Closing the information gap or digital divide is alleged to be a progressive goal on the basis of a set of presumptions concerning the role of information in contemporary political, social and economic life. The arguments in favor of devoting resources (political power, economic capital, labor power, activist energy) to closing the gap share a view of the nature of information and the importance of access to information as a means to solving problems of equity in distribution of goods - including goods beyond information itself. Increasingly, (access to) information is seen as a fundamental gateway good because it appears as the condition of acquiring further goods (political power and economic capital). If (access to) information is becoming a right (which would establish the strongest claim under our political system for efforts toward an equitable distribution), it is largely the result of the presumption of the power of information (or access to information) for control and prediction of complex systems. For that reason (as well as for the sake of the billions of dollars dedicated to this proposition that could be spent otherwise), our presumptions about (access to) information and the progressiveness of closing the digital divide should be given critical consideration.
 

1. Presumptive Progressiveness of Closing the Information Gap
 

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project (Pew web), 50% of US adults do not have access to the internet; of those, 57% do not plan to get access. The significance of this figure was outlined by Harris Miller, president of the Informational Technology Association of America, in testimony before Congress concerning the digital divide (or as Miller preferred, the "digital opportunity"):
 

While estimates of the growth and size of the electronic marketplace vary widely, global e-commerce in 1999 was estimated at US$300 billion, about $250 billion of which took place in the United States. Dramatic growth is occurring in business-to-business and business-to consumer EC, and more government services are being offered electronically. Given this growth, assuring the opportunity to access technology and to participate in the digital economy is not just an empowerment issue--it's a U.S. economic performance issue and a bottom line issue. (Miller 2000)

The Clinton administration has focused education and communication policy on closing the information gap. The stated aim of policies across federal bureaucracy was to provide access to the internet in rural and poor areas, and in Clinton's repeated phrase, to "wire our public schools," and to this end Education spent $2 billion in fiscal 2000 and the FCC spent $2.25 billion. (1995 estimates by McKinsey & Co. set the cost for wiring schools at $47 billion over ten years, with a yearly operating cost of $14 billion nationwide. (Benton Foundation, 1999)) This might appear initially to be a fairly progressive agenda, especially for Clinton.

Of course, identifying the context and considering the benefits of these proposals requires more careful critical scrutiny: Who benefits from the federal effort to "wire" the nation? What costs are associated with it, and who pays them? What is necessary (in terms of alterations of the world, changes in budgetary priorities, and international relations) in order to achieve this goal? Above all else, in order to understand what is proposed, the goals and expected benefits must be understood and evaluated, but in the contemporary political climate, no one was expected to answer the question: Why should the "gap" be closed?⁽¹⁾

I am not intending to argue that access to information is of no value or benefit, nor that limitations on access are economically just. It certainly seems laudable to make it possible for "underprivileged" or "underrepresented" people to get online, since the internet not only provides a huge quantity of useful information, but also is said to be the engine driving economic progress. In addition, access to information is said to convey power, as Mark Lloyd (of the Civil Rights Forum) claims:
 
 

The one most important power potentially conveyed by the Internet is access to much needed information. Local and federal government documents, including the documents businesses are required to file, can be made available on the Internet. Details about proposed laws and regulations can be accessible to all over the Internet. But this is a potential only, this potential will be realized only if the public demands timely access, and if there are groups to help alert you to problems… Access to information is essential to successfully challenge the status quo. The Internet can help you gain access to this sort of information, but only if government and business are required to provide it. (Lloyd 2000)

Perhaps even more significantly, democracy has already entered a "digital" age, as Lloyd also points out:
 
 

If your voice cannot get onto the dominant media, if the statistics I mentioned earlier are drowned in our happy conversation about the stock market, we will never be able to solve our real problems regarding health care, and a living wage, and a healthy environment. This is the impact of the digital divide. (Lloyd 2000)

I think it can be cogently argued that a public school in a poor district could be better off with a computer and internet connection than without (all other things being equal). I think the statistical fact that there is a racial as well as a class component to the digital divide should be a matter of concern. But I doubt that concern for the "underprivileged" or for improvements in education genuinely motivates these policies. More importantly, I am not at all convinced that access to information is an unqualified good even for those who presently seem to be "excluded."

