Commentators increasingly talk about information as a defining feature of the modern world. Much attention is now devoted to the informatization of social life: we are told that we are entering an Information Age, that a new mode of information predominates, that we have moved into a global information economy. Many writers even identify as information societies the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, and other nations with a similar way of life. Indeed, it appears that information has "become so important today as to merit treatment as a symbol for the very age in which we live."1
Just what sense to make of this symbol has been the source of a great deal of controversy. To some, it constitutes the beginning of a truly professionalized and caring society, while to others, it represents a tightening of control over the citizenry; to some, it heralds the emergence of a highly educated public that has ready access to knowledge, while to others, it means a deluge of trivia, sensationalism, and misleading propaganda; to some, it was the development of the nation state that promoted the role of information, while to others, it was changes in corporate organization that led information to become more critical.
However, a major division of opinion that cuts across interpretations is the separation between thinkers who, on the one hand, subscribe to the notion that in recent times we have seen emerge information societies that are marked by their differences from hitherto existing societies. Not all of these are altogether happy with the term "information society," but insofar as they argue that the present era is special and different, marking a turning point in social development, then I think they can be described as its endorsers. On the other hand, there are scholars who, while happy to concede that information has taken on a special significance in the modern era, insist that the central feature of the present is its continuity with the past.
We may separate those who endorse the idea of an information society and those who regard informatization as the continuation of pre-established relations. Toward one wing we may position those who proclaim a new sort of society that has emerged from the old. Drawn to this side are theorists of
On the other side are writers who place emphasis on continuities. I would include here theorists of
None of the latter group denies that information is key to the modern world, but unlike the former group, they argue that the form and function of information is subordinate to long-established principles and practices.
In what follows, I pay particular attention to definitions that underpin information society theorists. The insistence of these thinkers that our time is one of novelty cries out for analysis, more urgently than those scenarios that contend that the status quo remains. Of course, it is also unavoidable that in examining information society theorists, I shall consider aspects of the latter group, since a good deal of this critique requires expression of their misgivings.
In reading the voluminous literature on the information society, many writers operate with undeveloped definitions of their subject. They write copiously about particular features of the information society but are curiously vague about their operational criteria. Eager to make sense of changes in information, they rush to interpret these changes in terms of different forms of economic production, new forms of social interaction, or innovative processes of production. However, they very often fail to set out clearly in what ways and why information is becoming more central today, so critical indeed that it is ushering in a new type of society. Just what is it about information that makes so many think that it is at the core of the modern age?
It is possible to distinguish analytically five definitions of an information society, each of which presents criteria for identifying the new. These are technological, economic, occupational, spatial, and cultural.
Technological. The most common definition of the information society emphasizes spectacular technological innovation. The key idea is that breakthroughs in information processing, storage, and transmission have led to the application of information technologies (IT) in virtually all corners of society. The major concern is the astonishing reductions in the costs of computers, their prodigious increases in power, and their consequent application anywhere and everywhere.
Because it is now economical and feasible to put computers in typewriters, cars, cookers, watches, factory machines, televisions, and toys, it follows that we are certain to experience social upheaval of such magnitude that we shall enter a new era. Many books, magazine articles, and TV presentations have encouraged the development of a distinct genre that offers this viewpoint: the mighty micro will usher in an entirely new silicon civilization.
Somewhat more sophisticated versions of this technological route to the information society attend to the convergence and imbrication of telecommunications and computing. They argue that cheap information processing and storage technologies (computers) lead to extensive distribution. One of the major areas thus impacted is telecommunications, notably switching centers, which, in being computerized, in effect merge with the general development of computing and impel still more dramatic improvement of information management and distribution. This unification is especially fortuitous because the widespread dissemination of computers means that, for optimum use, they require connection. In short, the computerization of telecommunications means that, increasingly, computer can be linked to computer, hence the prospect of links between terminals within and between offices, banks, homes, shops, factories, schools, the globe itself.
It is tempting to dismiss technological approaches to the information society. Awed by the pace and magnitude of technological change, writers naively tell us that "the computer revolution...will have an overwhelming and comprehensive impact, affecting every human being on Earth in every aspect of his or her life."12 This tone is characteristically full of dire wake-up warnings, shallow analyses of the substantive realm, and the self-assurance that only the author has understood what most others have yet to comprehend. It presents but a poor case for the validity of technological measures.13
Nevertheless, if the likes of Alvin Toffler, Christopher Evans, and James Martin impel one toward ready rejection of technological criteria, it has to be acknowledged that many more serious scholars adopt what is at base a similar approach. For instance, Williams, a leading American communications professor, opines that "it [the information society] is a society where the economy reflects growth owing to technological advances."14 And Williams is far from alone. In Britain, for example, a much respected school of thought has devised a neo-Schumpeterian approach to change. Combining Schumpeter’s argument that major technological innovations bring about creative destruction with Kondratieff’s theme of long waves of economic development, these researchers contend that IT represents the establishment of a new epoch. This new techno-economic paradigm constitutes the Information Age that is set to mature early in the next century.15
Common sense tells us that these technological definitions of the information society do seem appropriate. If it is possible to see a "series of inventions"—steam power, the internal combustion engine, electricity, the flying shuttle—as characteristic of the industrial society, then why not accept the virtuoso developments in IT as evidence of a new type of society?16 As Naisbitt states, "Computer technology is to the Information Age what mechanization was to the industrial revolution."17 And why not?
