The Information Society

Issues and Illusions

David Lyon

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745603698
  9780745602608
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745667591
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an overview of debates about whether we are entering into a phase of social existence without precedent - the 'information society'. Intended as a bridge between the literatures of 'social theory' and the 'social impact of technology', this study exposes the myths surrounding the creation of the information society, discussing technologies such as cable TV and robotics.

1
What is the Global Information Society?

It will not have escaped your notice that there are many people who claim we have entered a new age, governed by a ‘new paradigm’ where society and its economic relations are no longer primarily organized on the basis of material goods. Rather, they claim, now everything is organized on the basis of information and knowledge, or soon will be. Often referred to as the arrival of a (global) information society, sometimes discussed as a ‘weightless world’ or a new network society, in the past this change has been characterized as the arrival of a postindustrial or service society. In this book I take some key elements of this contention and argue there is less to these changes than tales of transformation suggest. Simply put, while we may be living through a period in which the form and practices of our lives are changing in many ways, the underlying substance of our socioeconomic system remains largely the same.

We are often told that new information and communication technologies (ICTs), perhaps best represented by the internet, are changing everything: this is a revolution, a remaking of the world. All we previously knew about our societies is useless for thinking about this new world. But, despite claims that ‘grand narratives’ are obsolete, the vision of an information society itself often takes the character of an all-encompassing story about this new age. For many this prompts celebration of an approaching Utopia, while for others the developments described indicate progression towards a dystopian world like that set out in Bladerunner. However, I am sceptical: despite the claims about revolution (repeated on television, in the papers we read and even among ourselves), our lives in many ways remain relatively unchanged.

Most of us still need to go to work, where there remains an important division between those who run the company and those who work for it, not least in terms of rewards. When we look at what allows some of us to become rich and the rest of us merely to get by on our pay or pensions, this still has something to do with who owns what. In discussions of the information society, significantly, one of the changes most often identified has been in the sorts of things which produce the greatest wealth. In the past it might have been (part) ownership of a company (through stocks and shares) or land and buildings; now it is as likely to be the rights to a particular artistic creation (films, songs, books) or the rights to an innovative technical process. This new property is called intellectual property, and although different from material property in many ways, it still leaves us divided between those who have some of significant value and those who have only a little or none. Thus, while all sorts of claims are made about the ways in which our lives are being transformed by new ICTs, many social patterns (especially how wealth is distributed) continue as before. When we strip away the shiny new products and services which are available to us in ever increasing quantities, much about the world has not changed.

This is a sceptical view of the information age. Of course it is not the only view, but it is one that makes more sense to me than the celebratory chorus I hear so often when these subjects come up in the media, on the internet or when I am talking with colleagues and students. Let me be clear: I am not arguing that nothing is changing, but rather that these changes are not as profound as they are often presented. Underlying these shifts I see many continuities and it is those I wish to emphasize. I want to explore these continuities because I do not accept that the hard-won knowledge of modern life developed in the past is now outmoded or useless. The assertion that we are entering a new age attempts to neuter or defuse social criticisms which are as salient now as they were in the last millennium. I do not intend to deal with every variant of the information revolution thesis nor every author who has written about it in the last forty years. This would be a mammoth task and subject to diminishing returns. What I aim to do is utilize those authors who have made significant statements, and perhaps more importantly, those whose work has been often cited or used in subsequent discussions of the information age.

In the rest of this chapter I briefly discuss the development of the idea of an information society, and conclude by introducing the four key claims that are frequently made about this new era and which I discuss in the rest of the book. These have been often restated in the past thirty years and they are:

• that we are experiencing a social revolution;

• that the organization of economic relations has been transformed;

• that political practices and the communities involved are changing;

• and that the state and its authority are in terminal decline.

