Book Review: New Television, Old Politics: The Transition to Digital TV in the United States and Great Britain

No social or economic theory survives intact when it receives excessive credibility from policymakers. It is rarely theorists who translate their own insights into rules for policy formation, but policymakers who do it for them. Theorists of the stature of Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes feared the ability of political powers to codify their ideas, and produce hegemonic frameworks devoid of flexibility, uncertainty or contingency. Marx’s famous declaration that he was ‘not a Marxist’ or Keynes’s phrase that ‘in the end, we are all dead’ were attempts to apologise in advance, should their theories be converted into all-encompassing, ahistorical abstractions. Policymakers need their hegemonic social frameworks. They provide comfort and direction to legislators, but they also enable them to hide their decisionmaking behind seemingly apolitical social sciences. Contingency, institutions and political will come to appear parts of the system, rather than creators of the system or potential critiques of it. Where this happens, the theorist must then mobilize contingency to illuminate cracks in the alleged system. The Frankfurt School of the 1930s saw aesthetics as the way to desystematize Marxism, while the Post-Keynesians of the 1990s used the influence of Wittgenstein on the young Keynes as a rebuke to the neo-classical systematizing of their New Keynesian rivals. The true heir to a social theory unsettles it in order to save it. Hernan Galperin’s book performs a similar service for the overarching narrative of the ‘information society’. Together with its associated narratives of ‘globalization’ and ‘the knowledge economy’, the information society is an explanatory paradigm that is now orthodoxy in the English-speaking world, three decades after Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society first set out to formulate it. It has its grand theorists in Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells, plus its political bridgeheads in figures such as Robert Reich and Anthony New Media & Society 7(2)