Unfortunately, technological definitions of the information society must encounter a number of well-founded objections, including the following:
(1) If technology is the main criterion for defining a society, then why not just call the emerging era a high-tech society or an automated age? Given the variety of ways to describe a society in which IT predominates—silicon society, cybernetic society, robotic age—why choose to designate it an information society? If technology is the key, then why is the prefix "information" attached?
(2) When one reads of profound and portentous changes that new technology is bringing about, one cannot but be struck by its palpable presence. There is a self-evident reality about the hereness of the new technologies. Since each of us can see it with our own eyes, then it does seem obvious that the technologies are valid as distinguishing features of a new society.
But probing further, one cannot but be struck also by the astonishing vagueness of technology in most of these books. We ask for an empirical measure—in this society now, how much IT is there and how far does this take us toward qualifying for information society status? How much IT is required in order to identify an information society? Asking simply for a usable measure, one quickly becomes aware that a good many of those who emphasize technology are not able to provide us with anything so mundanely real worldly or testable. IT, it begins to appear, is everywhere ...and nowhere too.
This problem of measurement, and the associated difficulty of stipulating the point on the technological scale at which a society is judged to have entered an Information Age, is surely central to any acceptable definition of a distinctively new type of society. It is ignored by popular futurists: the new technologies are announced, and it is unproblematically presumed that this announcement in and of itself heralds the information society. This issue is, surprisingly, also bypassed by scholars who yet assert that IT is the major index of an information society. They are content to describe technological innovations in general terms, somehow presuming that this is enough to distinguish the new society.
(3) The final objection to technological definitions of the information society is frequently made. Critics object to those who assert that, in a given era, technologies are first invented and then subsequently have an impact on the society, thereby impelling people to respond by adjusting to the new. Technology in these versions is privileged above all else; hence, it comes to identify an entire social world: the Steam Age, the Age of the Automobile, the Atomic Age.
The central objection here is not that this is unavoidably technologically determinist—in that technology is regarded as the prime social dynamic—and as such an oversimplification of processes of change. It most certainly is this, but more important, it relegates into an entirely separate division social, economic, and political dimensions of technological innovation. These follow from, and are subordinate to, the premier league of technology that appears to be self-perpetuating, though it leaves its impress on all aspects of society.
But technology is not aloof from the social realm in this way. On the contrary, it is an integral and, indeed, constitutive part of the social. For instance, research and development decisions express priorities, and from these value judgments, particular types of technology are produced (e.g., military projects received substantially more funding than health work in the twentieth century western world; not surprisingly, a consequence is state-of-the-art weapon systems that dwarf the advances of treatment, say, of the common cold). Many studies have shown how technologies bear the impress of social values. Again, market power has an obvious influence on what gets manufactured technologically: corporations think of the customers and potential customers prior to production so it is not surprising that there are limits to what gets made imposed by ability to pay criteria.
Economic. There is an established subdivision of economics that concerns itself with the economics of information. As a founder of this specialism, the late Fritz Machlup (1902-1983) devoted much of his professional life to the goal of assessing the size and growth of the information industries. Machlup’s pioneering work, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962), has been seminal in establishing measures of the information society in economic terms.18
Machlup attempted to trace the information industries in statistical terms. Distinguishing five broad industry groups (two of which are education and media), he attempted to ascribe an economic value to each and to trace its contribution to gross national product (GNP). If the trend is for these groups to account for an increased proportion of GNP, then one may claim to chart the emergence through time of an information economy. This is just what Machlup proposed in this early study, which calculated that 29 percent of the GNP of the United States in 1958 came from the knowledge industries, which at the time was a remarkable rate of expansion.
As early as the 1960s, management guru Peter Drucker was contending that knowledge had become the foundation of the modern economy as we have shifted "from an economy of goods [to]... a knowledge economy."19 Today it is commonplace to argue that we have evolved into a society where the "distinguishing characteristic...is that knowledge and organization are the prime creators of wealth."20
Probably the best known, and certainly the most cited, study of the emergence of an information economy conceived on these lines comes in a nine-volume report from Porat.21 In allocating industries to his five categories, Machlup had adopted Catholic definitions of "knowledge production," broadly including both those that created new information and those that communicated it. Porat echoed much of Machlup’s approach in his reliance on government statistical sources to design a computer model of the U.S. economy in the late sixties, but divided the economy between the primary, secondary and noninformation sectors. This tripartite schema stemmed from his identification of a weakness in Machlup’s work, in which there was a failure to account for information activities that were disguised from initial examination, for example, because they are an in-house element of other industries. Porat included in the primary information sector all those industries that make available their information in established markets or elsewhere, where an economic value can be readily ascribed (e.g., mass media, education, advertising, computer manufacture).
This quantification of the economic significance of information is an impressive achievement. It is not surprising that those convinced of the emergence of an information society have routinely turned to Machlup and, especially, Porat as authoritative demonstrations of a rising curve of information activity, one set to lead the way to a new age.
However, there are difficulties with the economics of information approach.22 One is that, behind the weighty statistical tables that are resonant of objective demonstration, there is a great deal of hidden interpretation and value judgment as to how to construct categories and what to include and exclude from the information sector.
