Are We to be the Consumers of Information or the Producers of Knowledge?

From examining the press releases and publicized documents offerred by Microsoft concerning its practices and its conceptualization of the field of possibilities in which the company innovates, I have detected a rather disconcerting trend: The world's largest software manufacturer does not intend for the status of citizenry. The ordinary populace, which is the object of the practices committed by elites who deliberate over public-policy and corporate planning, are not, according to Microsofts plans for Information Technology, to be involved in the analysis and decision-making conducted by the priviledged sectors of society; namely, politicians, corporate executives, and their IT minions, who make possible the realization of the two before mentioned strata's actionable plans for the shaping and molding of society.

The new, highly advertised operating-system that will soon be released by Windows emphasizes the average citizen's role, not as a decision-maker, in the sense that he or she has the capacity to shape his or her world of possibilities, but merely as the consumer of the knowledge made available by the technicians of the vast corporatist, capitalist Empire known as America. We, the subjects of America are simply consumers who passively absorb the media content that is fed to us through the corporately controlled sources of art and journalism production in American society.

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I wonder, what if Microsoft was oriented towards devising an operating system that did not emphasize consumption, but, instead, knowledge production, on the part of the common man or woman, and its disemination to the public at large? I realize that these remarks are a too detached from the concrete to be easily understood by the reader, and I will remedy this problem in subsequent posts. However, for now, I simply want to express a sentiment of mine which can be articulated as follows: We should not be induced into a "passive gaze" when interacting with electronic media. Rather, we should be actively involved in shaping the content of the media, so that we are stimulated to formulate our own interpretation of empirical reality based upon our own unique situations with respect to the structural and cultural conditions of society. To sum, Microsoft should be attempting to facilitate a public sphere, instead of a pipeline for vested corporate elitist and political elitist constructions of our social and political reality.

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Russell Cole [send him email] is a contributing author to the Populist Party of America, and is the coordinator for the Populist Party's Midwest Alliance, the Midwest Populist Party.  Read more from Russell Cole at the Midwest Populist Party blog.