Critique of Information

by Scott Lash

This penetrating book raises questions about how power and resistance operate in contemporary society. Scott Lash argues that critique must take place from within information flows, rather than from the safety of `academic detachment′ and that information is power. The book identifies a central contradiction of the information society, that is, the more intelligent and rational that the information society becomes, the more irrational may be the consequences. Written by one of the most celebrated commentators on power and culture, the book is a major testament on the prospects of intellectual life in an age dominated by seemingly inexhaustible, global flows of information.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jiang Qin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book on livestream YouTube. It’s magic that once and only when I read this book, there are over 400 people read with me. Other books only has 40😂
And I found it’s mostly German because these days German people increased a lot in my audience.
This is my first real experience about general German. They’re so universally earnest and attentive to hard reads.

Many German words in this book. This is a thoughtful writer. Philosophy used in real life challenges makes those hard words so adorable.
This book addresses the information occupied our life without us inviting them. We can not discriminate what’s we learned and what’s we’re brainwashed. Maybe in this new world of information, the most important is not where to get information, but what rubbish information occupying our mind that we should get rid of.

[Ben Peters · Rating 1 out of 5]

A preliminary review: I found Lash's /Critique of Information/ superb in promise but disappointing in practice. Yes, we need better, more coherent critical ways of thinking about the idea of information, and its modern transformations. But this isn't it. The major obstacle for me was a jumbled wash of postmodern Marxian prose (one of the two would have been fine) that somehow kept me from understanding the critique, which is a shame since the author rightly shuns academic detachment. Critique is a high bar of course--one any author can only hope to meet. A critique ought to be clear and plain and usable to be a critique worth acting upon, or even just thinking with. But I am left feeling unsure what I'm supposed to do with this book. He argues that the more rational the information society, the more irrational its potential consequences. If everything in the information society is too global, too rational, too totalizing to make sense of itself, maybe that explains--with one part irony and another part of the world-weariness of reconstructed British Marxists--why I don't know quite what to do with the book. I may come back to it with time.

[Abraham Farrera]

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