Another difficulty is that the aggregated data inevitably homogenize very disparate economic activities. In the round, it may be possible to say that growth in the economic worth of advertising and television is indicative of an information society, but one is left with an urge to distinguish between informational activities on qualitative grounds. In asking which economically assessed characteristics are more central or strategic to the emergence of an information society, one is requesting scholars to distinguish between, say, information stemming from policy research centers, corporate think tanks transnational finance houses, manufacturers of 35-mm cameras, software designers, and the copywriters of Saatchi and Saatchi.
Of course, these economists are concerned solely with developing quantitative measurements of the information sector, so the issue of the qualitative worth of information would be of limited relevance to them. However, even on their own terms, there are problems. One, mentioned earlier, is the question about the point on the economic graph that one enters an information society. Is it when 50 percent of GNP is dedicated to informational activities? This may seem to be a reasonable point, one at which, in straightforward quantitative terms, information begins to predominate. Sadly for information society theorists, however, we are some distance even from that point. Replication studies of Machlup and Porat lead one to qualify any initial sighting of the new age. Rubin and Taylor, in a large-scale update of Machlup’s study, concluded that in the United States the contribution of knowledge industries to GNP increased from 28.6 percent to 34.3 percent between 1958 and 1980, with virtually no change since 1970, this constituting an extremely modest rate of growth relative to the average rate of growth of other components of total GNP."23 Furthermore, the same authors’ replication of Porat’s influential study found little expansion of the information sector during the seventies when compared with other contributors to GNP. These econometric studies scarcely trumpet the arrival of an information society.
Occupational. A popular measure of the emergence of an information society is the one that focuses on occupational change. Put simply, the contention is that we have achieved an information society when the predominance of occupations is found in information work. That is, the information society has arrived when clerks, teachers, lawyers, and entertainers outnumber coal miners, steelworkers, dockers, and builders.
On the surface, the changing distribution of jobs seems an appropriate measure. After all, it appears obvious that as work that demands physical strength and manual dexterity, such as hewing coal and farming the land, declines to be replaced by more and more manipulation of figures and text, such as in education and large bureaucracies, then so we are entering a new type of society. Today "only a shrinking minority of the labor force toils in factories...and the labor market is now dominated by information operatives who make their living by virtue of the fact that they possess the information needed to get things done."24
This trend is seized upon by many reports. For instance, two influential Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development publications produced figures from all member countries, signaling "continued growth...in those occupations primarily concerned with the creation and handling of information and with its infrastructure support."25 Elsewhere, Porat identifies an "astonishing growth rate" of the "information work force," which doubled every 18.7 years between 1860 and 1980, thereby propelling the United States toward "the edge of an information economy."26
The shift in the distribution of occupations is at the heart of the most influential theory of the information society. Here, Daniel Bell sees in the emergence of a white collar society (and, hence, information work) and the decline of industrial labour, changes as profound as the end of class-based political conflict, more communal consciousness, and the development of equality between the sexes.
I consider and critique Bell’s theorization elsewhere,27 but here it is appropriate to raise some general objections to occupational measures of the information society. A major problem concerns the methodology for allocating workers to particular categories. The end product—a bald statistical figure giving a precise percent age of information workers—hides the complex processes by which researchers construct their categories and allocate people to one or another.
Porat, for instance, develops what has become an influential typology to locate occupations that are primarily engaged in the production, processing, or distribution of information. His is a threefold scheme that encompasses more than 400 occupational types that are reported by the U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics.28
Jonscher simplifies this further still, discerning just two sectors of the economy: the first, an information sector, is where people whose prime function is creating, processing, and handling information; the second, a production sector, is where workers are found who chiefly create, process, and handle physical goods.29
These distinctions appear reasonable, precise, and empirically valid, but there are difficulties. Not the least is something Porat is well aware of, namely, that "stating precisely who is an information worker and who is not is a risky proposition."30 Indeed it is, since every occupation involves a significant degree of information processing and cognition. Porat acknowledges this in his attempt to distinguish noninformational from informational labor on the basis of estimating the degree to which each type is involved with information. In other words, the categorization is a matter of judging the extent to which jobs are informational or not.
For example, the railway signal man must have a stock of knowledge about tracks and timetables and roles and routines; he needs to communicate with other signal men down the line, with station personnel and engine drivers, is required to "know the block" of his own and other cabins, must keep a precise and comprehensive ledger of all traffic that moves through his area, and has had little need of physical strength to pull levers since the advent of modern equipment. Yet the railway signal man is, doubtless, a manual worker of the industrial age. Conversely, the person who comes to repair the photocopier may know little about products other than the one for which he has been trained, may well have to work in hot, dirty, and uncomfortable circumstances, and may need considerable strength to move heavy machinery and replace damaged parts. Yet he will undoubtedly be classified as an information worker, since his work with new-age machinery suits Porat’s interpretations.
The point to be made here is simple: we need to be skeptical of conclusive figures that are the outcomes of researchers’ perceptions of where occupations are to be most appropriately categorized. As a matter of fact, social scientists know very little about the detail and complexity of peoples’ jobs; there are precious few ethnographies that record the details of working lives.31 And researchers trying to label "information" and "noninformation" work are just as much in the dark as the rest of their social science colleagues.
It has to be said that counting the number of information workers in a society tells us nothing about the hierarchies—and associated variations in power and estee—of these people. For example, it could be argued that the crucial issue has been the growth of computing and telecommunications engineers, since these may exercise a decisive influence over the pace of technological innovation. A similar, perhaps even greater, rate of expansion in social workers to handle problems of an aging population and increased family dislocation and juvenile delinquency may have little or nothing to do with an information society, though undoubtedly, social workers would be classified with IT engineers as "information workers."
