Theories of the Information Society

Frank Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317964933
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Information is regarded as a distinguishing feature of our world. Where once economies were built on industry and conquest, we are now part of a global information economy. Pervasive media, expanding information occupations and the development of the internet convince many that living in an Information Society is the destiny of us all. Coping in an era of information flows, of virtual relationships and breakneck change poses challenges to one and all.

In Theories of the Information Society Frank Webster sets out to make sense of the information explosion, taking a sceptical look at what thinkers mean when they refer to the Information Society, and critically examining the major post-war approaches to informational development. The fourth edition of this classic study brings it up to date with new research and with social and technological changes – from the 'Twitter Revolutions' of North Africa, to financial crises that introduced the worst recession in a life time, to the emergence of social media and blogging – and reassesses the work of key theorists in the light of these changes.

More outspoken than in previous editions, Webster urges abandonment of Information Society scenarios, preferring analysis of the informatization of long-established relationships. This interdisciplinary book is essential reading for those trying to make sense of social and technological change in the post-war era. It addresses issues of central concern to students of sociology, politics, geography, communications, information science, cultural studies, computing and librarianship.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

It seems to me that most people ask themselves, at one time or another, what sort of society is it in which we live? How can we make sense of what is going on with our world? Where is it all taking us? Where do we fit in all of this? This is a daunting and frequently bewildering task because it involves trying to identify the major contours of extraordinarily complex and changeable circumstances. It is, in my view, the duty of social science to identify and explain the most consequential features of how we live now, the better that we may see where we are headed, so that we might influence where we are going. Some people quickly give up on the task, frankly admitting confusion. Still others, encountering disputation, retreat into the comforting (and lazy) belief that we see only what we choose. Fortunately, most people stick with trying to understand what is happening in the world, and in so doing reach for such terms as capitalism, industrialism, totalitarianism and democracy. Most of us will have heard these sorts of words, will have voiced them ourselves, when trying to account for events and upheavals, for important historical occurrences, or even for the general drift of social, economic and political change.

In all probability we will have argued with others about the appropriateness of these labels when applied to particular circumstances. We will even have debated just what the terms might mean. For instance, while it can be agreed that Russia has moved well away from Communism since the collapse of the Soviet Union late in 1991, there will be less agreement that the transition can be accurately described as a shift to a fully capitalist society. And, while most analysts see clearly the spread of markets in China, the continuation of a dictatorial Communist Party there makes it difficult to describe China in similar terms as, say, we do with reference to Western Europe. There is a constant need to qualify the generalizing terminology: hence terms like pre-industrial, emerging democracies, advanced capitalism, authoritarian populism and state capitalism.

And yet, despite these necessary refinements, few of us will feel able to refuse these concepts or indeed others like them. The obvious reason is that, big and crude and subject to amendment and misunderstanding though they be, these concepts and others like them do give us a means of identifying and beginning to understand essential elements of the world in which we live and from which we have emerged. It seems inescapable that, impelled to make sense of the most consequential features of different societies and circumstances, we are driven towards the adoption of grand concepts. Big terms for big issues.

The starting point for this book is the emergence of an apparently new way of conceiving contemporary societies. Commentators began to talk about information as a distinguishing feature of the modern world forty years or so ago. This prioritization of information has maintained its hold now for decades and there is little sign of it losing its grip on the imagination. We are told that we are entering an information age, that a new ‘mode of information’ predominates, that ours is now an ‘e-society’, that we must come to terms with a ‘weightless economy’ driven by information, that we have moved into a ‘global information economy’. Very many commentators identified as Information Societies the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany and other nations with a similar way of life. Politicians, business leaders and policy makers have taken the Information Society idea to their hearts, with the European Union urging the rapid adjustment to a ‘global Information Society’, thereby following in the tracks of Japan, which embraced the concept of Information Society in the early 1970s (Duff, 2000).

Just what sense to make of this has been a source of controversy. To some it constitutes the beginning of a professionalized and caring society, while to others it represents a tightening of control over the citizenry; to some it heralds the emergence of an educated public which has ready access to knowledge, while to others it means a deluge of trivia, sensationalism and misleading propaganda that keeps people stupid; to some it heralds a knowledgeled society, while for others we have entered an era of unprecedented monitorship. Among political economists talk is of a novel ‘e-economy’ in which the quick-thinking knowledge entrepreneur has the advantage; among the more culturally sensitive reference is to ‘cyberspace’, a ‘virtual reality’ no-place that welcomes the imaginative and inventive.

