The Global Information Society

William J. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351888882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Today, information and the technologies that store and disseminate it are producing deep-rooted and widespread changes in society - changes of the same magnitude as those that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. The purpose of this book is to give a complete picture of the information society by examining in detail the social, economic, political, and cultural roles of information and information technology. This book is effectively a second edition of the author's classic The Information Society. In it, the author illustrates the major trends in and inter-relationships between information, information and communication technologies, and the global economy and society. In tracing the direction of information-based change he reveals the implications for ordinary citizens, for the quality of everyday life, for economic and social activity, and examines the prospects of nations and trading blocs. This book provides a new way of looking at society, one that is essential for understanding social and economic structures and processes in the information age.

1 The Information Society

Although the term information society was in widespread use by the time that the first edition of this book appeared, its currency denoted neither the existence of a broad consensus on any associated constructs or concepts, nor indeed on their legitimacy. Writing some six years later, it has to be admitted that little has changed in the interim. In essence, therefore, while people all over the world continue to talk about the information society, and some would even claim to be living in it, there seems to have been little, if any, real progress made in establishing either some form of metrics for this phenomenon or in amassing the kind of evidence that would result in credibility. Indeed, the very absence of such criteria might well indicate that the information society has remained little more than a catchphrase or a slogan, more a matter of rhetoric than of reality.

There was always an element of symbolism about the term, with information serving as a talisman for a new kind of society, a society in which reason and consensus set the tone rather than raw power and materialism. Nevertheless, by the 1980s, it became clear that within certain advanced, western-type societies, a series of social, economic and technological changes had been set in train which marked them off, not just from developing nations, but from less advanced industrial societies. In such circumstances the concept acquired considerable substance, whether in the form of infrastructure developments or the emergence of information trade and the well-nigh pervasive influence of information and communication technologies in economic and social life.

Today, the informatization of such societies has proceeded to thepoint at which structures and institutions are affected, and the so-called information revolution is global in its extent and influence. Nevertheless, the same criticisms as were being voiced a decade ago, can be levelled against the concept today. Is the so-called information society really little more than the product of technological determinism, initially as the result of developments in computing but increasingly affected by those in telecommunications? Rather than information society would it not be more appropriate to label it a broadband society, one in which telecommunications has become the true catalyst for change? In such a society, it is claimed, everyone will have access to virtually unlimited information and universal telephone service will be replaced by universal information services.¹ Or alternatively, are such changes which have occurred not more representative of the emergence of an information economy than an information society? It is clear that fundamental questions still need to be answered as to the true nature of these changes, as to what has caused them and what they really mean for society. In the event, the label which we put upon such developments is a relatively minor issue. Much more important are the lessons that need to be learned from such developments and their implications for the future of all societies. Before turning to these issues, however, let us pause to reconsider the concept itself and its evolution from social construct to vernacular catchphrase.

INFORMATION SOCIETY, EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT

The concept of information society emerged in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, and it rapidly gained widespread currency. It has a broad provenance, its proponents ranging from scholarly and academic authors to the best-selling popularists. Prominent in the first group of writers were Masuda, who perceived an eventual transition to the point at which the production of information values became the formative force for the development of society² and Stonier, who perceived the dawning of a new age for western society, one as different from the industrial period as that period was from the Middle Ages.³ Although apparently uncomfortable with the term information society, Daniel Bell did much to sustain it through his work on what he termed postindustrial society. Postindustrial society was characterized by a shift from goods producing to service industry, and by the codification of theoretical knowledge, with knowledge and innovation serving as the strategic and transforming resources of society, just as capital and labour had been in earlier industrial society.⁴

Although Marc Porat and before him, Fritz Machlup did much to focus attention on its economic implications, few writers have done so much to popularize the concept of information society as have Alvin Toffler and John Naisbett. Naisbett, for example, argued that the United States made the transition from an industrial to an information society as early as the 1960s and 1970s and that in this process the computer played the role of liberator.⁵ Toffler talked of an information bomb exploding in our midst and of a power shift in society, consequent upon the extent to which it had come to depend on knowledge.⁶

The inherent attraction of these ideas and the confidence and vigour with which they were expressed, fired the public imagination, and no doubt helped sustain that sizeable body of writing on the information society which ensued. Perhaps significantly, not a great deal of effort went into definitions of the phenomenon or detailed categorizations of what was involved. The focus tended to be on broad trends and on their implications for the way of life in information society. Before going on to consider some of the arguments for and against the concept, let us return to a definition of the information society coined by the present author in 1988:

