iSPY: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (review)

This book is a provocative and readable romp through the contemporary U.S. “new media” landscape. Andrejevic, who teaches Communication Studies at the University of Iowa, casts his own critical eye on the “. . . hip, tricky little ‘i’ that appears in front of an increasing variety of popular products . . .” (4). His main goal is to deconstruct and demystify the hype, propagated by various computer industry leaders, scientists, bloggers, and MIT tech-heads, that proclaims that interactive media stands before us as the savior of our waning democratic culture. Proponents of this version of techno-spirituality contend that “interactivity”—a slippery term but, in essence, a form of two-way, symmetrical and transparent communication that helps level the playing field—allows us to better stand out and stand up as individuals living in mass society. While I found little to disagree with in Andrejevic’s central critique, ultimately, I think the project falters in a number of ways.

Andrejevic argues that the foundation for the new wired and supposedly more democratic social world is the construction of an interactive realm where we may get to “talk back” but also where every action and transaction generates information about itself. In essence, in order to for us to fully participate in this free-wheeling, interactive sphere, the trade off is that we have to enter a “digital enclosure” where all the signals and transmissions and transactions are monitored. This form of surveillance and the asymmetric power relations vested in the builders of the digital enclosure, i.e. corporate monopolies and weak state regulatory agencies, ultimately undermines much of the democratic promise. Fair enough. But how many out there, especially among an academic audience, actual take the hyperbolic claims of cybercelebrants like Nicholas Negroponte and Bill Gates seriously anyway?

As a whole, I found the book to be somewhat disjointed, struggling to contain a variety of themes while lacking a unifying conceptual framework. The sprinkling of quotes attributed to high-minded theorists—from Adorno to Žižek—fails to bring it all together. A chapter on “iManagement” covers a wide range of topics from Taylorism to the history of the “ratings industry,” while others on “iWar” and “iPolitics” come off more as political rants than focused analyses. Surveillance, a key concept of the book, is never developed fully and the extensive literature on the phenomenon is barely referenced. Further, it seems to me that Andrejevic falls victim to his own critique of “interactivity” as an ill-defined concept. Any data collection device or electronic media falls under his example umbrella whether they involve any real “interactivity” or not. Further, I found myself wondering how many people are actually participating in on-line forums like “TWoP” (“Television without Pity”), feeding producers their own versions of their favorite TV shows or who are taking part in the Homeland Security’s call for a vigilant, digitized citizenry. It is one thing to point out the commonalities of these themes; it is quite another to demonstrate how they are actually affecting the lives of a significant number of people.

In the end, we are left with what Andrejevic admits are dismal prospects. Yet, like many a cultural critic, hope springs eternal in the closing paragraphs where this author shakes-off his critical reverie and seems to say, “Hey wait, it doesn’t have to be like this! There could be a “public” rather than corporate digital enclosure through which we might somehow realize more truly collaborative and authentic forms of participation.” Yet the only concrete example Andrejevic can muster comes from members of the same “digerati” he had scorned throughout the text: ad hoc “mesh” networks developed by some “new media” guru’s graduate student that could bypass the commercial grid and might allow users “. . . to stream music to one another from their computers—to act, in short, as point-to-point network radios” (266). I have to say that if the fate of our anemic democracy hinges on the ability of some graduate students...