In order to explain my doubts and go some way in justifying them, I wish to expose here the ideology of the information gap. First, the ideological functioning of the term information needs to be clarified. This analysis leads to an account of the ideological formation of the problem of the information gap. But simply revealing the over-determination of information does not seem sufficient to show why the field of information technologies and competencies should become a special object of ideological thought. In the final section I develop a phenomenological analysis of experiences of information (as technology, as a set of objects, and as a mode of intentional directedness) that in my view accounts for the spectacular (Debord) status of information.
 

2. Social and ideological meaning of information
 

The socially constructed meaning of information is taken for granted to such an extent that when questions are raised about the legitimacy of gathering certain information, the issue is most often limited to the specific circumstances and kind of information gathered, and not the legitimacy of information itself. When claims of privacy are posed against claims to a legitimate interest in gathering information, the assumption on both sides is that information may be relied upon to reveal something about a person in a way that is beyond doubt or controversy. From the reverse standpoint, access to information and the "freedom" or "free flow" of information is presumed good for largely the same reasons. It is anticipated that access to information would reveal something about the state of affairs.

I will argue, against appearances, that information is not always credible and reliable as revelatory of states of affairs - and further, that in the sense most relevant here (viz., access to the internet) is not credible or reliable as revelatory of states of affairs, even though it still counts as information. The ambiguity of the term information is significant in this context, and in order to cast a wide net I will use a broad definition: information is any statement concerning some state of affairs in the absence of corroborating or ratifying experiences.⁽²⁾ So hearing, reading or watching a weather report informs me of the weather, while looking out the window or stepping outside do not (they would be experiences of weather).⁽³⁾ Having my credit report would inform a person of my record of passing bad checks or accruing consumer debt, but not the circumstances leading to these events, nor even whether these were accidents or mistakes on the record.⁽⁴⁾ The shift from conceiving knowledge of experience on the basis of understanding to the basis of information (statistics, etc.) is rooted in a positivist notion of real things as discrete, individual, determinate, unambiguous. As N. Katherine Hayles points out in How We Became Posthuman, this shift can be understood in the social and political (and geopolitical) context of the rise of the information age: post-war economic and military adventurism. Information can be understood as a strategic deployment of power (in this case capital power) for control, but it should be remembered that thus far we have not identified how this could be the case. My aim is to identify what it is about the positivist assumption about information's reliability and neutrality that prepares it to be the spectacular ideological object of capital that it is, and further to consider what in the experience of information founds or underlies this positivist assumption.
 

Ideology of Information
 

First, let me clarify the various ways information has served an ideological and/or hegemonic function. Several such uses of information have been identified in late capitalism, each critique in its own way defining information in terms of its social meaning - that is, in terms of its role in social relations. Daniel Bell described the role of information as a tool for "rationally" managing the increasing complexity of technologically advanced society. In this guise, information appears as a "panacea" for contradictions introduced by complexity (Robins and Webster 1987, 99). The naivete of this position lies in its ignorance of the capital interests served by the development of information technology, and more broadly of the fit between capital interests and the technocratic interpretation of social problems. The debate between "culturalist" and structuralist criticism reveals the uses of information in reproducing and neutralizing power relations and in developing a mystification of social reality (Allor 1987). Considered as a valorized set of practices (or as an institution), information can be seen as an establishment and legitimation of alienated, but regulated, relations. A credit rating, for instance, serves this purpose. Viewed as a valorized set of messages about reality, information establishes and legitimates an alienated social world and alienated species-being: the social significance of having a good credit rating exemplifies this.⁽⁵⁾ Considering the matter still more experientially, Peter Dahlgren suggested that information encodes or prestructures the habits of communication and community that establish social reality (1987, 43f) - that is, prior to the social formation of the meaning of a piece of information (or of information as such), there is a habituation or preforming of practices of communication and understanding that {center} information. In a related way, following out an implication of Michel Foucault's genealogical critique, Mark Poster has analyzed this hegemonic power of information further as a form of surveillance (1990, 70f). Information becomes a form of juridical power-knowledge when it establishes a regime of truth (here, a digital form of truth) over a set of practices. Under the term information, for instance, knowledge, education, emotion, thinking, and still more basically seeing and hearing are "disciplined" under the rubrics of cognitive science and cybernetics.

