Operational Context

For the purposes of this meta-brief - emanating from and referring back onto - the document at hand, I shall attempt to reduce the complexities, which can be derived from a thorough analysis of the current transformations that are refitting society, into two contrasting - although inter-related - patterns embodying thematic qualities; one, which I interpret positively; and, one which I interpret negatively.

Most salient to any considerations concerning the material conditions that are instantiated by the emergence of the Network Society and - to be more precise, referring to the circumstances found in American social formations - are the alterations in the economic institutions forming the rela­tionships between those who dictate the terms of employment and those who are obliged to acquiesce to those terms when procuring employment. The changes undergoing the form assumed by the relationships between firms and employees are significant to the point where is compelled to reconsider the analytics typically attached to the conception of elements - as the concept has been generally understood in the context of industrial capitalism. It is not a stretch to suggest that employment is a term that should be discontinued as a reference to the non-stan­dard terms of employment suffered by skilled laborers in the Informational economy. The socio-grammatical conventions forming the family resemblance of economic institutions that have been spawned by the material conditions in which agents and the aggregates - that they collectively form -who find themselves situated in the information economy - embody characteristics, render­ing them qualitatively unique exemplars of sociality. Therefore, the referring expression, virtual employment, will be used as a designator, when signifying instances of this social phenomenon, hence forth.

In order to provide definition to virtual employment, some extended remarks are necessary: The current economic condition - informational capitalism - in its most rudimentary dimensions, instantiates an input to output dynamic that has diverged from the traditional, industrial capitalist relational function, which assumed the form of raw materials transformed into commodities. The information economy - in opposition - can be understood - in the most generic of terms - as a mode of production that involves the input of information and the output of reorganized informa­tion; a construct, which can be referred to - for the sake of clarity - as knowledge. It is important, here, to mark a distinction between organization and reorganization, because the former applies to previous designs that exist prior to the latter’s inculcation.

In order to begin to understand this - what is the most basic of representations corresponding to the processes involved in informational capitalism - the precise nature of the function embedded within this relation needs further specification: Reorganization is a transformation that differs from the concrete functions found in industrial capitalism, constituting the mechanisms included in the operations performed upon the input - raw materials - in the sequences involved in the modes of production. The reorganization of information into a form of knowledge involves a transformation that cannot be routinized into the machinery of production - unless one is to reduce the available vocabulary to strictly materialist terminology - because the invention of the mode production qualifies as the production, itself. Therefore, keeping with the distinction declared between infor­mation and knowledge, as soon as knowledge has been produced, through the function implied in the input - output relationship of informational capitalism, the reorganized information - which has been transformed into knowledge - is reintegrated into the process as the input variable, and - once again - assumes the form of information. Consequentially, by definition, the mode of pro­duction cannot be mechanized because it would lack the properties qualifying as the connotative definition of production, as it is defined in the processes of informational capitalism; namely, the innovation of reorganized information; a definition that excludes standardized procedures, because such mechanics would entail the absence of innovation.

Stepping back from what has been analytically deposited thus far, some relationships between firms and the labor that firms employ become transparent: The modes of production can be understood as the persistent reorganization of the processes embedded in the modes of produc­tion, which constitutes the mode of production, per se; consequently, exacerbating the pace of de-skilling - a term that extends, most generally, to developments that render employees obso­lete - which creates volatility in the employer market. It should also be mentioned that the reorga­nization of data additionally includes the implementation of new grammatical schema deployed for purposes of structuring the classifications of document elements; the attributes of the docu­ment elements; and the possible values that the attributes can instantiate under varying - (although defined) - circumstances; because the procedure of implementing a new form of infor­mation technology necessitates the reorganization of the work flow processes utilized by an organization; thus, such a retrofitting constitutes the reorganization of information; specifically, the information - as it is defined and comes to be defined - within the work flow of the restructured social organization.

Returning to considerations conducted upon the nature of the relationships among firms and the labor they hirer, the conditions necessitating the augmentation of new labor become transient, reflecting the events in an organization’s state of affairs, where it must transition its ordering of information in order to reflect the evolving conditions of information technology. Therefore, the skills that are acquired when augmenting the labor capacities of the firm, as it transitions to a new state of information management.

In order to explain this theme through comparison, one can reference the present trends in Infor­mation Technology management, which now relies heavily on the implementation of virtual com­puting environments, in order to test software compatibility and to leverage available resources performed within spaces of productivity - that demand no institutional restructuring and fail to entail any necessary legacies, which might be incurred if the firm had originally adopted the workers as actual members of the institution; a relationship with the significance of manifesting all of the traditional definitions of expectations and obligations associated with employment.

The more sanguine of the two contrasting themes is the intellectual product of postmodern social theory - as well as, Castells, who might not necessarily fit within this rubric - who have argued for the acknowledgment of an emerging social condition resulting from the proliferation of digitally encoded communicative technologies - the virtual spaces of representation they entail - and the existential freedom to stylize one’s persona provided for within the digital matrix from which virtu­alism manifest - subsidiaries to Informationalism can be summarized under the slogan, re-enchantment.

