The Information Society is the title of a sociological journal, founded in 1981, which defines itself as a "critical forum for leading edge analysis of the impacts, policies, system concepts, and methodologies related to information technologies and changes in society and culture".
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information_Society.
The idea of an Information society
Before we can adequately appreciate different approaches to understanding informational trends and issues nowadays, we need to pay attention to the definitions which are brought into play by participants in the debates.
It is especially helpful to examine at the outset what those who refer to an information society mean when they evoke this term.
The insistence of those who subscribe to this concept, and their assertion that our time is one marked by its novelty, cries out for analysis, more urgently perhaps than than those scenarios which contend that the status quo remains.
Hence the primary aim of this chapter is to ask:what do people mean when they refer to an information society
Later I comment on the different ways in which contributors perceive 'information' itself. As we shall see - here, in the very conception of the phenomenon which underlies all discussion - there are distinctions which echo the divide between information society theorists who announce the novelty of the present and informational thinkers who recognize the force of the past weighing on today's developments.
Definitions of the information society.
What strikes one in reading the literature on the information society is that so many writers operate with undeveloped definitions of their subject. They write copiously about particular features of the information society but are curiously vague about their operational criteria.
Eager to make sense of changes in information, they rush to interpret these in terms of different forms of economic production, new forms of social interaction, innovative processes of production or whatever.
As they do so, however, they often fail to establish in what ways and why information is becoming more central today, so critical indeed that it is ushering in a new type of society.What strikes one in reading the literature on the information society is that so many writers operate with undeveloped definitions of their subject. They write copiously about particular features of the information society but are curiously vague about their operational criteria.
Eager to make sense of changes in information, they rush to interpret these in terms of different forms of economic production, new forms of social interaction, innovative processes of production or whatever.
Just what is it about information that makes so many scholars think that it is at the core of the modern age? We may distinguish five definitions of information society each of which presents criteria for identifying the new technological and economic transformation.
Source: Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Book Title: Theories of the Information Society. Contributors: Frank Webster - author. Publisher: Routledge. Place of Publication: London. Publication Year: 2002. Page Number 8. Information society Information Society is a term for a society in which the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information has become the most significant economic and cultural activity. An Information Society may be contrasted with societies in which the economic underpinning is primarily Industrial or Agrarian. The machine tools of the Information Society are computers and telecommunications, rather than lathes or ploughs. Policy makers for the G7 (now G8) group of nations recognized, only a few years ago, that: Progress in information technologies and communication is changing the way we live: how we work and do business, how we educate our children, study and do research, train ourselves, and how we are entertained. The idea of a global Information Society can be viewed in relation to Marshall McLuhan's prediction that the communications media would transform the world into a "global village." Here is a succinct definition from the IBM Community Development Foundation in a 1997 report, "The Net Result - Report of the National Working Party for Social Inclusion." Information Society: A society characterized by a high level of information intensity in the everyday life of most citizens, in most organizations and workplaces; by the use of common or compatible technology for a wide range of personal, social, educational and business activities, and by the ability to transmit, receive and exchange digital data rapidly between places irrespective of distance. |
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