Mosco Digital Sublime, 24 April

Comments here and there on Mosco's book:

p. 5: I would like to see a team of serious scholars work up the .com bubble along the lines of the comparison Mosco makes with the Great Depression. We've more or less been told that the economy absorbed the shock of that collapse, but I doubt that that is true. Why isn't the story reported?

p. 16: If as myths become reabsorbed into collective consciousness they exert their greatest political influence, what about the emergence of collective political will? The problem is that things are what we say they are until someone says differently. This relates to the .com collapse: if we had a Depression but nobody talked about it, there was no Depression to generate a political response. It's not an issue of cognition, it's an issue of control over the terms of the debate, or "framing" as it is now called.

p. 39: More provocative than the comments on Gore is the offhand remark that most people "have yet to use a telephone"; if that can be shown, then what significance does it have? Isn't knowing that telephones exist enough for them to have an impact?

About Fukuyama: isn't the issue about Fukuyama one of who pays him to say what he says, and who the target audience might be?

The most pervasive myth of cyberspace is that now the cool people will rule everything. Gore's problem in the 1990s is that he was claiming coolness but had yet to ascend to the appropriate chill level in the public mind.

Ch. 6 is very helpful--that the conspicuousness and lack of utility of the Twin Towers, connected with the economic cleansing of lower Manhattan in the 1960s, contributed to their vulnerability to catastrophic attack, is a point that can't be made often enough (note pp. 151-152).

Comment from main page, 10 April 2007

No argument with anything anyone has posted. These comments are very helpful.

The book by Ross cited in the Silicon Alley article, No collar, is a text we read in the first iteration of the class, and I recommend it highly. The beginnings of employee organization and traditional labor consciousness are discussed in Ross's ch. 7, "Optimize me." The key issue is that while Internet companies were expending enormous energy to make employees comfortable in the workplace, the survival of the industry in 2000 came down to cash flow. As far as employees were concerned, the financial issues were offstage.

In the article about models, I was reminded of how the public image of flight attendants has changed in 50 years, due to cost cutting in the airline industry, civil rights actions by employees, and unionization by attendants. Glamor has been sacrificed, but attendants have greater status and job security, along with more dignity. How models could organize to protect themselves I don't know. Actors, who have similar physical issues, are very militant.