HOW IT CAME TO RULE THE WORLD, 0.5
Posted on | March 21, 2010 | No Comments
This is the fifth post in the mini-series How IT Came to Rule the World ©
John M. Keynes
The second concern is the importance of using political economy to frame the general discussion. This includes classic issues like the price system, labor and corporations as well as the significance of peer production and gift economies. Economists like Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Fredrick von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Jeffery Sachs are important as their ideas have been consequential in shaping the modern world. The political economy shapes technological development and with it political and commercial power.
The third is the relationship between information technologies and the production of meaning. Technologies are part of a set of practices that frame information and meaning and with it socio-legal structure. The spreadsheet, for example, combines the power of lists and tables with other calculative abilities that “in-form” meaning and organize sets of knowledge that run organizations and shape the way people live their lives.
Lastly, an inquiry into the state of democracy in the age of IT dominance is important. Can IT contribute to a social structure that allows and empowers people to participate in the conditions of their lives? Can the age of “Big Data” promote an era of participation and democracy and not an age of “Big Brother”?
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD recently joined the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University in Austin TX, after ten years on the faculty of New York University.
Tags: democracy > Fredrick von Hayek > human agency > Jeffery Sachs > John Maynard Keynes > Karl Marx > lists > Majid Tehranian > meaning > methodological concerns > Milton Friedman > political economy > reciprocal effects > spreadsheet > techno-neutralist > Technologies of Power > technostructuralist
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About Me
Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.
You can reach me at:
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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