These four claims are related to each other. The notion of a social revolution is linked to changes in the ways economic relations are organized. Changes in economic relations are often related to shifts in the political landscape, and these shifts are unlikely to leave the role of the state unaltered. My criticisms of these assertions therefore represent related elements of my underlying argument that while the forms of activity have changed their substance remains the same. I recognize that the world cannot be divided so easily and clearly into what is changing and what is not, and neither is there a clear and distinct division between form and substance. Nevertheless, although a simplification, the distinction between changes in form and substance sums up my position so well that I am loathe to avoid it completely.

The Idea of an Information Society

The idea of an information society started to appear in accounts of contemporary society in the early 1960s, and until the 1980s claims made about the information revolution were subject to extensive interrogation. However, in the most recent rush to identify the (imminent) arrival of the global information society, criticism has been much more muted. Early analyses of the information society, from Fritz Machlup’s groundbreaking study in 1962 of The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States to Marc Porat’s work on The Information Economy in the mid-1970s, focused on the United States. Only after 1976 did studies start to appear which looked outside America (Poirier 1990: 247–9). And while in the early 1990s interest seemed to be on the wane, the emergence of the internet as an increasingly mass medium has prompted a major expansion of interest in the information society. Consequently, we can identify three periods of analysis:

1 from 1962 to the mid-1970s analyses concentrated exclusively on America;

2 from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, as ICTs were deployed extensively in the rich or developed states, analyses looked further afield;

3 and now, analyses focus on the potential and promise of the internet, leading to the current widespread interest in the global information society

Unsurprisingly, as the new ICTs became more and more widespread so speculation about their social impact expanded.

Where the global implications of the information society were recognized earlier, this usually focused on the problem of new knowledge (ideas and technologies) flowing (or not) from the centre outwards to developing countries; knowledge exports rather than the more recent notion of a networked world (Porat 1978; Dizard 1982: 148ff.). Indeed in the early 1980s both the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (MacBride et al. 1980) and the Club of Rome (Friedrichs and Schaff 1982) produced semi-critical reports on ICTs and global society. However, more recently a number of powerful international governmental organizations have started to emphasize the benefits of the (global) information society and its links to economic development. To take three examples, the emergence of the information society was the defining logic for the 1998–9 World Development Report: Knowledge for Development (World Bank 1999), a major report to the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development, Knowledge Societies: Information Technology for Sustainable Development (Mansell and Wehn 1998) and policy statements by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development such as Towards a Global Information Society (OECD 1997).

Although analysis of the idea of an information society got underway in earnest in the 1960s, the recognition of the economic value of knowledge and/or information was hardly unprecedented. Frank Knight explicitly accounted for the importance of knowledge activities and the workers who performed such tasks in Risk, Uncertainty and Profit published in 1921 (Poirier 1990: 246). And in 1959 Edith Penrose made the managerial control and development of knowledge resources a central element in her Theory of the Growth of the Firm (Penrose 1995). But the realization that knowledge or information might be valuable is, of course, much older. For centuries patents have been awarded to valuable ideas, copyrights have constructed exclusive rights to creative works and trademark protection has recognized the value to be gained from the exclusive use of a maker’s mark (Sell and May 2001). But, until the last third of the twentieth century, information was regarded as one input or resource among many, while knowledge was frequently assumed to be uncontainable. With the posited emergence of the information age, information is now becoming the input on which entrepreneurs concentrate, while the importance accorded to the control of (and access to) knowledge increasingly means that it must be contained, halting its ‘free’ distribution. It is these developments that lead many to herald a new age.

‘Information society’ emerges as an analytical concept

The origins of the idea of the information society can be traced to the work of Fritz Machlup. He was the first to categorize knowledge and information tasks separately from ‘normal’ industrial and social activities. He identified five sectors (education; media of communication; information machines; information services; other information activities) which could be measured and assigned economic value. This categorization, and the statistical measurement it enabled, allowed Machlup to claim in The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States that in 1958 around 29 per cent of America’s gross national product came from these ‘knowledge industries’ (Webster 1995: 11). Once a benchmark figure had been set, it was possible to measure any expansion of these sectors, and this was the evidence on which subsequent claims regarding the emergence of the information society were founded.