Ideology of the Information Gap
 

On the basis of such understandings of the role of information as a value and product in contemporary capitalist social and economic life, it is easy to see the capital interests at stake in the political aim of bridging the so-called information gap or digital divide. First, access to information is a two-way relation: no one gains access to information without providing access to information about oneself. Concerns about "privacy" of personal information on the internet express this dilemma without addressing the inherent requirement of the exchange (as mediated electronically). If, as Bell suggested, information is a tool for managing complexity, then capital must benefit from the acquisition of information. (This would be true even if the Foucauldian critique of panoptic digital surveillance were baseless. On the other hand, there are numerous ways in which access to information operates as a method of gathering information about information-accessors: from the use of "cookies" embedded in operating systems by marketing companies like DoubleClick to the monitoring of employee email. One proposal for making web access "free" to consumers involves gathering demographic, credit and purchasing-habit information about subscribers and using this information to target advertisements to them. The "free" internet access is traded for free access to information about the subscribers, and free access for advertisers to the subscriber's web browser.)

Second, training workers to operate on information makes a division of knowledge (or at least web-) labor possible. Bridging the gap means enlisting more knowledge (or web) workers. This argument draws on Hans Magnus Enzensberger's notion of a "consciousness industry" developing mental competencies in order to exploit them (1974). Capital's use of the information paradigm depends on an exploitable labor force that collects, distributes, and in various other ways produces information. Debord's analysis of the spectacular turn in late capitalism provides the terms of another critique of information-labor. If, as Debord claims, late capital requires the commodification of labor forms despite not requiring intensive labor for material production, then another form of labor must be found. The production of a "new economy" through information systems, though relying on an obscured (and in some areas monstrously exploited) material production force, also relies on an immaterial production force - the early forms of which were entertainment and advertising "industries," and the newest form of which is web-page design, and to a large extent the software engineering industry (IT). It would not be far wrong, based on Debord's analysis, to consider this a labor force that achieves nothing, that produces nothing - except the conditions of its own and others' further exploitation as consumers and wage laborers.

Third, access to information is reducible to a commodity by measuring either time of access or quantity of data (bytes). Increasing and generalizing access to information commodifies forms of labor previously difficult to regard as commodity forms. Education may be recast as training in the use of information-accessing tools and the subsequent use of those tools to access information. Result: bachelors', advanced and professional degrees available through web sites and sold to consumers as precisely the commodity forms they have become - means to certain forms of employment. (The redescription of artworks as commodities is advanced as well: music is essentially downloadable, exchangeable bits of data, thus something owned as information, rather than something created in a social context.)

(A fourth ideological facet of the project to reduce the digital divide is the conflation of competition and social justice. The presumption is that training workers - or still less, merely providing access - "levels the playing field" of economic competition, and further that this is identical to providing for social justice. But this is a general neo-liberal standpoint.)
 
 
 

3. Ambiguity and Ambivalence of Information
 

My concern here is not to defend nor even take up one or another of these interpretations, but to consider how any of them might be established. In other words, I am investigating what about information could make it serve so well its ideological and hegemonic functions. Here the main issue is what Hayles has called the essential ambiguity, and I will call the essential ambivalence, of information.