Amidst this divergent opinion, what is striking is that, oppositional though they are, all scholars acknowledge that there is something special about information. In an extensive and burgeoning literature concerned with the information age, there is little agreement about its major characteristics and its significance other than that information has achieved a special pertinence. The writing available may be characteristically disputatious and marked by radically different premises and conclusions, but about the special salience of information there is no discord.

It was curiosity about the currency of information that sparked the idea for the first edition of this book, which I wrote in the early 1990s. It seemed that, on many sides, people were marshalling yet another grandiose term to identify the germane features of our time. But simultaneously thinkers were remarkably divergent in their interpretations of what form this information took, why it was central to our present systems, and how it was affecting social, economic and political relationships.

This curiosity has remained with me, not least because the concern with information persists, and has, if anything, been heightened, as has the variability among analysts about what it all amounts to. While I was writing the first edition of this book discussion appeared stimulated chiefly by technological change. The ‘microelectronics revolution’, announced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, launched a fleet of opinion about what information technology (IT) was set to do to us. Favoured topics then were ‘the end of work’, the advent of a ‘leisure society’, the totally ‘automated factory’ in which robots did everything. These subjects went out of style somewhat as full employment returned in the late 1990s and 2000s, but the enthusiasm for technologically driven changes remained.

Another agenda emerged that concerned the internet as it became widely available during the 1990s. This focused on the ‘information superhighway’ and cybersociety brought about now by information and communications technologies (ICTs). Hot topics were electronic democracy, virtual relations, interactivity, personalization, cyborgs and online communities. Much comment seized on the speed and versatility of new media to evoke the prospect of radical transformations in what we might do. Thus when a tsunami enveloped large parts of South East Asia on 26 December 2004, the phones went down, but e-mail and the internet rapidly became the means to seek out lost ones. And when, on 7 July 2005, terrorists bombed the London Underground and the bus system, the phone system shut down, yet people quickly turned to the internet for news and mutual support, while the photographic facilities on many mobile phones displaced traditional media to provide vivid pictures of the immediate devastation.

Most recently, there has been an explosion of interest in ‘social media’, a catch-all label for things like blogging, social networking, wikis and internet forums where users can both consume and produce information (leading to the invention of the neologism ‘prosumer’). Increasing availability of computer communications technologies, accessed by easy-to-use programmes, has led to bold prophecies about the potential of ‘crowd sourcing’. The notion that ‘anywhere, anytime, always connected’ technologies have the potential to bring together previously isolated people means that, for some, there will be radical transformation of investment patterns (microfinancing), of retailing (online shopping) and even political engagement, where the once disenfranchised are empowered. Indeed, for some the ‘Arab Spring’ that ignited through 2011 in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and even Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic has been the result of technologies such as the mobile phone, video cameras and the internet integrated in and through the ‘affordances’ of social media such as Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and Facebook (cf. Shirky, 2008; Howard, 2011; Castells, 2012). Elsewhere, there was instant commentary on the urban riots that struck London in the summer of 2011 that accounted for their virulence and efficacy with reference to the capabilities of disaffected and criminal inner city youth armed with Blackberry Messenger mobile phones that enabled participants to connect and converge with ease (Halliday, 2011). As the Economist (13 August 2011) titled them, ‘the Blackberry Riots’ (cf. Adams, 2011) appeared to be a vivid example of the capacity of social media to bring together adroitly formerly isolated people, thereby to inflate their power (for good or ill [cf. Dunleavy et al., 2012]).

In some quarters at least there has been a move away from technology as the source of comment towards what one might consider the softer sides of information. This is reflected in a shift from computer communications technologies towards interest in social media, where commentary moves from concern with what technology is doing to society towards what people can do with technologies that are now pervasive, accessible and adaptable. Among politicians and intellectuals there is also an increased concern for ‘informational labour’, for the ‘symbolic analysts’ who are best equipped to lead where adaptability and ongoing retraining are the norm. Here it is people who are the key players in the Information Society, so long as they have been blessed by a first-rate education that endows them with the informational abilities to survive in a new and globalized economy. Now deal- makers, managers, software engineers, media creators and all those involved with the creative industries are seen as key to the Information Society. This shift in analysis from technology to people, along with a persistence of general concern for information, encouraged me to produce this fourth edition of Theories of the Information Society.

I focus attention on different interpretations of the import of information in order to scrutinize a common area of interest, even though, as we shall see, interpretations of the role and import of information diverge widely, and, indeed, the closer that we come to examine their terms of reference, the less agreement even about the ostensibly common subject matter – information – there appears to be.