The allusion to Weber, in this context, is appropriate, since there there is an empirically contingent subject to processes of confirmation juncture between two states that can be marked as qualitatively distinct from one another, through reference to the following contrasting characteristics: First off, the emphasis placed upon innovation - or creativity - calls for organizational environments structured according to flexibility, allowing for production to occur when inspiration precipitates insight, leading to innovation; a state that offer definition to production in the context of informational capitalism. Industrialism, on the other hand, prioritizes scheduling and efficiency, providing for the synchronization of events - performed by machines and their human appendages. Industrial Capitalism required the orderly sequencing of events in order to successfully enact it processes constituting the modes of pro­duction. Such an organization calls for the regimentation of social activity reflecting a synchronous layout of stages included in the operations through which output was generated.

It is too soon to fully address this topic in the context of the document object - executive summary - belonging to the document structure. Nevertheless, since the reference - to which the following brief remarks point - is transparently ostensible, it can be mentioned, without too much disrup­tion, that the flow of time in the Informational Economy instantiates different schematic qualities. In fact, the flow of time can be bannered under: an asynchronous dimension to the relations among digital objects and the relationships they intermediate during interactions among social counterparts. This state of affairs, in the of electronic interchange, through which transactions occur, exchanging information, need not be sequential, and, therefore, the forms of reciprocity that transpire can include objects that are not defined by any linear processed ordering of events. In other words, communications can address data objects in a recursive fashion; an aspect of the distant immediacy that characterizes the flow of events that occur in the virtual spaces engendered by the expansion of Internet infrastructures; or, what can be referred to, using Castells’ terminology, as Informationalism; the technological paradigm related to a pattern of productivity that is defined by exemplars constituting digitized communications.

Returning to the persona that is cultivated and constructed agents assuming a presence within the milieu of the digital matrix - a social object that can be Self stylized in the context of virtual interactions with greater plasticity, options, and allowance of revisions - the existential liberties attributable to the digital matrix are related to the condition in which interactions take place: The digital matrix instantiates a field of agents that interact with one another in a disembodied state. As a result, the physical attributes that entail ascription to a particular social identity are - often in the digital matrix - stripped from the communicative affair, allowing agents to bend their identities and play in the engagements while assuming the identity and role of statuses that they might be barred from in real - according to the traditional sense - interactions. One might liken this hyper-reality to the condition that is typically referred to - in the context of social theory - as carnival.

Associated with the breakdown of social barriers in the spaces, constituting virtual reality, is the more recent development typically designated as Web 2.0. Now is not the place to elaborate in dept upon this complicated empirical phenomenon and the properties that should be extrapo­lated for instances of Web 2.0 when constructing a corresponding analytic. However, with respect to its relevancy to the state of carnival attributed to many virtual spaces of interaction, it should be remarked that Web 2.0 similarly negates many of the semiotic devices - extant in real spaces - whose conventional interpretation by social agents leads to the labeling of ascribed - although sometimes assumed - social identities. In the context of the interactions occurring within instances of Web 2.0, the negation of many real cultural attributes results in a leveling of the stratifications that mark real social processes of knowledge production. Web 2.0 - the most rec­ognizable exemplar of which is probably the popular Wikipedia - democratize the production of knowledge, rendering the representational spaces in which externalizations of proposed versions of knowledge find publicity.

The emergence of the episteme, Web 2.0, signifies an area of considerable concern for the anal­ysis expressed in this document, due to the possibilities it incurs for sociopolitical movements that have been traditionally marginalized, preventing insurgents challenging the duopoly of the legitimate American sociopolitical infrastructure from achieving only the most modest forms of success. The existing literature pertaining to this topic is sparse. However, two references to sociological subject matters - incidentally related to the problem described in the earlier proposi­tions forming this paragraph - are worthy of mention and will be treated somewhat extensively in the chapters and sections that follow: The agricultural reform movement of the latter part of the 19th Century - referred to as the People’s Party, or Populist Party - achieved substantial reforms; mostly consisting of democratizing more directly some of the electoral processes on a Constitu­tional level. Most significantly, the movement brought about the popular election of Senators.

In terms of this document, what is of primary significance, is the scope of the extension of the refitted understanding of the conditions that can lead to the success of social movements that lack the networking resources with elites who assume positions of authority in the sociopolitical structures of the legitimate apparatuses of a state. Specifically, in the context of the American state, do the virtual spaces - allowing for the formation of virtual communities - similarly generate the Social Capital necessary to spawn the degree of social mobilization necessary for populist insurrections to achieve success; a state defined by the actualization of the conditions defined in the social movement’s teleology.

Strategy Employed

The problem - can third party sociopolitical movements in the United State exploit the current transformations taking place and reorganizing the representational spaces available for obtaining the publicity associated with mass media - is addressed through empirical studies, con­sisting of ethnographic field research conducted upon two instances of third party sociopolitical movements: a state Green Party in the Midwest and the Populist Party of America, (located, as a headquarters, in Las Angeles California). Both cases involved what has come to be referred to as virtual ethnography.

Tactics

Although the methodological specification of ethnographic research was originally conceived as grounded theory, the immersion in the virtual spaces of the Internet and their state of disembod­ied communications, led to the adoption of exploratory testing, which has been taken up by oth­ers involved in the investigation of this relatively new area of sociological research.

Deliverables

Review and comparison of these two empirical subject domains has led to insights concerning the fertility of virtual communities for the cultivation of Social Capital. Additionally - through my participation in the Populist Party of America, which evolved into a commitment where I was responsible for consultation on organizational matters pertaining to communicative strategies intended for the advancement of the Populist Party’s agenda - I have been afforded the opportu­nity to test hypotheses concerning the successful application of the communicative devices pro­vided by Internet infrastructures.