Or it may be argued that it is an "inner circle" of corporate leaders, quite different from their predecessors, that is the most decisive index of the information society.32 These are people who are empowered by communicative skills, analytical abilities, foresight, and capacities to formulate strategic policies, who also enjoy privileged educational backgrounds, connections through shared clubs and boardroom affiliations, plus access to sophisticated information and communications technologies. All of this provides them with extraordinary leverage over social, economic, and political affairs at the national and even international level. They are information specialists but radically different from the run-of-the-mill information workers that quantitative methodologists would crudely lump them with.
If one is searching for an index of the information society in these thinkers, one will be directed to the quality of the contribution of certain groups. Whether one agrees or not with either of these interpretations, the challenge to the definitions of an information society on the basis of a count of raw numbers of information workers should be clear. To thinkers such as Perkin and Gouldner,33 the quantitative change is not the main issue. Indeed, as a proportion of the population, the groups they lay emphasize upon, while having expanded, remain distinct minorities—tiny in the case of Useem’s "inner circle" and more numerous where the growth of professions is identified, but never more than 20 or 25 percent of the workforce.
Spatial. The spatial conception of the information society, while it draws on sociology and economics, has at its core the geographer’s distinctive stress on space. Here the major emphasis is on the information networks that connect locations and, in consequence, have dramatic effects on the organization of time and space. Goddard (1991) identifies four interrelated elements in the transition to an information society.34
(1) Information is coming to occupy center stage as the key strategic resource on which the organization of the world economy is dependent. The modern world demands the coordination of globally distributed manufacture, planning across and between sovereign states, and marketing throughout continents. Information is axial to these diverse activities and, thus, is of heightened importance in the contemporary world. It follows too that information management is of exceptional pertinence and that, as a result, we witness the rapid expansion of information occupations.
(2) Computer and communications technologies provide the infrastructure that enables information to be processed and distributed. These technologies allow information to be handled on an historically unprecedented scale, facilitate instantaneous and "real-time" trading, and monitor economic, social, and political affairs on a global stage.
(3) There has been an exceptionally rapid growth of the tradable information sector of the economy, by which Goddard means to highlight the explosive growth of services, such as new media (satellite broadcasting, cable, video) and online databases providing information on a host of subjects ranging from stock market dealings, commodity prices, patent listings, and currency fluctuations to abstracts of scientific and technological journals.
Complementing these developments has been the radical reorganization of the world’s financial system, which has resulted in the collapse of traditional boundaries that once separated banking, brokerage, financial services, credit agencies and the like. Inside this bewildering world of high finance—which few people understand and still fewer appear able to control—circulates, in electronic form, dazzling sums of capital (one estimate suggests there are $2 trillion Eurodollars in the system, though there were none just over a generation ago).35
(4) The growing "informatization" of the economy is facilitating the integration of national and regional economies.
Courtesy of immediate and effective information processing and exchange economics has become truly global, and with this has come about a reduction in the constraints of space. Companies can now develop global strategies for production, storage, and distribution of goods and services. Financial interests operate continuously, respond immediately and traverse the globe. The boundaries erected by geographical location are being pushed further and further back—and with them the limitations once imposed by time—thanks to the virtuoso ways in which information can be managed and manipulated in the contemporary period.
Added together, these trends—the strategic importance of information, the establishment of an IT infrastructure, the growth of tradable information, and global integration—emphasize the centrality of information networks, linking together locations within and between towns, regions, nations, continents, and the entire world.
As the electricity grid runs throughout an entire nation, extending down to
the individual householder’s ring main, so too may we envisage now a wired
society operating at the national, international, and global levels to provide
an information ring main to each home, shop, or office.36 Increasingly, we
are all connected to the network, which itself is expanding its reach and
capacities.
Many writers emphasize the technological bases of the information
network.37
Perhaps predictably then, with these accounts of an emerging network society,
considerable attention is given to advances in and obstacles to the development
of an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) infrastructure.38
However, notwithstanding the importance of technology, and actually providing a salutary reminder of the easily neglected centrality of telecommunications to IT developments, most thinkers concerned with the emergence of a network marketplace place stress on ways in which networks underline the significance of the flow of information.39
The salient idea here is of information circulating along electronic "highways." Interestingly, no one has been able to quantify how much and at what rate information must flow along these routes to constitute an information society. In fact, no one has produced reliable figures capable of giving us an overall understanding of information traffic.40 We have data on telephone density in relation to population, figures on the expansion of facsimile services, statistics for sales of computer systems, automated telecommunications exchanges, and so on, but lack a clear picture of the size, capacity, and use of the networks.
Nevertheless, all observers are aware of a massive increase in transborder data flows, in telecommunications facilities, in communications between computers at every level from home to transnational organization, in exchanges between stock markets and corporate segments, in access to international databases, and in telex messages. Similarly, there is considerable awareness of increases in the global distribution of mass-mediated information, satellite television being the obvious and preeminent example, though one would have to include news gathering and distribution services in any adequate picture. As Mulgan has it, "the networks carry an unimaginable volume of messages, conversations, images, and commands."41
Why much greater volume and velocity should impel us to think of information flows in terms of the constitution of a new type of society returns us to the geographer’s special concern with space. All things happen in particular places and at specific times, but the characteristics of space and time have been transformed with the advent of the network society. Where once trade was cumbersome and slow moving across distances, it can now be effected instantaneously with computerized communications technologies; where once corporate activity had to be coordinated by slow-moving letters that took days and even weeks to cross the space that divided the interested parties, now it takes place in real time, courtesy of sophisticated telecommunications and video conference facilities.
