Beniger - The Control Revolution report

One reading for this week features the work of James R. Beniger with an excerpt from his book The Control Revolution that was published in March of 1989. Beniger’s past is one decorated with degrees from some prestigious schools. He was a magna cum laude Harvard University graduate and later received his Ph. D. from Princeton. Previously, Beniger taught at Princeton and most recently at the University of Southern California where he was a professor in the Annenberg School of Communications before he passed in 2010. He was unwaveringly intrigued in how communication technologies evolve and change. The first book Beniger wrote was Drug Users: Professional Exchange Networks in the Control of Deviance which discussed how information flowed from one area to another, social changes, and social networks.

In the excerpt of his book we were assigned, Beniger begins to describe the early foundations of the control revolution, which started with the “crisis for control”. The industrial revolution ignited an explosion of information and transferring information across the globe. Early on, however, there was no order to the copious amounts of materials now at everyone’s fingertips. Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist who thoroughly examined the industrial revolution. He noticed that the more complex and complicated societies got, the greater the need for information control.

The solution that came about for the lack of control was bureaucracy. Beniger stated, “a bureaucratic organization tends to appear wherever a collective activity needs to be coordinated by several people towards explicit and personal goals, that is, to be controlled” (Beniger 58). Another way of managing information was rationalization. To have a better functioning society, they not only need to increase their processing capability, but also decrease the amount of information that needs processing. For example, making standardized paper forms so it takes less time to sort each one. Once bureaucracies and rationalization had established ways of organizing all the information, more control technology was perfected to better reach more people, with the more organized information. The updated technology included both the telephone and the printing press.

With the ability to reach many more people with much more information, the now famous expression “information society” emerged. Coming with the information society movement was a shift in the job market as well. In the eighteenth century, the majority of workers were involved in agriculture. Today almost all the working force is employed through some form of information distribution or works in a large industry based around knowledge instead of hard labor.

After sifting through many critiques of Beniger’s book, I couldn’t find a single one that had a negative comment. Critics loved the book, naming it as a source that provides rich, unrivaled cultural history of the information systems. Others called it “a masterly treatment of some of the most important developments in the making of society”. Judging from the opinions of critics, the depth of the issues covered and the sheer amount of material covered, this is a very reliable source for information regarding the control revolution.