…a society in which the quality of life, as well as prospects for social change and economic development, depend increasingly upon information and its exploitation. In such a society, living standards, patterns of work and leisure, the education system and the marketplace are all influenced markedly by advances in information and knowledge. This is evidenced by an increasing array of information-intensive products and services, communicated through a wide range of media, many of them electronic in nature.⁷

In this definition, the intention was to broaden the focus from the merely technological or economic, and to portray the information society as society. Although no attempt will be made to repeat the definitional exercise six years later, it is clear that the need for this broader basis of assessment is just as great today as it was at the end of the 1980s. It is still unclear what people mean when they talk about information society. The criteria for information society status are by no means obvious, nor are the characteristics which would set information societies apart from industrial societies. In his attempt to synthesize existing writings on the subject, Ian Miles did much to widen perspectives on the information society. Indeed, he argued that there is not simply one information society but many possible information societies.⁸

In seeking a synthesis between the views of those who saw information society as something that was fundamentally new and those who regarded it as largely a continuation of what had gone before, and between those who were optimistic about such developments and those who viewed them with concern, Miles came up with a structuralist perspective. The structuralist approach was a synthesis of extremes, which sought to introduce some sense of the complexity of the impact of social and technological change, and the likelihood that a diversity of interests, actors and social structures would produce a variety of outcomes or, as he put it, many possible information societies.⁸

CRITIQUE OF THE INFORMATION SOCIETY CONCEPT

The best-selling status of populist accounts of the information society stemmed from more than just the skill and passion of their authors. While critics could complain of the excessive hyperbole employed and an undue acceptance of both technological wizardry and free market individualism, it was clear from even the most detached accounts that major information-related change had been occurring in certain advanced societies from at least the 1970s.

By the 1980s, the evidence for such change was all around us. People were beginning to use computers at home as well as at work; most advanced economies had an information sector and realtime, 24 hour global trading on highspeed communications networks, was a fact of life. Along with such developments, society was beginning to face up to the threat of information related crime and to invasions of personal and corporate privacy. To that underclass which has always existed in all developed countries, was being added a new group known as the information poor, while the plight of the emerging world was aggravated by a new form of outside interference, dubbed electronic colonialism. Moreover, whether or not there was any general consensus on what was meant by it, the term information society was in common use throughout the world. So it was easy enough to be caught up in the excitement of what seemed to be the dawning of a new age, an information age.

The key question of course, was the extent to which society had actually changed. Leaving aside the matter of nomenclature, had the environment in which the events listed in the foregoing paragraph itself undergone dramatic and fundamental transformation? For this to be the case, there would have to be evidence not only of increased information or information-related activity within society, but also of the kind of changes involved in the transition from first, agricultural to industrial society and then from industrial to information society.

Although our definition of the information society does not specifically mention the mode of production, it is implicitly couched in relation to western, capitalist societies. Socialist states on the old totalitarian model would not have commended themselves as candidates for information society status. Indeed, it has been argued elsewhere that it was the very presence of information and its dissemination by means of communication technologies that served to break up the former Soviet and Eastern European monolith.⁹ Following the Industrial Revolution, first in 18th-century Britain and then in other parts of the globe, the nature of production became a metaphor for society itself, as the factory system and the capitalist mode of industrial organization spread throughout much of the modern world. Information had always played a major role in such developments and was to become even more important with the adoption of modern management practices at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, as writers like Schement have pointed out, the United States was already a capitalist society before the onset of the factory system. The commoditization of information, such a prominent feature today, was well entrenched in the United States before 1877, as indeed was a marketplace for information workers such as printers and journalists.¹⁰

David Lyon was one of many writers to question whether or not the sum of the changes inherent in what people refer to as the information society in fact amounted to a shift beyond industrial capitalism. As Lyon pointed out, many of the anticipated benefits of an information society have failed to materialize so far as the majority of people in advanced countries are concerned, for example, a leisured lifestyle in a culture of self-expression, political participation and an emphasis on the quality of life.¹¹ A similar conclusion was reached by Tom Forester, originally an enthusiastic proponent of the information society concept. In fact, observed Forester, by the 1990s, people were working longer rather than shorter hours and the paperless office, like the so-called electronic wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Information Society Revisited
• 1 The Information Society
• 2 Information and Communication
• 3 Developments in Computing
• 4 Developments in Telecommunications
• 5 The Economics of Information
• 6 The Social Impact of Information and Communications Technologies
• 7 The Information-based Industries
• 8 Information Management
• 9 Global Information Flows: Content and Context
• Bibliography
• Index