In short, the constraints of space have been dramatically limited, though
certainly not eliminated. And simultaneously, time has itself been shrunk as
contact is immediate via computer communications and telecommunications. This
"time/space compression," as Giddens terms it, provides corporations,
governments, and even individuals with hitherto unachievable options.
No one
can deny that information networks are an important feature of contemporary
societies: satellites do allow instantaneous communications around the globe,
databases can be accessed from Oxford to Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Paris, and
facsimile machines and interconnected computer systems are a routine part of
modern businesses.
Yet we may still ask: Why should the presence of networks lead analysts to categorize societies as information economies? And when we ask this, we encounter the problem of the imprecision of definitions once again. For instance, when is a network a network? Is it two people speaking to one another by telephone, or computer systems transmitting vast data sets through a packet switching exchange; is it when an office block is "wired," or when terminals in the home can communicate with local banks and shops? The question of what actually constitutes a network is a serious one, and it raises problems not only of how to distinguish between different levels of networking, but also of how we stipulate a point at which we have entered a network/information society.
Cultural. The final conception of an information society is perhaps the most easily acknowledged yet the least measured. Each of us is aware, from the pattern of our everyday lives, that there has been an extraordinary increase in the information in social circulation. There is simply a great deal more of it about than ever before.
Television has been in extensive use for over 30 years in Britain, but now programs run round-the-clock. There is much more radio output available now than even a decade ago, at the local, national, and international levels. Radios are no longer fixed in the front room, but spread through the home, car, office, and with the Walkman, everywhere. Movies have long been an important part of peoples’ information environment and indeed, attendance at cinemas has declined significantly. But movies today are more prevalent than ever: available at cinema outlets, broadcast on television, readily borrowed from video rental shops, and cheaply purchased from the shelves of chain stores. Walk along any street and it is almost impossible to miss the advertising hoardings, the billboards, the window displays in shops. Visit any railway or bus station and one cannot avoid being struck by the widespread availability of paperback books and inexpensive magazines, their subject matter including such a range as classical, pulp fiction, middle-brow, and self-therapy—a scale and scope without precedent. In addition, audio tape, compact disc, and radio all offer more, and more readily available, music, poetry, drama, humor, and education to the general public. Newspapers are extensively available, and a good many new titles fall on our doorsteps as free sheets. Junk mail is delivered daily.
All of this testifies to the fact that we inhabit a media-laden society, but the informational features of our world are more thoroughly penetrative than a short list of television, radio, and other media systems suggests. This sort of listing implies that new media surround us, presenting us with messages to which we may or may not respond. But in truth, the informational environment is a great deal more intimate, more constitutive of us, than this suggests. One may consider, for example, the informational dimensions of the clothes we wear, the styling of our hair and faces, the very ways in which we work at our image. From body shape to speech, people are intensely aware of the messages they may be projecting and how they feel about themselves in certain clothes, with a particular hairstyle, etc. A few moments’ reflection on the complexities of fashion, the intricacy of the ways in which we design ourselves for everyday presentation, make one well aware that social intercourse involves a greater degree of informational content now than previously.
This intrusion of information into the most intimate realms of home, bedroom, and body is complemented by the growth of institutions dedicated to investing everyday life with symbolic significance. One thinks of the global advertising business, of publishing empires, of the fashion industry, of worldwide agencies of media production that bring to the domestic scene reflections of our own ways of life and images of other lifestyles, thereby presenting us with alternative meanings that may be absorbed, rejected, and reinterpreted, but all the while adding to the vocabulary of the symbolic environment.
Readers will recognize and acknowledge this extraordinary expansion of the informational content of modern life. Contemporary culture is manifestly more heavily information laden than any of its predecessors. We exist in a media-saturated environment, which means that life is quintessential about symbolization, about exchanging and receiving—or trying to exchange and resisting reception of—messages about ourselves and others. It is in acknowledgment of this explosion of signification that many writers conceive of our having entered an information society. They rarely attempt to gage this development in quantitative terms, but rather start from the "obviousness" of our living in a sea of signs, fuller than at any earlier epoch.
Paradoxically, it is perhaps this very explosion of information that leads some writers to announce the death of the sign. Blitzed by signs, designing ourselves with signs, unable to escape signs wherever we may go, the result is, oddly, a collapse of meaning. As Baudrillard puts it, "there is more and more information, and less and less meaning."42 Signs once had a reference (clothes, for example, signified a given status, the political statement a distinct philosophy, the TV news was "what really happened"). However, in this postmodern era, we are enmeshed in such a bewildering web of signs that they lose their salience. Signs come from so many directions and are so diverse, fast changing, and contradictory that their power to signify is dimmed. In addition, audiences are creative, self-aware, and reflective, so much so that all signs are greeted with skepticism and a quizzical eye, hence easily inverted, reinterpreted, and refracted from their intended meaning. Thus, the notion that signs represent some reality apart from themselves loses its credibility.
