The Early Information Society

Information Management in Britain before the Computer

Alistair Black, Dave Muddiman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317034988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Whether termed the 'network society', the 'knowledge society' or the 'information society', it is widely accepted that a new age has dawned, unveiled by powerful computer and communication technologies. Yet for millennia humans have been recording knowledge and culture, engaging in the dissemination and preservation of information. In `The Early Information Society', the authors argue for an earlier incarnation of the information age, focusing upon the period 1900-1960. In support of this they examine the history and traditions in Britain of two separate but related information-rich occupations - information management and information science - repositioning their origins before the age of the computer and identifying the forces driving their early development. `The Early Information Society' offers an historical account which questions the novelty of the current information society. It will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners in the library and information science field, and for sociologists and historians interested in the information society.

PART I
OVERVIEW

Chapter 1

The Information Society before the Computer

Alistair Black and Dave Muddiman

The Information Society Debate

The information society is not so new, or so significant, as we may think. In this book, we explore the idea of an information society before the information society that is today defined by the supposedly revolutionary impact of digital technology on our culture. Whereas it is undeniable that this new wave of technological development is in itself exceptional and exciting, its social effects should be viewed more soberly, the word ‘revolution’ in this regard having been devalued by its over-use in the vocabulary of socio-technical utopianism. Our view is that such grand, transformative assessments of social change need to be treated with considerable care.

For some, the contemporary information society and its positive consequences are taken for granted; for others it is a contested concept which requires detailed investigation (Mackay, 2001). The information society debate is comprised of two basic questions. The first is ethical: to what extent, individually or collectively, are the information and communication technologies that have inspired the information society idea beneficial or damaging?¹ The second theme is concerned with the existence of an information society: is it a reality or an illusion?²

In a number of recent studies we have adopted an historical approach designed to question, either directly or implicitly, the novelty of the contemporary information society (for example, see A. Black, 1998; A. Black, 2002; Muddiman, 1998; Muddiman, 2002b; Plant, 2004). In this book we are able to mount a more concerted assault on the information society ‘citadel’ – the high-tech, socially progressive New Jerusalem envisioned at governmental, expert and popular levels. The walls of this citadel have been built from inexhaustable supplies of digital technology which, unlike natural resources, are proclaimed to be renewable and expanding. The most important parts of any edifice, however, are perhaps those that are hidden from sight, below ground. This is not only true of the foundations integral to the structure, but also the deeper levels of material containing evidence of any past construction stretching back through time. It is our intention, in this book, to excavate one of these earlier strata – dating from the first half of the twentieth century – that lies beneath the information society citadel.

Yet, in pursuing this ‘archaeological’ project we are not blind to the possibility that the edifices under which we dig are likely to be more virtual than real. Our discourse is hence tempered by the critical observation that the information society proposition is almost certainly a mirage: in essence a welcoming vision of a ‘haven society’ forced onto our consciousness by a powerfully persuasive technological determinism and the abrupt, dislocating and disquieting consequences of the shift to post-modern modes of social, economic and cultural life. In short we adhere, like Christopher May (2002) to a ‘sceptical view’ of the whole information society proposition. That said, however, we have not discarded the term. Instead, we use the notion of an ‘early information society’ throughout this book in an impressionistic, rather than systematic, and a descriptive, rather than prescriptive, sense. Our aim is not to establish the legitimacy or otherwise of the term ‘information society’ as a representation of Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. Rather we seek, less ambitiously, to demonstrate that during this period information as a discrete concept became recognised, as it had not been before, as economically, socially and intellectually important.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century the information society became a commonplace explanation of change in human relations and culture. By the end of the century, as Duff (1995) argues, the concept had gained paradigmatic status. An over-excited acceptance of the historical discontinuity that is the information society is widespread, promoted and re-cycled by a variety of politicians, journalists, popular commentators, interested entrepreneurs and those who Roszak (1988, pp. 34–61) once referred to as ‘the data merchants’. The information society paradigm is infused with futuristic predictions – mostly positive – of social change. As Bill Gates (1995, p. 250) has written:

This is an exciting time in the Information Age … I’m optimistic about the impact of the new technology. It will enhance leisure time and enrich culture. It will help relieve pressures on urban areas by enabling individuals to work from home or remote-site offices. It will relieve pressure on natural resources because increasing numbers of products will be able to take the form of bits rather than of manufactured goods. It will give us more control over our lives and allow experiences and products to be custom tailored to our interests. Citizens of the information society will enjoy new opportunities for productivity, learning, and entertainments. Countries that move boldly and in concert with each other will enjoy economic rewards.

