Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 166

producers and maintainers, mass media conglomerates and others have
all taken a strong transnational outlook in their development. Paehlke
( 2003 : 79) has been sharp on the role of media (in its various physi-
cal outlooks) in the current economy. “Most media are directed to a
dominant objective - to increase, influence, and organise commercial
transactions through advertising. Topics and recording are perhaps the
only communication forms that have thus far avoided being largely
subsumed by this single-minded purpose.” Advertisements are then
seen as the central logic that structures the major share of the media,
or even of contemporary culture.
Moreover, the market value of many physical products is far less than
the 10 percent determined by the physical contents and a far larger
share by its image content, a critique that is even more vehemently
addressed by Naomi Klein's No Logo .Inthat sense, the information-
alisation of the economy has even more far-reaching consequences,
beyond the reorganisation of conventional economic networks and
chains in which physical products are produced. In this line, one of the
most radical analyses of an informationalised and mediatised economy
is perhaps given by Scott Lash ( 2002 )inhis Critique of Information .
If physical capital, accumulation and commodification were the key
categories of the industrial economy, informationalisation, circulation
and intellectual property are those of the new economy. Information-
alisation is driving commodification, and “explodes the distinction
between use value and exchange value,” before being recaptured by
capital for further commodification and profit-making. According to
Lash ( 2005 ), Ford was commodified, Nike is mediatised. 5 The new
consumer goods of the informational economy are characterised by
their quick turnover (or immediacy), their largely immaterial nature,
their global reach between production and consumption and their reg-
ulation through intellectual property rights. Actual production is out-
sourced, whereas the valorisation towards profit - design, branding
and copy and property rights - remains in the core economies. This all
results in new (and more nasty) global inequalities and power relations,
according to Lash.

5

Here, Lash refers to Baudrillard's ( 1981 ) notion of sign-value. The sign-value
of an object refers to its capacity to generate communication, but can be and is
converted into exchange value in an informational economy. Still, according to
Baudrillard, the two are analytically different.