Experientially, the idea of an information society is recognized easily enough, but as a definition of a new society, it is considerably more wayward than any of the notions we have considered. Given the absence of criteria we might use to measure the growth of signification in recent years, it is difficult to see how students of postmodernism such as Poster can depict the present as characterized by a novel mode of information.43 How can we know this other than from our sense that there is more symbolic interplay going on? And on what basis can we distinguish this society from, say, that of the 1920s, other than purely as a matter of degree of difference? Those who reflect on the postmodern condition have interesting things to say about the character of contemporary culture but as regards establishing a clear definition of the information society, they are glaringly deficient.
Reviewing these varying definitions of the information society, what becomes abundantly clear is that they are either underdeveloped or imprecise, or both. Whether it is a technological, economic, occupational, spatial, or cultural conception, we are left with highly problematical notions of what constitutes, and how to distinguish, an information society.
It is important that we remain aware of these difficulties. Though as a heuristic device, the term "information society" has some value in exploring features of the contemporary world, it is far too inexact to be acceptable as a definitive term. Now, however, I want to raise some further difficulties with the language of the information society. The first problem concerns the quantitative versus qualitative measures to which I have already alluded. My earlier concern was chiefly that quantitative approaches failed to distinguish more strategically significant information activity from that which was routine and low level and that this homogenization was misleading. Here I want to raise again the quality/quantity issue insofar as it bears upon the question of whether the information society marks a break with previous sorts of societies.
Most definitions of the information society offer a quantitative measure (numbers of white collar workers, percentage of GNP devoted to information, etc.) and assume that, at some unspecified point, we enter an information society when this condition begins to predominate. But there are no clear grounds for designating as a new type of society one in which all we witness is greater quantities of information in circulation and storage. If there is just more information, then it is hard to understand why anyone should suggest that we have before us something radically new. This is a point made well by Giddens, when he observes that all societies, as soon as they are formed into nation states, are information societies insofar as routine gathering, storage, and control of information about population and resources are essential to their operation.44 On this axis, all that differentiates the present era from, say, seventeenth century England, is much greater quantities of information that are amassed, dissembled, and processed.
The blunt point is that quantitative measures—simply more information—cannot of themselves identify a break with previous systems, while it is at least theoretically possible to regard small but decisive qualitative changes as marking a system break. After all, just because there are many more automobiles today than 30 years ago does not qualify us to speak of a "car society." What is especially odd is that so many of those who identify an information society as a new type of society do so by presuming that this qualitative change can be defined simply by calculating how much information is in circulation, how many people work in information jobs, and so on. What we have here is the assumption that quantitative increases transform, in unspecified ways, into qualitative changes in the social system.
It is noticeable that those scholars such as Herbert Schiller and David Harvey,45 who stress the continuities of the present with those of the past, while they acknowledge an increasingly central role played by information, have at the forefront of their minds the need to differentiate between categories of information and the purposes to which it is put. In other words, those who insist that the informationalized society is not radically different from the past are at pains to differentiate information on qualitative grounds. For instance, they will examine how information availability has been affected by the application of market criteria and contend that the wealthier sectors of society gain access to particularly high-quality information, which consolidates their privileges and powers. Yet, while they emphasize these sorts of qualitative dimensions of informatization, they do so to highlight continuities of the socioeconomic system. Conversely, those who consider that the information society is a radically different system most often recourse to quantitative indices to demonstrate a profound qualitative change.
Roszak provides an interesting insight into this paradox in his critique of information society themes.46 His examination emphasizes the importance of qualitatively distinguishing information, extending to it what each of us does on an everyday basis when we differentiate between phenomena such as data, knowledge, experience, and wisdom. Certainly, these are themselves slippery terms—one person’s knowledge attainment (say, a graduation degree) can be another’s information (say, the pass rate of a university)—but they are an essential part of our daily lives. In Roszak’s view, the present "cult of information" functions to destroy these sorts of qualitative distinctions, which are the stuff of real life. It does this by insisting that information is purely quantitative, subject to statistical measurement. But to achieve calculations of the economic value of the information industries, of the proportion of GNP expended on information activities, the percentage of national income going to the information professions, and so on, the qualitative dimensions of the subject (is the information useful? is it true or false?) are laid aside. "For the information theorist, it does not matter whether we are transmitting a fact a judgment, a shallow cliche, a deep teaching, a sublime truth, or a nasty obscenity."47 These qualitative issues are laid aside as information is homogenized and made amenable to numbering: "Information comes to be a purely quantitative measure of communicative exchanges."48
The astonishing thing to Roszak is that along with this quantitative measure of information comes the assertion that more information is profoundly transforming social life. Having produced awesome statistics on information activity by blurring the sort of qualitative distinctions we all make in our daily lives, information society theorists then assert that these trends are set to qualitatively change our entire lives.
Roszak vigorously contests these ways of thinking about information...Roszak insists that the "master ideas" that underpin our civilization are not based upon information at all. Principles such as "all men are created equal," "my country right or wrong," "live and let live," "we are all God’s children," and "do unto others as you would be done by" are central ideas of our society, but all come before information.49
It is important to say that Roszak is not arguing that these and other master ideas are necessarily correct...But what he is emphasizing is that ideas, and the necessarily qualitative engagement these entail, take precedence over quantitative approaches to information. And what he especially objects to is that information society theorists reverse that situation at the same time as they smuggle in the (false) idea that more information is fundamentally transforming the society in which we live.