Hayles' book impressively recounts the ideological and hegemonic underpinnings of the validation and legitimation that establish the social meaning and good of information. When Hayles describes information as ambiguous, she refers to the deliberate effort by information theorists to separate information from meaning. Viewed charitably, the initial purpose of this split seems to be rooted in a technical concern with the nature of message systems. But the separation, decontextualization and "disembodiment" (Hayles) of information permits further technical efforts at measurement and control over information (leading ultimately to treating information as a commodity) as well as a peculiar "backhand" redescription of meaning in terms of information. In other words, the initial move to separate the concept of information from the issue of meaning (and interpretation) has led to both the technical capacity to measure and control "flows" of information and to the reinscription of the concept of meaning on the basis of a metaphor of information. Hayles offers the example of Alan Turing's imitation game thesis and proposal for the Turing machine. Turing's view is that anything that responds to messages in a way that cannot be distinguished from an intelligent human being's response (and thus succeeds in playing the imitation game) lacks no right to be called intelligent. Intelligence would be measured by the machine's provision of information indistinguishable from the information provided by human beings. This has led to the hypothesis, in cognitive science circles, that human intelligence is information processing - a backformation of the concept of intelligence based on a test that in its very design does not rely on any definition of intelligence. Having become a widely appropriated metaphor, Hayles suggests, the term information has become almost meaninglessly vague. But by and large its validity and legitimacy goes unquestioned, central as it is to so many pursuits - scientific, academic, military, and literary.

Hayles points to the social construction of information as an object. I would like to bring to bear the phenomenological constitution of information as an object, beginning with parenthesizing the posit implicit in Hayles' discussion - namely, that information is actual - either as an entity or as a construction. I do not propose to raise doubts about the existence of information, but instead consider what sorts of conceptual frameworks and modes of consciousness are at work in taking information for granted as given. How is it that information appears to us as information?

Hayles' account of the decontextualization and disembodiment of information provides an important initial clue. One could almost say that the context in which information appears is characterized by this lack of context. At its core, the experience of information is an experience of a message that stands by itself - or that is meant to be taken to stand by itself. I am informed when I am made aware of what is presented in the message as such; that the message means something (practical or otherwise) does not determine whether I am aware. Information indicates, but does not express, a state of affairs appresented in the message.

The phenomenological description of any external perception has a similar and characteristic appresentative structure. Edmund Husserl's account of the intentionality of consciousness leads to an analysis of perceptual objects as appresenting, along with their directly and immediately perceptible facets, the facets that are not directly perceptible. For the perceptual experience of my hat to be a genuine perceptual experience of my hat, the side opposite my perspective (indeed, every other possible perspective) must be appresentively given in my perception of this particular adumbration I see now. Otherwise, Husserl claims, I am not seeing the hat at all, but seeing only purely immanent, non-objective sense data.

In ordinary experience of objective perception, the appresentatively given other perspectives on my hat are ideally attainable perspectives. What makes visual perspectives what they are is precisely this attainability for perception.⁽⁶⁾ But in experiences of information, no other ideally attainable perspectives are appresentatively given. The experience of information is uniperspectival, as its positivist lineage would expect. The difference between these types of experience could be described as a difference in their openness, vividness, or dimensionality: ordinary objective perception opens upon an object and upon its additional adumbrations rather than closing additional perspectives, is vividly self-expressive or self-presentative rather than merely indicative, and is multidimensional rather than flat.

This is clear when we consider the cases of misinformation and disinformation. Being mis- or dis-informed occurs not as the failure of being informed, but as modes of its successful accomplishment. In short, I cannot be misinformed or disinformed without being informed (in these cases, falsely). To become informed is to become aware of a presentiation of a state of affairs through the exclusive means of messages. But since this amounts to being aware only of what the messages themselves state, the condition of being informed necessarily accedes to the messages' contents. Any situation in which someone accedes to the content of a message is a successful act of information.

The significant issue is not limited to the content of the message, but also that the message is informing, and what further acts follow from being informed. Here an important distinction needs to be made. After having heard some item of information, I may decide that the state of affairs is worth investigating on my own, and I may proceed to research it actively. As soon as I have ceased to rely on the messages themselves, that is, as soon as I have an objective experience of the state of affairs, I am no longer merely informed. (In Hayles' view, I have re-entered an embodied and contextual cognitive environment.) What I am considering are acts that follow upon being-informed, acts that take up the messages as bases for further acts - doubting the content, denying the content, responding affectively to the content, etc. These acts founded on being-informed continue to accede to the message contents; it is such a category of acts that are the basis of the ideological functioning of information.

