From: "Michael Strangelove" <Michael-AT-Strangelove.Com>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 1997 15:24:39 +0000
Subject: Poster on Database Discourse


The following is a section of notes from my dissertation (draft), 
offered up here for comments. The dissertation is being published in 
draft and, eventually, final form at 
http://ottawacitizen.galaxy.southam.com/columnists/strangelove

best wishes

michael strangelove

PUBLIC DATABASES AND IDENTITY
<P>
Containing somewhere between 15 and 30 billion words, the Web is well
on its way to becoming the largest database in history. This
dissertation represents the foundation for a critical media theory
which evaluates the impact of a massive, global, public, and
inexpensive database and bi-directional communication system, here
called cyberspace, on the processes of social memory. Prior to the
rise of the Web in the early 1990's, discourse theorists within the
post-structuralist camp were generating critical positions on the
social impact of computerized databases. Since the Web and related
Internet technologies of FTP, Gopher, Usenet, and mail servers are a
distributed database of global proportions, then the conversation
within the post-structuralist camp should provide some clues to the
impact of cyberspace as a public database. Post-structuralist
discourse theory of Michael Foucault, J=FCgen Habermas, Jean-Fran=E7ois
Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and others will remain
outside the framework of this dissertation. But it will prove useful
to look over this fence and see where dialogue would be fruitful.
 <P>

In <i> The Second Media Ages, </i> (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press,
1995), Mark Poster uses post-structuralist media theory to explain how
electronically mediated communication and databases affect the
cultural construction of the subject. Poster sees databases as a form
of discourse which changes the nature of the subject. In discourse
theory the concept of a "subject" is used as a metaphor for the
"self". It will be useful to understand how computerized databases
affect the identity of individuals. 

<P> DATABASES AND IDENTITY <P>

Government and corporate databases contain information about
individuals. These electronic profiles can be combined, dissected,
bought and sold, and otherwise manipulated without the knowledge or
consent of the individual subject. Computerized databases are actually
identity-producing engines.[1] The computerization of information
about the self leads directly to a multiplication of identities. As a
result of this new process, computer databases have reconfigured the
subject and this in turn brings to an end the modern self, "there is a
secular trend emanating from electronic communications that undermines
the stability of the figure of the rational autonomous individual".[2]
Poster sees the impact of databases on the self as an erosion of
personal autonomy, <P> 

"For now, through the database alone, the
subject has been multiplied and decentered, capable of being acted
upon by computers at many social locations without the least awareness
by the individual concerned yet just as surely as if the individual
were present somehow in the computer." [3] 

<P> Databases violate the integrity of the modern individual by 
creating multiple selves which governments and corporations can then 
subject to surveillance and control. Poster uses Foucault's concept 
of 'governmentality' to describe the power inherent within the 
databases. Governmentality is a form of bureaucratic power that uses 
knowledge of individuals to control the public.[4] For 
post-structuralists and many other theoretical frameworks, databases 
represent knowledge and knowledge, or information, equals power;
 <P> 

"Databases provide contemporary governments with vast stores of 
accessible information about the population which facilitates the 
fashioning of policies that maintain stability. An important 
political effect of databases, as they have been disseminated in our 
societies, is to promote the "governmental" form of power, to make 
knowledge of the population available to coercive institutions at 
every level."[5] <P>

Expressed in the terms of the jargon of post-structuralists, 
databases are a discourse, or more simply, a practice of description, 
which culturally constructs the subject. What I wish to bring forward 
in Poster's discussion of databases is the hidden nature of how 
databases act upon the subject. Poster describes the power of 
database discourse as invisible to the individual;

<P> "The chief characteristic of the power effect of discourse is to 
disguise its constitutive function in relation to the subject, 
appearing only after the subject has been formed as an addressee of 
power." [6]<P>

When the self is addressed or decsribed by databases it takes on the
characteristics of the description -- I carry within myself all the
structures of the social discourses which provide the predetermined
context of my existence, such as the social structures of my early
childhood. As with the self-fulfilling theory of Freud, the individual
becomes the <i>thing</i> described within the discourse which in turn
supports the structures of domination, be they psychoanalytic or
political. <P>

For our purposes, post-structural discourse theory provides two 
useful observations about databases; (1) they enable the manipulation 
of identity and; (2) databases are territory for strategies of 
coercion and resistance. With the rise of cyberspace, the discourse 
power of databases is now subject to democratization -the identity of 
institutions, such as corporations and political parties, are subject 
to manipulation by the wired public. The one-way discourse of private 
databases and their institutions are now subject to the same 'power 
effect'. Discourse theory reads like a child of the broadcast-based, 
private information systems within mass media culture. People are 
acted upon by databases with little or no means of resistance. But 
the Web, which has armed the public with their own database. As a 
result of the democratization of the mass media through the database 
of the Web (or at least the injection of some serious feedback 
capability into the realm of broadcast-based, mass media culture), 
discourse theory will need to account for dialogue within the realm 
of databases, where <i>all</i> subjects are continually 
reconfigured.[7] <P>

FOOTNOTES
<P>
1. Mark Poster. <i>The Second Media Age.</i> (Cambridge, MA: Polity
Press, 1995), 89.<P> 2. Ibid., 76.<P> 3. Ibid., 88.<P> 4. Ibid.,
91.<P> 5. Ibid., 92.<P> 6. Ibid., 84. <P> 7. As mentioned previously,
my dissertation will not make use of discourse theory. The
philosophical perspective of identity in this field tends to be
anthropologically naive. Identity, even within western cultures, can
hardly be grouped under the category 'centred, autonomous subject' and
then contrasted to a supposedly emerging 'dispersed, multiple
subject'. <P> 

Copyright (C) 1997, Michael Strangelove. All Rights Reserved.




Michael Strangelove
Michael-AT-Strangelove.Com
http://ottawacitizen.galaxy.southam.com/columnists/strangelove.html
To join a mailing list that will keep you informed of new material on the Net by Strangelove,
send the command SUBSCRIBE CONTENT to content-AT-strangelove.com. 
You will be sent one email per week.