INTERACTIONS OF THE TECHNICAL AND THE SOCIAL

Abstract

This article compares two kinds of socio-technical formations: electronic financial networks and local social activist movements that are globally networked. Both cut across the global/national duality and each has altered the economic and political landscapes for, respectively, financial elites and social activists. Using these two cases helps illuminate the very diverse ways in which the growth of electronic networks partially transforms existing politico-economic orderings. They are extreme cases, one marked by hypermobility and the other by physical immobility. But they show us that each is only partly so: financial electronic networks are subject to particular types of embeddedness and local activist organizations can benefit from novel electronic potentials for global operation. Financial electronic networks and electronic activism not only reveal two parallel developments associated with particular technical properties of the new interactive digital technologies, but also reveal a third, radically divergent outcome, which is interpreted as signalling the weight of the specific social logics of users in each case.

Keywords:

• digital formations
• powerful
• powerless
• global/national
• territory

Acknowledgements

The author thanks an anonymous reviewer for several helpful comments and suggestions. She also thanks the SSRC for inviting her to chair a five-year project on ICTs and International Relations, supported by a generous Ford Foundation grant; part of the research the author carried outfor that project allowed her to develop a number of conceptual and empirical aspects which have also shaped this paper.

Notes

For a full development of these various issues, see Sassen (2008, chapters 7 and 8).

The particularities of these two cases serve to address several larger research agendas now under way. They include specifying, among others, advancing our understanding of the actual socio-digital formations arising from these mixes of technology and interaction (Barry & Slater 2002; Howard & Jones 2004; Latham & Sassen 2005; Bartlett 2007; Lovink 2008; Lovink & Dean 2010), the possible new forms of sociality such mixes may be engendering (e.g. Whittel 2001; Elmer 2004; Himanen 2001; Latham & Sassen 2005; Olesen 2005; Castells 2009), the possible new forms of economic development and social justice struggles enabled by these technologies (Gurstein 2000; Avgerou 2002; Mansell et al. 2009), and the consequences for state authority of digital networks that can override many traditional jurisdictions (Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 1998; Rosenau & Singh 2002; Klein 2005; Drake & Williams III 2006).

For instance, the growth of electronic network alliances among financial exchanges located in different cities makes legible that electronic markets are partly embedded in the concentrations of material resources and human talents of financial centres, because part of the purpose is to capture the specific advantages of each of the financial centres (Sassen 2008, chapter 7). Thus, such alliances are not about transcending the exchanges involved or merging everything into one exchange.

I use the term imbrication to capture this simultaneous interdependence and specificity of each the digital and the nondigital. They work on each other, but they do not produce hybridity in this process. Each maintains its distinct irreducible character (Sassen 2008, chapter 7).

The model designed for Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) was considered a significant and brilliant innovation. Others adopted similar arbitrage strategies, despite the fact that LTCM did its best to conceal its strategies (MacKenzie 2003). MacKenzie and Millo (2003) posit that two factors ensured the success of option pricing theory (Black–Scholes) in the Chicago Board Options Exchange. First, the markets gradually changed (e.g. alterations of Regulation T, the increasing acceptability of stock borrowing, and better communications) so that the assumptions of the model became increasingly realistic. Second, the spread of a particular technical culture of interpretation in the context of globalized economic processes gradually reduced barriers to the model's widespread use. The performativity of this model was not automatic but ‘a contested, historically contingent outcome, ended by a historical event, the crash of 1987’ (MacKenzie 2003, p. 138).

Among the main sources of data for the figures cited in this section are the International Bank for Settlements (Basle); International Monetary Fund national accounts data; specialized trade publications such as Wall Street Journal's WorldScope, Morgan Stanley Capital International; The Banker; data listings in the Financial Times and in The Economist. For a more detailed account and full bibliography, see Sassen (2011, chapters 2, 4, and 5).

This parallels cases where use of the Internet has allowed diasporas to be globally interconnected rather than confined to a one-to-one relationship with the country or region of origin.

There are several organizations that work on adjusting to these constraints or providing adequate software and other facilities to disadvantaged NGOs. An early example is that of Bellanet (2002), a non-profit set up in 1995 that played a critical role in Latin America. It helps poor NGOs gain access to online information and with information dissemination to the south. To that end, it has set up Web-to-email servers that can deliver Web pages by email to users confined to low bandwidth. It has developed multiple service lines. Bellanet's Open Development service line seeks to enable collaboration among NGOs through the use of open source software, open content, and open standards; so it customized the Open Source PhP-Nuke software to set up an online collaborative space for the Medicinal Plants Network. Bellanet adopted Open Content making all forms of content on its Web site freely available to the public; it supports the development of an open standard for project information (International Development Markup Language). Such open standards enable information sharing.