear that Schiller is no cheerleader for the neo-liberal orientation he perceives on the Internet. Is there an overt political slant to the book? You might say that. We [...] recommend it to students of economics, social sciences, and communications, and to anyone else with a good political filter who wants to better understand the Internet's impact on the global economy, albeit from a U.S. perspective.