Roszak’s rejection of statistical measures leads us to consider perhaps the most significant feature of approaches to the information society. We are led here largely because his advocacy is to reintroduce qualitative judgment into discussions of information. Roszak asks questions like the following: Is more information necessarily making us a better informed citizenry? Does the availability of more information make us better informed? What sort of information is being generated and stored, and what value is this to the wider society? What sort of information occupations are expanding, why and to what ends?
What is being proposed here is that we insist on examination of the meaning of information. And this is surely a common-sense understanding of the term. After all, the first definition of information that springs to mind is the semantic one: information is meaningful; it has a subject; it is intelligence or instruction about something or someone.
If one were to apply this concept of information to an attempt at defining an information society, it would follow that we would be discussing these characteristics of the information. We would be saying that information about these sorts of issues, those areas, that process are what constitutes the new age. However, it is precisely this common-sense definition of information that the information society theorists jettison. What is, in fact, abandoned is a notion of information having a semantic content.
The definitions of the information society I have reviewed perceive information in nonmeaningful ways. That is, searching for quantitative evidence of the growth of information, a wide range of thinkers have conceived it in the classic terms of Shannon and Weaver’s information theory.50 Here, a distinctive definition is used, one that is sharply distinguished from the semantic concept in common parlance. In this theory, information is a quantity that is measured in "bits" and defined in terms of the probabilities of occurrence of symbols. It is a definition derived from and useful to the communications engineer whose interest is with the storage and transmission of symbols, the minimum index of which is on/off (yes/no or 0/1).
This approach allows the otherwise vexatious concept of information to be mathematically tractable, but this is at the price of excluding the equally vexing, yet crucial, issue of meaning and, integral to meaning, the question of the information’s quality. On an everyday level when we receive or exchange information, the prime concerns are its meaning and value: is it significant, accurate, absurd, interesting, adequate, or helpful? But in terms of the information theory that underpins so many measures of the explosion of information, these dimensions are irrelevant. Here, information is defined independent of its content, seen as a physical element as much as is energy or matter. As one of the foremost information society devotees puts it, information exists. It does not need to be perceived to exist. It does not need to be understood to exist. It requires no intelligence to interpret it. It does not have to have meaning to exist. It exists.51
In fact, in these terms, two messages, one that is heavily loaded with meaning and the other pure nonsense, can be equivalent. As Roszak says, here "information has come to denote whatever can be coded for transmission through a channel that connects a source with a receiver, regardless of semantic content."52 This allows us to quantify information but at the cost of abandonment of its meaning and quality.53
If this definition of information is the one that pertains in technological and spatial approaches to the information society (where the quantities stored, processed, and transmitted are indicative of the sort of indexes produced), we come across a similar elision of meaning from economists’ definitions. It may not be in terms of bits, but at the same time, the semantic qualities are evacuated and replaced by the common denominator of price.54
To the information engineer, the prime concern is with the number of yes/no symbols; to the information economist, it is with their vendibillity. But as the economist moves from consideration of the concept of information to its measurement, what is lost is the heterogeneity that springs from its manifold meanings. The "endeavor to put dollar tags on such things as education, research, and art" unavoidably abandons the semantic qualities of information.55 Boulding observed a generation ago that "The bit...abstracts completely from the content of information...and while it is enormously useful for telephone engineers...for purposes of the social system theorist we need a measure which takes account of significance and which would weight, for instance, the gossip of a teenager rather low and the communications over the hot line between Moscow and Washington rather high."56 How odd then that economists have responded to the qualitative problem, which is the essence of information, with a quantitative approach, which being reliant on cost and price, is at best "a kind of qualitative guesswork."57 "Valuing the invaluable," to adopt Machlup’s terminology, means substituting information content with the measuring rod of money. We are then able to produce impressive statistics, but in the process we have lost the notion that information is about something.58
Finally, though culture is quintessential about meanings, about how and why people live as they do, it is striking that with the celebration of the nonreferential character of symbols by enthusiasts of postmodernism, we have a congruence with communications theory and the economic approach to information..Here too we have a fascination with the profusion of information, an expansion so prodigious that it has lost its hold semantically. Symbols are now everywhere and generated all of the time, so much so that their meanings have imploded, hence ceasing to signify.
What is most noteworthy is that information society theorists, having jettisoned meaning from their concept of information in order to produce quantitative measures of its growth, then conclude that such is its increased economic worth, the scale of its generation, or simply the amount of symbols swirling around, that society must encounter profoundly meaningful change. We have, in other words, the assessment of information in nonsocial terms—it just is—but we must adjust to its social consequences. This is a familiar situation to sociologists who often come across assertions that phenomena are aloof from society in their development (notably technology and science) but carry within them momentous social consequences. It is demonstrably inadequate as an analysis of social change.59
Doubtless, being able to quantify the spread of information in general terms has some uses, but it is certainly not sufficient to convince us that in consequence of an expansion, society has profoundly changed. For any genuine appreciation of what an information society is like, and how different or similar it is to other social systems, we must surely examine the meaning and quality of the information. What sort of information has increased? Who has generated what kind of information, and for what purposes and with what consequences has it been generated?
1. William J. Martin, "The Information Society - Idea or Entity?," Aslib Proceedings (40: 11-12, 1988), p. 303.
2. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), and a legion of followers.
