The Surveilling Eye of Global Financial News

Surveillance of the world is considered an important function of media systems and plays a unique role in the financial industry. Furthermore, it is important to place the analysis of financial news within the political context of a larger techno-structural environment of global financial trading that works to discipline countries, companies and people around the world. The implications of this global web have been amplified by the extraordinary volume and velocity of the system that sees tens of trillions of dollars of trades transacted every day.

How IT Came to Rule the World, 1.4: SAGE and Early Electronic Computing

The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) system conceived at MIT and built at IBM’s Poughkeepsie, New York facilities helped transform the computer from a bulky, slow, vacuum-tube switched numerical processor into a generalized, software-driven, transistor-enabled, media-enhanced computer with an accompanying communications system able to send digital data over telephone lines.

HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.4

Over time, these regimes shaped an informational and technological environment that was sequentially dedicated to: 1) a military real-time hemispheric radar defense system to protect against a nuclear attack; 2) an international regime of capital decontrols, electronic money and financial news flows, and 3) an electronic environment for social networking, surveillance, and global business to business (B2B), business to government (B2G), business to consumer (B2C), and consumer to consumer (C2C) transactions.

HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.2

The answer to the question of how information technology (IT) emerged is a complex one. The thesis in this project is that modern information technology developed out of the trajectory of US statecraft and its involvement in several political economy regimes which emerged successively and sometimes concurrently in the post-World War II period up and through the turn of the second millennium.