Information Society Studies

Alistair S. Duff

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317797982
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

We are often told that we are "living in an information society" or that we are "information workers." But what exactly do these claims mean, and how might they be verified? In this important methodological study, Alistair S. Duff cuts through the rhetoric to get to the bottom of the "information society thesis." Wide-ranging in coverage, this study will be of interest to scholars in information science, communication and media studies and social theory. It is a key text for the newly-unified specialism of information society studies, and an indispensable guide to the future of this discipline.

1 Introduction

Introduction

The Information Society is here! … It may sound like a cliché, but the Information Society is here.

(Lehtonen 1988: 104)

Researchers in many disciplines, social commentators and columnists, policymakers at both the national and international level, and even that useful epistemological construct ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’¹ seem to be agreed that we are witnessing the onset of a new era: the ‘information age’. Scholars have been particularly diligent in investigating the ethical and social problems allegedly faced by citizens of the information society: online pornography, threats to privacy, intellectual property violations, and the increasing gap between ‘info rich’ and ‘info poor’, to name only a few. However, while all this thought and activity may be laudable, the grounds for the existence of this putative new social formation remain rather unclear. Commenting on the second edition of a well-regarded textbook on the information society, a prominent British information scientist notes that the book’s author ‘very reasonably emphasises the difficulty of deciding exactly what the term means, and, hence, of determining whether we are really members of such a society’ (Meadows 1996: 278). Indeed, it is the case that ‘the serious academic study of information society issues is still relatively under-developed’, and that ‘many of the claims made about the information society are not subjected to serious scrutiny’ (Preston and Wickham 1997: vi). However, if something is repeated often enough it is sooner or later accepted as the truth, and this seems to have happened to the ‘information society thesis’; it has become, as Jaako Lehtonen says, a cliché.

The aim of this book is to try to establish whether the assertion that ‘the information society is here’ can really be justified. This chapter begins by tracing the literary roots of the term ‘information society’, to discover from where this bewitching descriptor originally came. The next section charts the term’s recent behaviour in academic literature and the press, and demonstrates bibliometrically that ‘information society’ has indeed become a widely influential concept, and, if not a new ‘paradigm’, then at least a new framework for research and speculation. I then outline the parameters of the problem at the heart of the present investigation: is there a methodology which can truly justify the information society thesis? It will be assumed as axiomatic that there is nothing as important as facts: does, then, the information society thesis rest squarely or even obliquely on them, and if so, what precisely are they, and in what way or ways does it do so? It will be argued below, specifically, that there are several logically distinct but usually conflated versions of the information society thesis. In the chapters that follow, each of these versions is expounded and evaluated, both in its own right and in relation to the other versions. The investigation is thus offered as a basic methodological contribution to the budding interdisciplinary field of Information Society Studies.²

The roots of the information society concept

The origins of the term ‘information society’ are not well understood. If one ignores the many vague or patently anachronistic claims which have appeared, one is left with two cogent theories. Both locate the invention in the early 1960s, and both also link it closely to the idea of the ‘information industry’. However, there is disagreement over whether it is authors in Japan or the USA who should be credited. Here the main arguments for both schools are examined.³

The case for American provenance

The key document in the case for US provenance is Fritz Machlup’s The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962). In an allusion typical of this school of thought, A.E. Cawkell says that ‘Fritz Machlup, an American economist, started it all, although he called it “The Knowledge Industry”’ (1986: 87). Cawkell acknowledges that Machlup did not himself actually ever use the term ‘information society’, but argues that he should be credited with its invention on the grounds that the ‘idea of an “Information Society” was implicit in Fritz Machlup’s work in 1962’ (Cawkell 1984: 63, my italic). That is to say, the case for American provenance reduces to a claim concerning the coining of the term ‘knowledge industry’, and thus depends upon the legitimacy of equating knowledge with information, and industry with society.

In his book, Machlup had propounded the view that ‘all information in the ordinary sense of the word is knowledge’ (1962: 15). Moreover, while he did not speak of the ‘information industry’, he did refer to computers and an assortment of other technologies as the ‘information machine industry’. It may therefore be possible to infer that the idea of information industries was implicitly there. However, the conflation of industry and society cannot be defended. No doubt the former implies the latter in the trivial sense that one cannot have industries in the absence of some kind of society, but it does not at all follow that every economist who has written on an industry or group of industries has ipso facto been engaged in an act of sociological origination. A society is, after all, a complex formation in which industry is only one of many components. Thus the question remains: who actually invented ‘information society?

The first actual usage of the term identified by Cawkell comes in a 1975 OECD conference paper by Edwin Parker and Marc Porat, but this is certainly too late a date. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1974; first published 1973), Daniel Bell had already mentioned the term, albeit choosing, at this stage in the development of his thought, not to adopt it. He wrote:

The question has been asked why I have called this speculative concept the ‘post-industrial society’, rather than the knowledge society, or the information society, or the professional society, all of which are somewhat apt in describing salient aspects of what is emerging.