3. See for example Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York, NY: Semiotext, 1983); and Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
4. See for example Michael Piore & Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1984); and Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Postindustrial Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
5. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
6. Manuel Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban Regional Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
7. See for example Herbert I. Schiller, Who Knows: Information in the Age of the Fortune 500 (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981); and Herbert I. Schiller, Information and the Crisis Economy (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1984).
8. See for example Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: New Left Books, 1979); and Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: The Crises of Global Fordism (London: Verso, 1979).
9. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
10. Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Cambridge: Polity, 1985).
11. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1962); and Nicholas Garnham, Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information (London: Sage, 1990).
12. Christopher Evans, The Mighty Micro: The Impact of the Micro-Chip Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1979), p. 13.
13. Frank Webster and Kevin Robins, Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986), Ch. 2.
14. Fred Williams (ed.), Measuring the Information Society (London: Sage, 1988), p. 15.
15. Christopher Freeman and Carlota Perez, "Structural Crises of Adjustment, Business Cycles, and Investment Behavior," in Giovanni Dosi et al. (eds.), Technical Change and Economic Theory (London: Frances Pinter, 1988), pp. 38-66; Peter Hall & Paschal Preston, The Carrier Wave: New Information Technology and the Geography of Innovation, 1846-2003 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988); Christopher Freeman, Technology Policy and Economic Performance (London: Frances Pinter, 1987); and Christopher Freeman, J. Clark, and L. Solte, Unemployment and Technical Innovation: A Study of Long Waves and Economic Development (London: Frances Pinter, 1982).
16. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
17. John Naisbitt, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives (London: Futura, 1984), p. 28.
18. Fritz Machlup, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962).
19. Peter F. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity (London: Heineman, 1969), pp. 247, 249.
20. Neil Dias Karunaratne, "Issues in Measuring the Information Economy," Journal of Economic Studies (13: 3, 1986), p. 52.
21. Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy: Sources and Methods for Measuring the Primary Information Sector (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications, 1977); and Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications, 1977).
22. Peter Monk, Technological Change in the Information Economy (London: Frances Pinter, 1989).
23. Michael Rubin and Mary Taylor, The Knowledge Industry in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).
24. Tom Stonier, The Wealth of Information: A Profile of the Post-Industrial Economy (London: Thames Methuen, 1983), p. 7,8.
25. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Information Activities, Electronics and Telecommunications Activities: Impact on Employment, Growth and Trade (Paris: OECD, 1981).
26. Porat, The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement, pp.131, 204.
27. Kevin Robins and Frank Webster, "Information as Capital: A Critique of Daniel Bell," in Jennifer Daryl Slack and Fred Fejes (eds.), The Ideology of the Information Age (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1987), pp. 95-117.
28. Marc Uri Porat, "Communication Policy in an Information Society," in G.O. Robinson (ed.), Communications for Tomorrow (New York, NY: Praeger, 1978), pp. 5-6.
29. C. Jonscher, "Information Resources and Economic Productivity," Information Economics and Policy (1:1983), pp. 13-35.
30. Porat, "Communications Policy in an Information Society," p. 5.
31. Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk about What They Do All Day and How They Feel about What They Do (Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1977).
32. Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Larger Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US and UK (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Michael Useem and Jerome Karabel, "Pathways to Top Corporate Management," American Sociological Review (51: 1986), pp. 184-200.
33. Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: Britain Since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989).
34. John Goddard, "Networks of Transactions," Times Higher Education Supplement, February 22, 1991, p. VI.
35. Harvey, p. 163.
36. James Martin, The Wired Society (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1978); and Iann Barron and Ray Curnow, The Future with Microelectronics: Forecasting the Effects of Information Technology (London: Frances Pinter, 1979).
37. See for example Mark Hepworth, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (London: Bellhaven, 1989).
38. Herbert S. Dordick et al., The Emerging Network Marketplace (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1981).
39. See Castells.
40. Economic Commission for Europe, The Telecommunications Industry: Growth and Structural Change (New York, NY: United Nations, 1987).
41. Geoff Mulgan, Communications and Control: Networks and the New Economies of Communication (Cambridge: Policy, 1991).
42. Baudrillard, p. 95.
43. See Poster.
44. Giddens, p. 178.
45. See Schiller, Who Knows; and Harvey.
46. See for example Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (Cambridge: Latterworth Press, 1986).
47. Roszak, p. 14.
48. Roszak, p. 11.
49. Roszak, p. 91.
50. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communications (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1949).
51. Tom Stonier, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe: An Exploration into Information Physics (London: Springer-Verlag, 1990), p. 21.
52. Roszak, p. 13.
53. See for example John Young, Information Theory (Butterworth, 1971).
54. See for example Kenneth Arrow, "The Economics of Information," in Michael L. Dertouzos and Joel Moses (eds.), The Computer Age: A Twenty Year View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979), pp. 306-317.
55. Fritz Machlup, Knowledge: Its Creation, Distribution and Economic Significance: Volume 1, Knowledge and Knowledge Production (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 23.
56. K.E. Boulding, "The Economics of Knowledge and the Knowledge of Economics," American Economic Review (56: 1-13, 1966).
57. Ibid.
58. Esfandias Maasoumi, "Information Theory," in John Eatwell, et. al., The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 846-851.
59. See for example David Dickson, Alternative Technology and the Politics of Technical Change (London: Collins/Fontana, 1974); and Steve Woolgar, Science: The Very Idea (Chichester: Ellis Horwood, 1988).
*From The Information Society, Vol. 10(1), pp. 1-23,
Frank Webster.
Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
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