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Jeremy Bentham coined the term ‘panopticon’ in his proposal for a circular prison, whose cells were exposed to a central well in which the warders were located, allowing the prisoners to see all other prisoners and to be observed at all times without ever knowing when they were being watched. Bentham also promoted the idea of political economy as the greatest good for the greatest number. Drawing on his terminology as the basis for this article, I therefore propose the new term ‘infopolecon’ to describe the political economy of information.
I start with a problem. What do I mean by the term ‘information’? The word is used to describe the objects on which data is coded and structured, the codes and structures themselves, the resources, and the process by which users of these resources use them. In itself it is now so general as to be of no use to us at all. I want to limit discussion to a specific class of problem - information systems design. By looking at the design, we can formulate an information practice which shows a political economy.
Let us take an undergraduate. Any undergraduate will do. There are about a million of them in Britain at the
moment. Each undergraduate undertakes a module in which there is an assignment. They do about ten of
these in a year. An assignment starts with a problem definition which defines a search space, an information
deficiency, which has to be satisfied by the writing of a document. This is called learning. They perform this
process within an infrastructure called the world of learning. Their teachers populate the search space with
documents which they themselves have written, their careers patterned by the relative influence or
frequency of these documents.
All of these documents now are electronic, virtual, and digitised at beginning and at end, though they might go through various transformations, including appearing as ink squeezed into dead trees. Some of the documents are understood to have a beginning and an end, some to be in collections assembled according to rules, known or unknown. Some are called books, some journals. Some are called libraries. Others are files, and others, URLs.
Part of what the undergraduate has to learn is how to navigate this search space. But where are the maps to this world of learning? Where the blueprints? At a more primitive layer still, what is the physics, the chemistry and the biology of this world? What are its atoms and its particles and its organisms? How does our undergraduate understand it?
Then, let us take a university. Any university will do. There are about a hundred of them in Britain. They cost about ten billion pounds a year to run, and they hold all together about a million undergraduates, each producing around ten documents a year. This is the organisational form which the world of learning takes. In each university there are teachers, who structure courses, set and mark assignments, write teaching materials, produce papers, referee one another’s papers and edit journals in which these papers are published.
In any one university, or in the world of learning as a whole, how are these papers organised? And for the production of one paper, as a process, how is it systematised? By re-engineering the process of systematisation, can the unit cost per activity be reduced?
But the product is not the physical form, the paper - it is the activity, the learning, of which the written assignment is only a representation. The organisational form these documents coagulate around either hinders or facilitates learning. The question is which? And if we can tell which, can we then improve the process?
Three elements are missing from the world of learning modelled thus so far. The first is the publishers. Some were established by the universities and are owned by them, some were speculative enterprises intended to generate a profit for their owners. They risk capital in order to produce a document, a print run. They will realise that risk through sales and revenue. When hot metal presses and compositors and galleys were involved the capital and the risk was high. Now there is none.
The second is the secondary publisher, the publisher of ‘information’ about what publishers have published.
The third element is the library. In the university this was from the beginning a collection of documents shared by the university as a whole, rather than the collection which belonged to an individual teacher or student. It produced its own type of professionals who knew how to organise it as it grew. And in some sense they could organise a community of libraries where the sum of the system as a whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The libraries produced catalogues, so that the reader could know not only that the document was, but where it was.
Yet libraries, which provide the publications of primary and secondary publishers, still do not give learners all they need. What is missing is aboutness, for both reader and document. What is the reader about? What do they need to know? And what is the document about? How can it satisfy the information deficiency? And where to look, since the virtualised, digitised electronic collection of all documents which now constitutes the world of learning has not the concrete form or appearance of a library, a catalogue, a shelf and a book? So it is not surprising that our undergraduate might be disoriented.
How have the denizens of this world of learning responded to this virtualisation? How are we constructing this new virtual reality so that learning might occur?
Well we, the teachers, are carrying on much as before, writing papers, producing courses and marking assignments. Precious little has changed on that front, which is surprising. What has changed, though, is the number of students per teacher, which means that the proportion of the teacher’s time given to each student has fallen. In fact, such is the massification that individually students hardly exist at all.