(Bell 1974: 37)

The wording here seems to imply that ‘information society’ was already a live option as a possible descriptor for the emergent social formation. Susan Crawford (1983) indeed traces the term back to 1970, when the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) organised its annual meeting around the theme of ‘The Information Conscious Society’. Eugene Garfield has argued (1979: 209) that ‘information-conscious society’ and ‘information society’ are not synonymous. That may be true at a philosophical level, but in terms of a straightforward inquiry into literary priority it is reasonable to credit ASIS with first usage. A wide range of bibliographic database searches commissioned for the present inquiry confirmed that there was no English-language use of the term prior to 1970, at least in a document title or abstract (see Appendix 1).

The case for Japanese provenance

The alternative theory claims that ‘the term “information society” was itself coined in Japan’ (Morris-Suzuki 1988: 3). Two cognates are involved. ‘Joho Shakai’ is normally translated into English as ‘information society’, but has also been rendered as ‘information-oriented society’, ‘information-conscious society’, and ‘information-centred society’. ‘Johoka Shakai’, which uses a verbal form of’joho’, has a sense analogous to ‘industrialised society’, and is translated variously as ‘informised society’, ‘informatised society’, ‘informationised society’, or sometimes simply (again) ‘information society’. Osmo Wiio has disputed such translations, claiming (Wiio 1985) that the term ‘communicating society’ is more accurate, but his position is undercut by the fact that bilingual Japanese authors themselves translate ‘joho’ as ‘information’. Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1988) specifies that Yujiro Hayashi did the actual coining in 1969, i.e. a year before the ASIS conference. In that year two Japanese government reports on the theme of the information society were published, on both of which Hayashi had acted as a leading advisor (Keizai 1969; Sangyo 1969): his book Johoka Shakai: Hado no Shakai Kara Sofuto no Shakai e (The Information Society: From Hard to Soft Society), which reportedly sold 100,000 copies, appeared simultaneously.

A different, and rather more nuanced, account of Japanese literary origins can be found in the writings of Youichi Ito. Like Cawkell and others, he links the origination of the term ‘information society’ to ‘information industries’. According to Ito, the latter term was first used by Tadao Umesao in an article entitled ‘Joho sangyo ron’ (‘On information industries’), published in the January 1963 issue of the media periodical Hoso Asahi (Rising Sun Broadcasting). Ito argues that, while Umesao did not actually use the terms ‘Joho Shakai’ or ‘Johoka Shakai’, his article ‘caused the “joho shakai (information society) boom”’ (Ito 1991a: 5). Exactly one year later, the January 1964 issue of the same periodical contained the proceedings of a discussion in which Jiro Kamishima argued that Japan was suited to become a ‘Joho Sangyo Shakai’ (information industrial society). The editors of Hoso Asahi, one of whom Ito names as Michiko Igarashi, ‘apparently seized on these words and titled the article, “Sociology in information societies” ‘; thereafter, between November 1964 and July 1966, they ran a series of articles on the theme of the ‘information society’, with such titles as ‘ “Audience” in information societies’, ‘ “Senders” in information societies’, and ‘Organizations and individuals in information societies’. As regards monographs, Ito has stated elsewhere (1981: 673) that Hayashi’s ‘was probably the first book in the world that used the term “informational society” or a similar term as its book title’. However, he identifies (Ito 1991a: 7) a slightly earlier usage in Joho Shakai Nyumon (Introduction to an Information Society) by Yoneji Masuda, which was published in 1968. Ito also credits Masuda with first English-language usage, again in a conference proceedings of 1970, in this case a future studies one (Masuda 1970). A final significant datum Ito supplies is that in 1971 a dictionary on information societies appeared in Japan (Johoka Shakai Jiten).

Discussion: the invention of ‘information society’

Ito’s research establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the invention of the term ‘information society’ occurred in Japan and not in the USA.⁴ The first Japanese use of the term was in 1964, fully six years before the earliest date given by those claiming American provenance. The titles of the articles in Hoso Asahi demonstrate that by the mid-1960s ‘information society’ was already serving as a subject heading for Japanese reflection on the modern world, and the publication of a dictionary on the subject constitutes clear bibliographic proof that the term was well established by 1971. As regards first English-language usage, the American and Japanese accounts agree on the year: any applause for this achievement can therefore be shared between Masuda and the American Society for Information Science, since both employed the term ‘information society’ (or, in the latter’s case, a bona fide synonym) in 1970.

However, while the facts provided by Ito must be admitted, his i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The information sector version of the information society thesis
• 3. The information flows version of the information society thesis
• 4. The information technology version of the information society thesis
• 5. Synthetic methodology of the information society thesis
• 6. Overall conclusions
• Coda: An agenda for Information Society Studies
• Appendix 1: Database searches
• Appendix 2: Telephone interview with Youichi Ito
• Appendix 3: Periodicals carrying articles on the information society between 1984 and 1997
• Bibliography
• Index