Vincent Mosco

Computers and Democracy

RESEARCH that is sensitive to the human and social dimensions of communication and computers aims to open the media and new technology to full public access and control. In order to do this, we need to understand what access and control mean and how our particular ways of relating to technology might advance or retard democracy.

La Economía Política de la Comunicación:una actualización diez años después

The paper begins by defining the political economy approach, identifies its fundamental characteristics, and maps major schools of thought. From here, it proceeds to examine how communication scholars have drawn on the theoretical framework to carry out research on the mass media and information technologies. The text highlights differing emphases that distinguish research approaches in North America, Europe, and the Third World. The paper then describes the process of rethinking the political economy of communication by proposing the means to address its philosophical assumptions. Specifically, it calls for an approach to knowing that accepts the reality of both concepts and observations and rejects the view, prominent in some theories, that all explanations can be reduced to one essential cause, such as the economy or culture. Rethinking political economy also emphasizes social change, social processes and social relations over the traditional tendency in political economy to start from social structures and institutions.

Citizenship And The Technopoles

AbstractIn a world in which people are increasingly identified as consumers and audiences, it is more important than every to invoke them as citizens. Citizenship elevates human activity to include legal, political, and social rights to participate fully in a democratic society. However, citizenship is also a discipline and a tool of discrimination that permits governments to exercise extensive control over who can participate and the extent of that participation. This article addresses the dual nature of citizenship as it applies to critical new spaces shaped by high technology. Specifically, it takes up citizenship in what Castells and Halls call the “technopoles” or regional concentrations of science, technology, and venture capital whose icon is Silicon Valley. The article uses citizenship to critique new manifestations of the technopole phenomenon and concludes by considering different forms of regionally based citizenship that provide alternatives ways to think about progressive social development.

Canadian consumers and telephone pricing: From luxury to necessity and back again?

Changes are being sought in Canadas telecommunications services which would deregulate the industry and result in reduced long-distance telephone rates and increased local charges. This article examines historical data on telephone rates and penetration, and contemporary evidence on the results of telephone industry changes in both Canada and the USA. The authors argue that such changes would benefit business users and harm residential users. They would challenge Canadas long-term commitment to universal telephone services -- an ironic development in an information age where access to electronic technology is becoming essential for daily life.

Entanglements: Between Two Cultures and Beyond Science Wars

Over the past 50 years, two distinct arguments have dominated discussions of the relationship between science and culture or the arts. One, famously announced by C. P. Snow in the 1950s, proclaimed a great divide between the sciences and the arts or what was widely believed to be two distinct cultures and modes of understanding. The other, more prominent in recent times, claims that whether reconcilable or not, differences have led to entanglements and conflicts that feed popular accounts of outright warfare between those supporting one or the other way of comprehending the world (Parsons, 2003). Neither argument is new but each has taken on a particular urgency since Snow wrote because science is now big business and the partnership between science and industry is itself closely tied to the military. As for culture, it too has become a central economic force and, Science as Culture Vol. 21, No. 1, 101–115, March 2012

Critical theory and electronic media

The revolution in the method of production in industry and agriculture, likewise necessitated a revolution in the general conditions of the social process of production, that is to say in the means of communication and transport. In a society whose pivots ... were, first, small-scale àgriculture, with its subsidiary home industries, and, secondly, urban handicraft, the means of communication and transport were utterly inadequate to the requirements of the manufacturing period, with its extended division of social labor, its concentration of the means of labor and of the workers, and its colonial markets; communications and transport, therefore had to be revolutionized, and were in fact revolutionized.Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I (Everyman, 1972), 106.

Here Today, Outsourced Tomorrow: Knowledge Workers in the Global Economy

Abstract Outsourcing of jobs, particularly the growing practice of sending the jobs of U.S. knowledge and communication sector workers to other countries, has become a significant issue in academic, policy and media circles. The paper begins by defining knowledge workers and summarising debates about their significance dating from the 1950s. Next it considers prevailing views about the problem which centre on the fear of massive job loss to low-wage nations like India and China and prevailing solutions offered by labour- stop outsourcing wherever possible, and by business-outsourcing can only be curtailed when business and labour grow smarter. Each of these views conveys an essential truth but each deals only with symptoms of a significant transformation in the international division of labour. Understanding this transformation, and the role of information and communication technologies, leads us to consider key dimensions in the complexity of outsourcing: developed nations like Canada and Ireland have benefited as recipients of outsourced jobs; less developed nations like India are not just recipients of outsourced jobs, they are beginning to lead the process; in spite of “end of geography” promises, place matters and culture counts; and, finally, resistance takes a multiplicity of forms.

Deregulating telecommunications: The workers' view

This paper draws on data gathered in the course of a two-year study of the Canadian telecommunications industry workforce. The study contributes to the international literature on telecommunications deregulation by providing the first systematic data on how the telephone industry workforce views the policy of deregulation. If found that opposition to deregulation is widespread, and even stronger than opposition to technical change. The findings support anecdotal experience from other countries that deregulation even poses a significant threat to jobs.

The labouring of the public service principle: union convergence and worker movements in the North American communication industries

Purpose – The paper aims to expand the public service principle to cover labour and worker organizations in the communication industry. It also aims to demonstrate the value of labour convergence as an instrument to advance the interests of knowledge workers and the public interest in communication.Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from conceptual debates around the nature of knowledge labour and of convergence. It draws from interviews and documentary evidence to determine the value of trade union convergence and new forms of worker organization in the communication industries.Findings – The paper finds that communication workers are engaging in their own form of convergence and are using it to advance the public service principle in knowledge labour. In doing so, they are expanding the public interest in communication.Originality/value – The paper is one of the only studies that connects the public service principle and convergence to knowledge and communication workers. It demonstrates that...

The Political Economy of Communication: Lessons from the Founders

When Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, a leading architect of economic reconstruction in the former Communist world, was asked about his work in the region, he began by calling it “the greatest moral challenge of our time” (Rusk, 1991, p. B8). When his colleague Benjamin Friedman wrote a book (1988) attacking the excesses of Reagonomics, he introduced each chapter with a Biblical citation. In their recent overview of the political economy of communication, Golding and Murdock (1991, pp. 18–19) maintain that what distinguishes critical political economy is that “perhaps most importantly of all, it goes beyond technical issues of efficiency to engage with basic moral questions of justice, equity and the public good.” These are examples from across the spectrum of perspectives in economics and political economy that there is some unease with what has become the customary practice of separating science from morality. They inspire the effort in this chapter to expand our conception of the political economy of communication by returning to the thinking of some of the discipline’s founding figures.