Without Machlup’s work, Peter Drucker could not have argued a few years later that in the postwar period ‘the base of our economy shifted from manual to knowledge work, and the centre of gravity of our social expenditure from goods to knowledge’ (1968: 287). Drucker devoted nearly half The Age of Discontinuity to a discussion of ‘knowledge techniques’ and ‘the knowledge society’, arguing that the ‘impact of cheap, reliable, fast and universally available information will easily be as great as was the impact of electricity’ (1968: 27). Using an idea that was later central to Daniel Bell’s work, Drucker suggested that while progress in the past had been based on the acquisition of experience, now ‘systematic, purposeful, organized information’ was the resource that would be deployed to advance society (1968: 40). Machlup’s work enabled, or even encouraged, such claims.

Expanding on this statistical work, in the mid-1970s, Marc Porat’s The Information Economy (a widely quoted and influential nine-volume report for the US government) suggested there were two complementary information sectors: the primary and the secondary. In the primary sector, knowledge industries manipulated knowledge and information to produce new knowledge products and services. In the secondary sector, knowledge and information manipulation was one part of material production processes, information being utilized in the production and sale of material outputs and the provision of services. The report claimed that, when taken together, these sectors accounted for over half of all economic activity in America (an increase on Machlup’s figure), leading Porat to conclude that the US was fast becoming an information society (Webster 1995: 11–15). With its vast array of statistical evidence and its widely disseminated conclusions, Porat’s report became a key piece of evidence in arguments regarding the transformation of society.

Despite being concerned primarily with the analysis of economic activities, a clear link between technological development and its social impact was always implied in these analyses. This led Wilson Dizard to rework Porat’s sectors by conceptualizing them as three stages in the shift towards an information society in America, rather than as previously existing industrial sectors. In the first stage, large corporations deployed and developed various information technologies to produce new technical products. In the second, these new ‘tools’ were taken up by information industries and services. Finally, in the ‘third and most far-reaching stage’, this use would become so generalized that new networks would appear and transform the flows of information throughout society (Dizard 1982: 7). It was in this third stage that the social impact of these new technologies would become clear. This notion of progress towards the information society through the widening deployment of ICTs continues to be influential to this day.

Implications of the information society

Around the same time as Porat was compiling his report, Daniel Bell recognized similar shifts in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1974). But Bell also suggested three more dynamics: theoretical knowledge would become increasingly important (a change in the ‘axial principle’ of society); expectations about the future would foreground issues of technology, its control and potential for transforming existence; and new decision-making processes would appear (1974: 14). He argued that methods of organizing social activities (the manner in which decisions are reached) could be regarded as ‘intellectual technologies’ which spread by example; successful techniques are copied by other actors and groups. Furthermore, ‘the major source of structural change in society ... is the change in the character of knowledge’, a change which substitutes ‘a technical order for the natural order’ (1974: 44–5). This new knowledge order would increasingly set the agenda from which problems were addressed, defining the acceptable and unacceptable through the reduction of all problems to technical issues.

In the information age the role of the expert or technocrat would be enhanced. Bell recognized that knowledge had always been necessary in the functioning of society, but what would be

distinctive about the post-industrial society is the change in the character of knowledge itself. What has become decisive for the organisation of decisions and the direction of change is the centrality of theoretical knowledge – the primacy of theory over empiricism and the codification of knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that ... can be used to illuminate many different and varied areas of experience. (Bell 1974: 21)

In postindustrial society the ‘central person is the professional’ providing the ‘services and amenities – health, education, recreation, and the arts – which are now deemed desirable and possible for everyone’ (Bell 1974: 127). Bell characterized postindustrial society as a new set of ‘games between people’, a realm of individualized social existence. Classes and groups would be sidelined by the individual as the possessor and user of knowledge, but guided by (enlightened) technocratic governors. This idea of the rise of the individualized knowledge-adept social actor is one of the most repeated elements of the information age, although it is now seldom traced back to Bell’s work.

