Digital Day - Dan Schiller
Tue, 07 May 2013 13:00:00 IST - Tue, 07 May 2013 16:30:00 IST
At Main Room, Huston School of Film & Digital Media
Organised by Huston School of Film & Digital Media
Digital Depression: the Crisis of Digital Capitalism The economic downturn of the early 1970s engendered massive, sustained corporate investment in ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies,) as a many sided attempt to renew profitable growth. Core components of this response included financialisation, the restructuring of the production system, and the recomposition of the communications industry as a leading site of economic dynamism. The vaunted ‘Information Age’, however, turned out to herald a new and deeper financial-economic crisis - a digital depression with which we continue to live. How may the newly contentious geopolitics of information play out? May we expect the communications sector to reprise its earlier role in renewing growth and profitability? 2.30 on Tuesday 7th May, Main Room Huston School. Rosa Luxemburg's Internet? Both the state and capital have been crucial for the evolving political economy of the Internet. Drawing on the thought of the Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, We should inquire as to how states are supporting commodification projects built around the Internet; how they are contending with one another in this process; and how communication processes are related to the historical reconstitution of the global working class. Professor Dan Schiller is a historian of information and communications at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The author of half a dozen books and many research articles, he has written extensively on the development and current structure of digital capitalism—the system of market relationships that is predicated increasingly on networks. His current research focuses on the role of information and communications in today's financial/economic crisis, and on the history of U.S. telecommunications infrastructures.