The information society concept is noticeably entrenched in the discourses of the information professions. Librarians, for example, have been keen to see themselves at the core of the information society, their institutions functioning as the ‘heart and brain’ of a new age (Batt, 1997).³ As long ago as 1986, Bose (p. 92) declared emphatically that: ‘From an industrial society we have transformed into an information society … the information society has arrived.’ Equally, many information scientists have adopted an uncritical enthusiasm for the information society.⁴

In accordance with the theory that every action provokes a reaction, however, there has emerged a healthy scholarly scepticism concerning the existence or imminent arrival of an information society posited as fundamentally distinct from industrial society. Frequent sorties against information society utopianism have been launched, employing tactics of social determinism and contemporary social analysis to puncture the validity and hyped implications of concepts like the ‘information economy’, the ‘information occupations’, ‘knowledge society’ and ‘cultural informatisation’, as well associated ideas and predictions of individual empowerment and social harmony. If one examines current society and recent social change then most of the earlier predictions of the info-enthusiasts have a hollow ring to them. The warm and homely vision of millions of people switching to flexible working from idyllic ‘tele-cottages’ has failed to materialise; ‘tele-work’ continues to account for a tiny segment of the workforce. Environmental damage has not been reduced as a result of the ‘perceived’ shift away from industrialism. Social exclusion persists, despite the information revolution and the promise of falling ‘access’ costs. Notwithstanding the growth of tertiary education in terms of raw numbers, it is difficult to argue that labour has been significantly intellectualised or released from monotonous patterns of work; on the contrary, it might be posited that professional occupations, the so-called liberated knowledge workers of the information society, has been subjected to ongoing ‘proletarianisation’. The silicon chip has not brought increased leisure time and an easier working life; if anything working hours have increased, stress and hurry at work have intensified, and the notion of the paperless office remains purely a dream.⁵

Even as the info-enthusiasts were talking up the social effects of the silicon chip in the early 1980s, some sections of popular opinion were ready to take a detached, sceptical view of information technology. Writers to the Britain’s Mass-Observation Archive, University of Sussex, in response to an investigation on the topic of ‘work’ in 1983 offered the following critical commentaries:

Video and computerised games in the home. Computers in the office. I suppose there will be more and more of this sort of thing. I don’t like it much. As the machine becomes more advanced and important, so does the human being become diminished. New technology will increase the gap between generations and will tend to ‘hermitise’ individuals and small groups, increasing the differences between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

Without being ‘luddite’, our arguments in this book are located in this critical tradition, although unlike most critiques of the information society their perspective is essentially historical.

The Information Society and History

Comparing contemporary evidence with prophecy from the past has been an effective way of challenging the information society idea. The contemporary approach to the questioning of the information society has been forceful and convincing. Such criticism has by no means been ‘history poor’. However, adopting the ‘long view’, others, in some instances alongside contemporary analysis, have resorted more systematically and directly to history as a tool for questioning the information society construct (for example, Castells, 1996, pp. 34–52; Feather, 2004, pp. 3–40; May 2002, pp. 19–47; Rayward, forthcoming; Robins and Webster, 1999, 89–110).⁶ Recent social and technological change might be seen ‘as no more than the latest part in a continuum that has stretched over many centuries’ (Dearnley and Feather 2001, p. 131).

History has been a natural tool for information society enthusiasts and critics alike to take up – for a number of reasons. The first reason has been alluded to already. The information society concept has been circulating in academic and professional circles for over thirty years. In addressing the way that the information society concept has evolved, and the way it has been shaped by its exponents, and denied by its sceptics, one is by definition making it the subject of historical study.