In another early analysis of the effects of this new age, Alvin Toffler suggested that the feeling of dislocation and uneasiness many experienced in the late 1960s was directly linked to ‘future shock’, an inability to keep up with the accelerating changes of the nascent information age (Toffler 1970). This was, he later argued, because the postindustrial, information society was ‘not a straight line extension of industrial society but a radical shift of direction ... a comprehensive transformation at least as revolutionary’ as the industrial revolution (Toffler 1980: 366). It is this disjuncture with the past, this new way of organizing society (Toffler’s canvas stretched from psychology, through social relations to international relations), which resonates throughout the literature of the information society. Despite, or because of, their more journalistic tone, for many Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt – whose Megatrends (1984) also foregrounded ICT-driven change – were the writers who first brought these ideas to an audience far outside the cloistered world of academia.

Once these early analyses of the postindustrial, information society had appeared, more and more accounts of the new age and its effects began to materialize. Indeed, Anthony Smith has argued these early writings on postindustrialism have ‘a Hegelian ring about them. Information technology was penetrated by the historic spirit ... [and] the very act of formulating this idea of an information and communication society has exercised much of the transforming power, or at least has provided the political acceleration [towards it]’ (1996: 72). This is to say, the arguments for the emergence of the information society have reinforced the dynamic they claim to observe by contributing to the reorganization of socioeconomic relations they merely purport to ‘recognize’. Postindustrial analyses which claim the information society is emerging have themselves contributed to the appearance of this new socioeconomic ‘reality’. By arguing that these changes are real and require a response, social and economic development has been pushed in a particular direction. The responses suggested (and enacted) have actually reinforced (or even underpinned) the developments which these analyses argue have already taken place. In an important sense, the ‘information society’ as a characterization of the new technological age we are entering is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Communication and the information society

It is also frequently argued that changes in ICTs have transformed the way we perceive the world. This is a proposition made famous by Marshall McLuhan, who had an ear for a catchy phrase and popularized such terms as the ‘global village’, the ‘age of information’ and ‘the medium is the message’. Taking a historical perspective on information revolution(s), McLuhan focused in the first instance on the typographical innovations of the fifteenth century. He argued that the assumption embedded within typographical reproduction (the separation of language and information into recombinable units), alongside the more generally recognized expansion in the distribution of knowledge, was revolutionary, changing everything printing came into contact with (McLuhan 1962). Using his analysis of the impact of ‘print culture’, McLuhan then turned his attention to the effects of contemporary technological changes, outlined in his most famous book Understanding Media, first published in 1965 (McLuhan 1994). Trying to understand McLuhan is not an easy task, but his discussion of the transformative potential of new communication technologies and practices remains influential, inasmuch as many of his ideas find their way into current discussions, albeit unacknowledged.

The division of media into hot (closed, unidirectional/transmitted, complete messages) and cool (open, multidirectional/interactive messages requiring engagement) which McLuhan deploys at some length in Understanding Media has been seized on by those wishing to stress the interactive implications of internet-mediated information networks. Encapsulated in the book’s subtitle ‘The Extensions of Man’, McLuhan argued that new ‘cool’ technologies extend our capabilities and enhance those aspects of practice which previously had been limited, either spatially or by time. However, at the same time new technologies swiftly naturalize such advances and make them seem ‘everyday’ rather than novel. While Machlup was seeking to quantify the economic changes engendered b...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1 What is the Global Information Society?
• 2 Locating the ‘Information Age’ in History
• 3 Information Capital, Property and Labour
• 4 Communities, Individuals and Politics in the Information Society
• 5 W(h)ither the State?
• 6 Back to the Future
• Appendix: Intellectual Property
• References
• Index