Unlike Hayles' description of information as separate from meaning, a phenomenological clarification of information shows that the status of information as such is not altered by its being integrated into a sphere of (expressive) meaning. Information is relatively independent of spheres of expressive meaning: some given informational item can be set in any meaning-context and thus, while retaining its status as information, undergo an indefinite series of modifications of its sense. (Information could be said to be power in a Foucauldian sense, then: in every instance information is a deployment of power into new contexts.) Because of this reiterability, information is an ideal candidate to become a spectacular object, a commodity form, a hegemonic/ideological instrument. Because information does not have a context of its own (ownmost or proper to it), because it can be set into an indefinite number of contexts (an indeterminable determinacy), it is essentially and radically appropriable - (a ready-made instantiation or deployment of power).

Guided by the positivist presuppositions of information's reliability and neutrality, the neo-liberal notion of the information gap presumes the goodness of access to information. It is obviously of questionable value to provide access to information without skills in critically judging message contents - and thus bringing them into a certain meaning-context. Less obviously, even critical thinking about information accedes to message contents. Information remains problematic because it retains its sense in the critical context: all critical thinking about these messages can achieve is to show that this or that piece of information should not be trusted. That knowing is not identical to being informed is hidden by the general commitment to information as the model of knowing - and this no critical thinking skill in the ordinary sense can teach.
 

4. Resisting the Information Paradigm?
 

Viewed as a class competition within a field of power-relations, i.e., an ideological or hegemonic battle, the information gap is open to a radically different interpretation: the lagging "penetration" (Crutsinger 2000) of the internet into African-American homes can be understood as a form of resistance to the commodification and specularization of contemporary home life. The social meaning of access to the internet is to a large extent determined by those who stand to gain the most by promoting access - both in terms of profit and in terms of determining social meaning.

There remains the potential activist use of access to information, as suggested by Mark Lloyd above. Access to information provides a means to spread messages about states of affairs that activists would want to change. This restores and exhibits the ideological function of information as a strategic field of struggle. In that case, the truth of a claim to know or the rightness of a claim to benefit the greater good are admittedly secondary to the naked competition of information as message frequency and volume. Within an information paradigm, the most progressive agenda would be to reach an equity distribution of access to information in terms of message frequency and volume. It seems to me this fails to be genuinely progressive because it relies on the distinction of meaning-context and an impeccable and unassailable sphere of messages whose value is taken as self-evident. The ambivalence of being-informed and the ambiguity of information, accepted as conditions of political activism, reduce politics to attempts to overwhelm opposition with message frequency and volume, with contradictory messages.

Endnotes:

1.  The fact that no one has asked this question should be beyond controversy, because of the well-known role played by the US government, primarily the Defense Department, in developing the microelectronics industry. As reported by John Kurt Jacobson, analyst Nathan Rosenberg considered the joint-venture "the most outstanding success story ini terms of government policy to stimulate technical progressiveneness, growth and employment in the postwar period." (Jacobson, 126)

2. In the context of "information theory," and "cybernetics," the definition has shifted from one generation to the next, all founded historically and conceptually on Claude Shannon's probability-definition as the probability that a single message element in a series will be selected. This completely separates information from meaning. My definition does not rely on the natural-attitude predication of a real distinction between messages and meaning (noting on the contrary that statistical reasoning is a form of meaning as well). Instead, it notes a fundamental difference in the mode of givenness of objects of "informational" consciousness, which I'll explain in more detail below.

3.  An information-system account of human cognition reduces experiences to information, on the model of propositional logic: I am experiencing rain or not, or there is a report of rain or not, and in the one case the truth-claim "it is raining" is true, in the other not.

4. One credit-reporting company markets its services by claiming that many people's credit records are mistaken, and that correcting the records and maintaining vigilance over them is vital to keeping "good credit."

5. Baudrillard's discussions of credit and of consumerism are very helpful for my articulation here.

6. This need not mean a perceptual perspective I myself could take, nor a perceptual perspective I can imagine, nor even one I can imagine any human being could take. In objective perception, the attainability of other perspectives is given as an ideal or irreal "horizon" of the experienced admubration. See Merleau-Ponty 1964, Nagel 2000.