How has the library changed? Surprisingly little too. It still spends most of its budget on books and journals which are stored on shelves.
Nor have publishers changed in any significant way. They are still printing books, journals and catalogues. The prices of student textbooks have fallen, the quantity of print increased. Colour has been added with falling prices. New media have arrived, though there are few truly multimedia publications.
The change is in the network.
When computers were first built they were big and expensive - though in their time so too were books. But where books were owned by scholars and universities, paid for out of their own funds almost from the beginning in this country, computers were paid for by a central organisation of the state. As computers were linked together, networking was provided out of top-slicing the budget of the universities of Britain as a whole. A most uncharacteristic British thing. And they had to intercommunicate, which meant standardisation. This was driven by the Computer Board which allocated funding bid for from the Treasury.
The internetworking was enabled by a suite of protocols called the Joint Academic Network Colour Books onto which was layered a transition to the Open Systems Interconnection strategy required by European Commission directive. Meanwhile the US had DARPANET and TCP/IP. The Computer Board subsequently became the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) ,the club of Directors of Computer Centres called itself the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA), the Joint Academic Network became the United Kingdom Education and Research Networking Association (UKERNA), and X.25 became TCP/IP. But the teachers have not been involved in any of this at all.
Since academic networking began, there has been a tension between the running of the network itself, and what it was for. My experience of trying to raise issues in regional and national JANET user groups is that there is an endless fracture between conduit and content.
The Follett report, which started from libraries and the impact of information technology, rather than from questions of what higher education is for and how it should be delivered, was disappointing in its narrowness and lack of imagination (though I must declare an interest as I had been commissioned to write a paper on the information economy). The development of BIDS, NISS and then the deal with ISI were all precursors of what was to come. At every stage expediency was the excuse for short-term fixes followed by institutionalisation of the result.
And from this has grown the JISC datasets policy, the eLib programme and the whole horror show with which we are now confronted. For, whatever the infelicities of the actual deals with the dataset providers, the added complexities of both nationally-provided services and local organisation (where power struggles are now common between the managers of computing and library services) mean that today's undergraduate has very little grasp of how to perform an information search or answer a question.
The problem is not confined to higher education. The British Library recently produced a gimmicky interface to its Catalogue of Printed Books, while it still has no plan for the digitisation of its vast collection.
Meanwhile TCP/IP with HTML begat Mosaic, Mosaic begat Netscape, and Netscape with Z39.50 produced Common Gateway Interfaces (CGIs). But the nationally-provided services were slow to take up the opportunities offered by the Internet and so each university implemented library-based solutions in different ways, resulting in the worst of a centrally-organised top-sliced resource, and a locally-provided idiosyncratic one.
Our predicament is one which I have called elsewhere ‘Mrs Thatcher’s handbag modem’. We are the victims of the state's taxing and top-slicing, and our local institutions' multiplicities of management layers. The state brought us ‘uk.ac’. Local organisation brought in a proliferation of CD-ROMs, databases, licence agreements, passwords and log-on procedures.
In large part the fault must lie with the Librarians of the universities who have had for many years an organisation, SCONUL, which would have been capable of exercising considerable muscle against the publishers.
But in larger part the fault must lie with the funding agency which has the power of the control of the finances of the system as a whole. The absurdity of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is clear to most of us. But imagine if the RAE input had been URLed, as I suggested in a paper to the JNUG in 1994. There would then be a major research database as an output of what otherwise has been a huge waste of resource.
The fault must also lie with the teachers and professional associations which have played little part in the process at all. There has been a failure of analysis, of engineering and of theory.
Returning to our world of learning, where do we go from here with these ten million design exercises? I think it is still possible for higher education to form a power block to force through the implications of the new information and communication technologies. It is possible for the one hundred universities to create better learning environments. In the meantime information systems designers have been given a rich laboratory of examples of what not to do and how not to do it.
What we have created, then, is an infopolecon in which in every cell the learner can see everything and everywhere, but has no structure to understand what any of it means. As virtualisation and digitisation accelerate, the need increases for concrete codes, structures and notations. These have to be taught. This is where we must start.
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on November 20th 1996