The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context.
Mark Poster
Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Blackwell, 1990.
188 pages

"Concept of postindustrial Society"
In a nutshell: He mainly criticises the approaches of the Deconstructivists, Foucault, Derrida, Marx, Weber and Habermas to different (electric) media as being outdated and delusioning themselves (thats how i understood it). Text, print, oral & written, Ads and TV.

"Electronic communications are new language experiences."
The book is exploring the differences between the language of electronic communication and that of ordinary speech and writing and their Significants.

"The extend in which communication is restricted by time and space governs, with striking force, the shape society may take."

"The subject is loosing its fixed vantage point in time and space - instead it is decontextualising and re-identified, dissolved."
Deleuze/Guattari: We change from "arboreal" beings to "rhizomic" monads. Repression of language.

About Luhmann: "Media create a selection pattern of reduction, so that people join with others in a narrow world of common understandings."

Isn't that how society (and language) work? Poster jokes about Luhmanns closeness to Talcot Parsons and his ideas about "truth, love and art". Ads on ideology.

Databases:
The "store credit card information and more, intrusion on individual privacy."
Poster thinks Western thought begins just with Descartes not with Plato as Derrida does. Writing promotes cool contemplation instead of impulsive passion (except good old Rethorics).

"electronic writing functions to destabilise the subject as it is drawn on the (...) western thought."

"Mandelbrots fractals and (...) catastrophe-theory are changing the meaning of the word knowledge. (...) They are producing not the known, but the unknown."
Which is a true and good remark.

Mark Poster: ""The Mode of Information - Post-structuralism and social context"

Mark Poster is completely ignoring the context of the other writers and that quite polemic. We are standing on the shoulders of giants, not dwarfs. Once, someone has thought the "unthinkable" its a routine. From this distance its an easy exercise. Even Astrophysics see the sun "going up" and "going down" - although they now that it is not true. It an exercise to do it.