Investigating Information Society

Hugh Mackay, Wendy Maples, Paul Reynolds

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136453045
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This lively and engaging text introduces students to the major debates and data on the information society, and at the same time teaches them how to research it. It gives an overview of: * theorists of the information society, particularly Manuel Castells and Daniel Bell * social research methodologies, including positivist, interpretivist, critical and cultural * qualitative and quantitative research methods and criteria for social science evaluation. Drawing on a rich body of empirical work, it explores three core themes of information society debates: the transformation of culture through the information revolution, changing patterns of work and employment and the reconfiguration of time and space in everyday life. In exploring these, the reader is introduced through case-studies, activities, and questions for discussion, to the practicalities of doing social research and the nature of social science argument and understanding.

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The information society: continuity or change?

Hugh Mackay

1 THE INFORMATION SOCIETY DISCOURSE

Social scientists have commonly sought to understand the major social transformations underway at their time of writing — notably the work of Karl Marx on industrialization, Emile Durkheim's concern with social stability, and Max Weber's analysis of bureaucracy. Contemporary social transformation in the developed world has led social scientists to seek to understand what many have called the information society. It's likely that you have heard of this notion because in the press, on radio and television, in popular culture, literature, industry, education, official reports and social research we find claims of far-reaching social transformations referred to in terms of an emerging information society. Other terms in circulation — post-industrial society, network society and knowledge society, for example — carry similar or overlapping meanings. The term ‘information society’ spans the social and the technical: the global information infrastructure, the Internet, the World Wide Web, the e-economy, information technology (IT), telecommunications, digitization, convergence, and many more. Although there is considerable variation in analysis of the social, economic and political significance of the information society, together these debates form a discourse, a set of ideas, concepts and understandings that are invoked in a diversity of contexts. Crucial, as we shall see, is the growth of information and IT.

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Convergence
This term relates to the technical (telecommunicating and computing), the content (graphics, sound and text on the Internet), and the medium (e.g. radio on the Internet).

Discourse
A narrative in which a set of concepts, unified by common assumptions, is brought together.

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Nicholas Negroponte, Director of the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a leading commentator on the digital future. His book, Being Digital, draws on his columns in the monthly magazine Wired, and constitutes a typical perspective within the broad information society discourse:

Early in the next millennium your right or left cufflinks or earrings may communicate with each other by low-orbiting satellites and have more computer power than your present PC. Your telephone won't ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be redefined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment Schools will change to become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world. The digital planet will look and feel like the head of a pin.

(Negroponte, 1995, p.6)

In a similar vein, the futurist Tom Stonier argues that ‘modern productive systems no longer depend on land, labour and capital as their primary input; rather, they require information’ (Stonier, 1983, ?.306). Such analysis is not, however, confined to futurists. Mark Poster, a communications theorist, argues that ‘new forms of social interaction based on electronic communications devices are replacing older types of social relations’ (Poster, 1984, p. 168). As an oral culture was replaced by print, so this is being replaced by electronic communication (Poster, 1990). David Bolter, a classicist with an interest in computing, argues that, in the same way as the clock is the symbol of the industrial era, the computer occupies ‘a special place in our cultural landscape. It is the technology that more than any other defines our age … giving us a new definition of man, as an “information processor”, and of nature, as “information to be processed”’ (Bolter, 1986, pp.8–9, 13).

The ‘information society’ is prominent too in a breadth of government and European Union (EU) policies. Martin Bangemann, European Commissioner and Head of the European Council Directorate General XIII, led a ‘high-level group’ of ‘prominent persons’ that reported to the European Council in 1994 on the measures the EC and its member states should consider regarding information infrastructure. His report was unambiguous in its analysis of the present as the time of an information revolution:

Throughout the world, information and communications technologies are generating a new industrial revolution already as significant and far-reaching as those of the past.

It is a revolution based on information …

This revolution adds huge new capacities to human intelligence and constitutes a resource which changes the way we work together and live together. …

All revolutions generate uncertainty, discontinuity — and opportunity. Today's is no exception. How we respond, how we turn current opportunities into real benefits, will depend on how quickly we can enter the European information society.

(Bangemann, 1994, ch. 1)

This analysis has been used to inform a raft of EU policies, including the development of a regulatory framework for infrastructure and services, the stimulation of technology research and applications, increasing public awareness of the information society and monitoring its social and cultural impacts. These policies seek to stimulate both production and consumption, within the context of the free market and private sector investment. Many areas of EU intervention, including its funding of regional economic development, lie under its ‘information society’ umbrella.

In the USA you can find a similar concern, though commonly couched in terms of the ‘information superhighway’, a notion associated closely with Al Gore. For him, the global information infrastructure (GII) is:

a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village on every continent… The GII will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel … These highways — or, more accurately, networks of distributed intelligence — will allow us to share information, to connect, and to communicate as a global community. From these connections we will derive robust and sustainable economic progress, strong democracies, better solutions to global and local environmental challenges, improved health care and — ultimately — a greater sense of stewardship of our small planet … Hundreds of billions of dollars can be added to world growth if we commit to the GII.

(speech to the International Telecommunication Union World Telecommunication Development Conference, Buenos Aires, 21 March 1994)

Nearer home we can find similar sentiments and policies, with both Conservative and Labour governments committed to using IT to improve communication between citizens and the government. At the time of writing the Cabinet Office has a Central IT Unit, the PM has an MP as his e-Envoy and there is an e-Minister. The 10 Downing Street website (http://www.number-10.gov.uk) provides information about the Prime Minister and the government. A related e-mail service allows citizens to be updated regarding government activities in which they have expressed an interest. This is not simply a one-way channel for funnelling official information. Rather, the idea is a two-way process, in which dialogue, sharing knowledge, and involvement and participation are facilitated. The 10 Downing Street website allows feedback, as the PM's welcome statement outlines: ‘this site lets you have your say. Take part in a discussion forum, or pose a question to be asked in one of our live broadcasts’. Visitors to the site can observe discussions which are underway, make their own contributions to these, or even open up new topics for discussion.

ACTIVITY 1.1

Log on to 10 Downing Street. If you do not have easy Internet access, try to get a friend to help, or get to an Internet café. Log on to 10 Downing Street (http://www.number-10.gov.uk) and view a discussion. What do you see as the strengths and limits of such government sites, as regards extending democracy and participation?

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COMMENT

This Internet site appears to represent a new and significant channel for enabling expression of opinion by citizens to government, with some indication of discussion being taken seriously (at the time when we looked, there was a summary by the PM of a discussion which had taken place). But how many can contribute to such discussion? Who are they? Who is not contributing, and why do you think they are not? What is the significance for those who are excluded of others taking advantage of the access allowed and possibly influencing policies? Who is organizing, ordering and managing the discussion? What do you think is happening when a discussion is summarized? More bro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The information society: continuity or change?
• Chapter 2 Theories of the information society
• Chapter 3 Social Science and the information society
• Chapter 4 Researching the information society: methods and methodologies
• Chapter 5 Culture, representation and identities
• Chapter 6 New patterns of work and inequality
• Chapter 7 Time—space reconfiguration
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Index