The making of a National Information Infrastructure: A cultural analysis of social networking

The significance of post-structuralist cultural theories is related to the making of public policy about social networking in the latter techno-cultural stage of the formation of capitalist societies. New and different frames of questioning about the relationships between signification and presumed reality in the cultural analysis argue that meanings in language do not simply reflect but actually constitute the reality experienced by individuals. In the present study, two documents from Congressional hearings are examined. One of them is from the hearings on the first triennial review of the Modified Final Judgment (referred to as MFJ) in 1987-1988; the other is from the "National High-Performance Computer Technology Act of 1989" for the establishment of a National Information Infrastructure (referred to as NII).; The essentialist notion of technology as a universal service for a unified audience is rejected. Pre- and extra-linguistic references to technology are negated and replaced by the argument that any technology is a social construct. The myth of natural divisions is dissolved to repudiate the regulatory boundaries among industries or classifications of technologies.; Discussion in this study consists of four parts. The first part argues that the transformation of the nation's telecommunications and the constitution of information services are neither a simple function of the state regulatory apparatus nor a mere clash of ideological opposites. The second part contends that the constitution of communications technology is not necessarily a class practice but a struggle among variously differentiated categories of society. The third part criticizes the nation's new communications infrastructure as dealt with in the hearings documents as technological determinism and a utopian ideology through the illegitimate imposition of a teleological conception of social progress. In the fourth part, computer-mediated social networking is analyzed as the exclusively politico-technical domain of a new dominant social class. The techno-cultural formation of society is seen as dominated by the collective properties and dispositions of this class.