Secondly, but linked to the first reason, the information society debate is overflowing with terms that carry historical connotations. Its vocabulary is saturated with references to ‘evolution’, ‘progress’, ‘developments’, ‘trends’, ‘transformation’, ‘growth’ and ‘decline’ – as theorists attempt to map out the journey from industrial, through a post-industrial, to an information society. Writers and researchers have interested themselves in the rise of the information industries and the shift towards information occupations, in the emergence of an informatised culture and in the convergence and ever increasing power of digital technologies. In claiming and tracking such changes, information society enthusiasts have been intrinsically historical in their analysis. They have displayed a sense of history, even if their conclusions are contested and have addressed too short a timeframe. Another word laden with history is ‘origin’. Searching out the key changes and forces which ‘prefaced’ the information-abundant society of the late–twentieth century and which encouraged commentators to attach an epochal label to this perceived new society – for example, the influence of the Japanese economic revolution of the 1960s or the marked decline in corporate profits in the late-1960s and early-1970s which forced a solution in the form of new technologies of information⁷ – is an important aspect of studying the information society question.

The third reason why history is a very visible component of information society studies is the understandable compulsion – whether one is adopting an evolutionary or revolutionary perspective – to situate late-twentieth-century socio-informational change in a timeframe that goes beyond merely recent, or contemporary, history. A major factor which legitimises the use of history to question the arguments of the information society’s proponents is the mobilisation of the past by the proponents themselves to support their position. An example in this regard is Alvin Toffler’s (1980) widely accepted thesis that western society is on the brink of a fundamental change, a ‘third wave’ of human social development, to which he sees attached a variety of labels: information age, electronic era, global village, techno-electronic age, post-industrial society. Such dramatic claims are in the tradition of Drucker’s (1969) assessment that we have entered an ‘age of discontinuity’.

The information society is presented by its history-minded publicists as a grand periodisation of history. It is not surprising, therefore, that responses to the concept have similarly entailed references to, and analysis of, earlier ‘ages’. Kumar (1991) offers the theory that the information society is merely a further wave in the history of utopianism, previous waves of optimism coinciding with the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the nineteenth-century holy grail of free trade and free market economics, and, most recently, the immediate post-1945 decades of technological capitalism and rapid economic growth. However, given that the utopianism of these grand stages of history was misplaced, Kumar believes that naturally we should be suspicious of claims concerning the existence of an information society.

When confronted with the proposition that we are experiencing a fundamental ‘historical turn’, therefore, counter-attacks from revisionists are inevitable. Bold claims that a new age is in the making have incited a response from those who request a more careful recognition of the continuities of history. In particular, attention is drawn to the monumental shifts in human relations and thought wrought by modernity and the growth of capitalism, and the fact that these are still very much ‘in play’. ‘Grand’ history has become a potent weapon in the fight against the millenarianism of the information society.

Whenever visions of the future are summoned up, automatically, as if in accordance with the laws of physics, the energy of history is released in reaction. The futurology accompanying the information society concept is intense. The reasons for this intensity are complex. The tendency of some social theorists and commentators to gaze with optimism into their crystal balls might be explained by the insecurities of our modern life. But the age in which we live does not hold a monopoly on peering hopefully into the future in order to avoid the social anxieties of the present. It is difficult to believe that we today are so ready to grasp the future because we are faced with greater social uncertainty than in the past – for those who in relatively recent history lived through world wars or the unemployment of the 1930s might robustly disagree that theirs was a more secure age. A more feasible explanation of information society futurology is the technological determinism that has infected the ‘new age’ proposition. Seduced by the ‘glittering’ machines of the digital revolution, it has become all too easy to exaggerate the potential of technology to mould society: the digital ‘technical fix’ is populist and digestible. History guards against futurology. Preoccupation with gazing into a utopian information future tends to create blind spots to the reality of an information-rich past and of a bigger picture that has been long in the making.

Information History

Given that the information society concept contains an historical dimension and readily invites historical commentary, one is prompted to consider if such historical analyses can be placed under the umbrella term ‘information history’. Info-enthusiasts assert that information is fast becoming the defining feature of our culture. If this is so, then the prospects for a distinctive subject named ‘information history’ are good (Stevens, 1986; Weller, 2005). We know that the subject of history has a healthy capacity to generate sub-sets within itself, as the appearance of a multiplicity of sub-fields in recent decades shows – for example, social, cultural and gender history. We also know that as new areas of knowledge and expert practice appear then their historical ‘adjuncts’ soon follow. Prompted by the digital ‘revolution’, information has become a fashionable topic for historical investigation. Unsurprisingly, there has been curiosity as to how information was ‘created, diffused and manipulated...