The information society is a broad concept which has been used since the 1970s to refer to the wide range of social and economic changes linked to the growing impact of information technology. It highlights the role that information technology plays in the way that individuals live, work, travel and entertain themselves. The use of the term information society has now become so widespread that the concept cannot be understood as a reference to any specific thesis. Journalists, futurists and social scientists often use this term to denote a more information-centric society in the same vein as others use such concepts as the information economy, the wired nation, the communications revolution, the microelectronics revolution and the knowledge society.
Others see the information society in terms of a prescription rather than a forecast. In Japan and Europe, as well as North America, the information society is often promoted as a vision for the twenty-first century as a means to help policy makers anticipate and nurture the information sector in local, national and regional economies. In the 1990s US and other national initiatives to build modern information infrastructures—the so-called ‘information super-highway’—were based on such visions (Dutton et al. 1987).
For social scientists interested in the role of information and communication technology in social and economic development, the information society is a central idea. It builds on seminal work by the American sociologist Daniel Bell (1974), who focused on forecasting the ‘post-industrial society’. Bell posited information as the defining technology of the post-Second World War era, while raw materials were the core technology of the agricultural society, and energy was the core technology of the industrial society.
Broadly speaking, information technology refers to knowledge about how to create, manage and use information to accomplish human purposes, and so includes not only advances in computing and telecommunications, but also advances in the techniques and skills for using these systems for such purposes as modelling and computer simulation.
Bell identified major trends in what he called the post-industrial society, focusing on the USA as the exemplary case. The principal trends tied to the development of an information society include the growth of employment in information-related work; the rise of business and industry tied to the production, transmission and analysis of information; and the increasing centrality of technologists—managers and professionals skilled in the use of information for planning and analysis—to decision making.
The most significant trend is the shift in the majority of the labour force from agriculture (the primary sector) and manufacturing (the secondary sector) to services (the tertiary sector). Growth in information work, primarily white-collar occupations, has contributed to growth in service sectors. Information work includes a broad array of jobs, ranging from programmers and software engineers to teachers and researchers. New information industries, such as the providers of on-line data and communication services, account for some of this growth, but information work has also become more central to every sector of the economy, including agriculture and manufacturing. In this respect, the occupational shifts associated with the information society do not necessarily imply a decline in the relevance of primary or secondary sectors to national or global economies, as some critics have argued, but rather a diminishing need for labour within these sectors as computing, telecommunications and management science techniques are used to redesign the way in which work is accomplished.
A second trend identified in post-industrial information societies is the increasing importance of knowledge—including theoretical knowledge and methodological techniques, and its codification—to the management of social and economic institutions. Knowledge and technique, such as systems theory, operations research, modelling and simulation, are viewed as critical to forecasting, planning and managing complex organizations and systems, which Bell posited as central problems of the post-industrial era. According to Bell, the complexity and scale of emerging social and economic systems requires systematic forecasting and foresight rather than a previously trusted reliance on common sense or reasoning based on surveys and experiments.
A third set of trends involves power shifts, particularly the growing prominence of a professional and managerial class—the knowledge workers. These are the individuals who understand and know how to work with knowledge, information systems, simulation and related analytical techniques. They will become increasingly vital to decision-making processes in situations of growing complexity (Dutton et al. 1987:12–33). Thus, the relative power of experts should rise with the emergence of an information society.
Despite the significance and longevity of the concept, there remains no consensus on the definition of an information society, or indeed whether we are in fact living in an increasingly information-oriented society. Controversy over the trends and historical underpinnings of an information society generated a lively debate within the social sciences. Critics of Bell’s theory focus on his identification of information technology as central to long-term macrolevel changes in society—particularly in the structure of occupations and social strata—and the resultant deterministic view of social change. Whether or not this is an oversimplification of the information society thesis, it has led to a valuable shift in the focus of social science enquiry. This no longer looks only at the social implications of technological change, but also considers the social, political and economic factors that have shaped the design and use of information and communication technologies.
William Dutton
Brunel University and University of Southern California
References
Bell, D. (1974) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, London. (Original edn 1973, New York.)
Dutton, W., Blumler, J. and Kraemer, K. (eds) (1987) Wind Cities, New York.
Further reading
Bell, D. (1980) ‘The social framework of the information society’, in T.Forester (ed.) The Microelectronics Revolution, Oxford.
Porat, M. (1976) ‘The information economy’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, GA.
Robins, K. (ed.) (1992) Understanding Information, London.
