ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses material and symbolic shifts associated with globalization and the information society. Its main perspective is that structuring and restructuring in contemporary times, as well as resistances of various kinds related to such processes, are now taking place in complex technological conditions. While most are familiar with the technological order of industrialization, with its emphasis on heavy machinery, centralized modes of (mass) production, and patterns of inequality and oppression associated with it, the new information society mode is presenting new framings for consideration. These do not replace industrialization, which, as a central feature of globalization, continues its geographical spread across the world, as evidenced most notably in the manufacturing giant that China has now become. But they do expand our thinking about political economy to incorporate information and communication technologies (ICTs) and diverse economic developments associated with the digital age. ICTs may be seen as a new form of economy, but their structures sub-

stantially reflect the dominant neoliberal patterns of ownership and control that have characterized the industrialized economy. The market dominance of global giants like Microsoft illustrate this only too well. But the technological character of the information age offers decentralizing tendencies as well as centralizing ones, in ways that many consider to be entirely new. ICTs facilitate horizontal dissemination of power, innovation, and resistance, in addition to strengthening familiar vertical forms of power, whether state or corporate. Horizontal patterns reflect myriad forms of economic and social entrepreneurialism, resistance through networking, online community building, and information and product sharing, such as blogging and music file sharing. In simple terms, such developments indicate that political economy is now an online and offline phenomenon, that is, one that is channeled via the digital world and the diverse technologies (hardware and software) associated with it, as well as the more familiar material world. Power and inequality and resistances to them are being increasingly

expressed in these online and offline circumstances and, thus, their material

and symbolic qualities increasingly need to be taken into account. Feminist concerns and strategies reflect these changed conditions, and are likely to do so in more intense patterns as the digital economy continues to expand, and becomes embedded in growing numbers of societies across the world. In macro terms, the global economy can already be considered a hybrid of digital and industrial worlds. Robotics in manufacturing, and digitization, for example of media, demonstrated, even before mass use of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the ability of the former (the digital) to adapt and transform the latter (the industrial). Such transformations continue, but ICTs have provided new infrastructures for producing and consuming, as well as providing new products (hardware and software), and facilitating continually expanding new services. The digital economy not only captures what we produce and consume, but also the ways (often virtual) in which we engage in these and other social activities.