Nikolai Novikov was the Soviet Ambassador to the United States in 1946-1947 and he ready his telegram for Stalin and Molotov. Though Novikov’s telegram consciously mirrors the quite breathless and apocalyptic tone of Kennan’s, he makes some fascinating points.
We stay in a world the place the usage of expertise is accelerating at breakneck pace. From cell phones and video video games to smart appliances and social networks, with each passing day, expertise turns into extra a part of everyday life. When you feel such as you’re caught in a dashing current of bits and bytes that appears to be carrying you away from the world you knew, away from a place of comfort – know that you just’re not alone. That is the lifescape of the 21st century. However is technology in management? Completely not! Society is not any more managed by expertise than Invoice was by Hillary.
This know-how of power rests on the buildup of coded info used to manage the actions of individuals about whom it’s gathered. In distinction to earlier political varieties, the modem state lays less stress on overt coercion to sustain its rule. As a substitute it favors pervasive, and penetrative administrative energy, primarily by the gathering, storage and retrieval of knowledge within an administrative context of regulated definitions of tasks, features and roles that situate people and groups in relation to other people and groups in an administrative or organizational framework.
Radio right now had not only the technical benefit of lightweight replaceable expertise but more importantly was able to be used to create a self-referential feedback loop of political communication between producers and receivers, tending in the direction of breaking down the distinctions between them: ‘the totality of technical and human means accessible should permit the institution of a veritable feedback loop between the auditors and the published workforce: whether or not by direct intervention by telephone, via opening studio doors, through interviews or programmes based on listener made cassettes’.
Most not too long ago, Douglas Rushkoff has turned his essential lens to the medium of foreign money. Probably the most necessary concepts that he coins and develops is the notion of social foreign money, or the degree to which sure content and media can facilitate and/or promote relationships and interactions between members of a group. Rushkoff mentions jokes, scandals, blogs, atmosphere, i.e. something that will engender water cooler” talk, as social currency.
