The Control Revolution

"Weber included among defining characteristics of bureaucracy several important aspects of any control system: impersonal orientation of structure to the information that it processes, usually identified as "cases," with a predetermined formal set of rules governing all decisions and responses. Any tendency to humanize this bureaucratic machinery, Weber argued, would be minimized through clear-cut division of labor and definition of responsibilities, hierarchical authority, and specialized decision and communication functions."

-- From The Control Revolution, James Beniger, p. 15

Beniger's description of Weber's definition of bureaucracy made me laugh and reminded me of the experience I had just gone through prior to reading this introduction. I had recently experienced some problems with the database on my website, and I went through my hosting company multiple times to ask some questions. Each time, I spoke to a human who recited a script and followed various protocols in order to assist me. I was put on hold multiple times before I finally reached the right person in the right department and was handed various case numbers and that sort of thing. All in all, I was happy to speak with a person rather than a computerized/automated system that responded to vocal cues, numbers and specific words- experiencing a robot voice rather than a human person in my experience is incredibly frustrating when one is faced with any kind of technical or logistical problem. In a way, the experience was as efficient as I could possibly imagine, yet in another it was incredibly redundant as I was forced to repeatedly state my name, recite pieces of various contact information, and answer my "secret question" to people in each department.

On a more theoretical note, Beniger in The Control Revolution has me wondering in his text where the role of nation-building, the emergence of the nation, the consequences of colonialism/empire, and mechanized/modern warfare fit into his theory of a 19th-century crisis of control and the subsequent restoration of economic and communicative order, a macro-change in social, production, distribution, and information processing relations that he calls the Control Revolution? (p. 26.) Where do these political, economic and social events or shifts fall? Are they too obvious in terms of their societal and economic influence? I think the answer to that might be yes, but at the same time his introduction seems a bit anemic to me when these issues are not at all addressed, even by way of a disclaimer from him.

I've also been thinking about what we were asked in class: what characteristics or conditions of the Industrial Revolution led to the growing need for rapid, inexpensive and widespread communications technologies, developing forms of organizational management, information processing capacities and information management sciences? Was it new forms of transportation that changed our economic system and made it more efficient or even possible to buy and sell at a distance? Was it a need to expand existing governments by demonstrating economic and social influence wherever possible? I don't know how to answer these question in a few sentences, truly, but I feel like there is something missing in Beniger if he does not include the role of national infrastructures as critical to making these changes. I wonder how many of these material and societal changes via technology came from top-down or bottom-up, from private or governmentally funded institutions or organizations, in terms of their research & development, implementation, and publicization of the usefulness and appeal.

My other question is: where are the humans in Beniger's analysis? In all of this I am wondering about human agency in the world of control, if we are more than just creators and then parts of these systems he speaks of. The world appears awfully reductionist in some way if everything is thought of in terms of control, or lack of it. For some reason I got the impression that Beninger describes all humans as roughly the same, as part of the managerial/economic/productive/telecom/industrial order of things, or else he doesn't describe us at all (those who don't fit into the picture or who are left behind the control system, or who are exploited by it.)