Setting out to examine various images of the Information Society, this book is organized in such a way as to scrutinize major contributions towards our understanding of information in the modern world. For this reason, following a critical review of definitional issues in Chapters 2 and 3 (consequences of which reverberate through the book), each chapter thereafter looks at a particular theory and its most prominent proponents and attempts to assess its strengths and weaknesses in the light of alternative theoretical analyses and empirical evidence. Starting with thinkers and theories in this way does have its problems. Readers eager to learn about, say, the internet and online/offline relations, or about information flows in the Iraq War, or about the consumption of music that has accompanied the spread of file sharing, or about politics in an era of media saturation, will not find such issues considered independently in this book. These topics are here, often at considerable length, but they are incorporated into chapters organized around major thinkers and theories. Some readers might find themselves shrugging at this, tempted to dismiss the book as the work of a dreamy theorist.

I plead (a bit) guilty. As they progress through this book readers will encounter Daniel Bell’s conception of post-industrial society which places a special emphasis on information (Chapter 4); the contention that we have undergone a transition from Fordist to post-Fordist society that generates and relies upon information handling to succeed (Chapter 5); Manuel Castells’s influential views on the ‘informational capitalism’ which operates in the ‘network society’ (Chapter 6); a number of thinkers, notably John Urry, who conceive of ‘mobilities’ – of information, but also people and products – as the distinguishing feature of our world (Chapter 7); Herbert Schiller’s views on advanced capitalism’s need for and manipulation of information (Chapter 8); Jürgen Habermas’s argument that the ‘public sphere’ is in decline and with it the integrity of information (Chapter 9); Friedrich von Hayek’s view that only the market can ensure the information needed by a successful economy and liberal society (Chapter 10); Anthony Giddens’s thoughts on ‘reflexive modernization’, which spotlight the part played by information gathered for surveillance and control purposes (Chapter 11); and Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman on postmodernism and postmodernity, both of whom give particular attention to the explosion of signs in the modern era (Chapter 12).

It will not escape notice that these thinkers and the theories with which they are associated, ranging across disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, economics and geography, are at the centre of contemporary debates in social science. This is, of course, not especially surprising given that social thinkers are engaged in trying to understand and explain the world in which we live and that an important feature of this is change in the informational realm. It is unconscionable that anyone should attempt to account for the state of the world without paying due attention to that enormous domain which covers changes in mass media, the centrality of mediation to our lives (from our knowledge of what is happening in the world through news services to the routine use of text messaging and mobile telephony), the spread of information and communication technologies, new forms of work and even shifts in education systems and services.

Let me admit something else: because this book starts from contemporary social science, it is worth warning that some may find at least parts of it difficult to follow. Jürgen Habermas is undeniably challenging, Daniel Bell – outside popularizations of his work – is a sophisticated and complex sociologist who requires effort to appreciate, and postmodern thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard are famously (and irritatingly) opaque in expression. So those who are confused will not be alone in this regard. It can be disconcerting for those interested in the information age to encounter what to them can appear rather alien and arcane social theorists. They know that there has been a radical, even a revolutionary, breakthrough in the technological realm and they want, accordingly, a straightforward account of the social and economic consequences of this development. There are paperbacks galore to satisfy this need. ‘Theory’, especially ‘grand theory’ which has ambitions to identify the most salient features of contemporary life and which frequently has recourse to history and an array of other ‘theorists’, many of them long dead, does not, and should not, enter into the matter since all it does is confuse and obfuscate.

Against this, I assert the value of my starting point. I intentionally approach an understanding of information via encounters with social theorists by way of a riposte to a rash of pronouncements on the information age. Far too much of this has come from ‘practical’ men (and a few women) who, impressed by the ‘Information Technology Revolution’, or enthused by the internet, or unable to imagine life without e-mail, or enraptured by bloggers, or wowed by the instantaneity of a tweet that has ‘gone viral’, or captivated by ‘virtual reality’ experiences that outdo the mundane, have felt able to reel off social and economic consequences that are likely, even inevitably, to follow. In these frames work will be transformed, education upturned, corporate structures revitalized, democracy itself reassessed – all because of the ‘information revolution’ (cf. Morozov, 2013).

Such approaches have influenced – and continue to influence – a vast swathe of opinion on the Information Society: in paperback books with titles such as The Mighty Micro, The Wired Society, Being Digital and What Will Be, in university courses designed to consider the ‘social effects of the computer revolution’, in countless political and business addresses, and in a scarcely calculable amount of journalism that alerts audiences to prepare for upheaval in all aspects of their lives as a result of the Information Age.

These sorts of commentaries of course have an immediacy that appeals, a ‘real-world’ engagement that readily pushes aside any concern for ‘theory’. This latter itself evok...