Information Age

The term information age refers to the existence of society on a global scale wherein the creation, distribution, integration, and manipulation of [Page 914]information is the defining activity that shapes and transforms increasing realms of life. It may be understood as a periodization of the social, economic, and cultural processes that comprise what has been termed the information society.

Sociologist Daniel Bell has been credited for coining the term information society, which he used interchangeably with his key research interest, the postindustrial society. Bell was interested in the effects of computerization and, more specifically, the computer-based knowledge production that was becoming prevalent in post-World War II industrial economies. In The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), Bell argued that the growing centrality of information and knowledge was producing a new society, one that was developing beyond that which had formed on the basis of the 18th-century industrial model. In this postindustrial society, according to Bell, the intangible and immaterial processes of “information” and “knowledge” in the production of services constituted the central processes of the evolving information age. Rather more controversially, Bell argued that through “knowledge technologies” or “intellectual technologies,” the main constitutive axis of postindustrial society would be theoretical knowledge, where the new dynamics of innovation are increasingly derived from a new relationship between science and technology.

Bell built on the work of an established pioneer in this realm, the economist Fritz Machlup. Machlup's principal work, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962), analyzed the relationship between the increasingly dynamic and interdependent processes of communication, computing, and knowledge production and how these could be developed and optimized in the service of the U.S. economy. With respect to knowledge, Machlup distinguished between five types of knowledge: practical, intellectual, pastime, spiritual, and incidental. In broad terms, Machlup regarded computers as “machines of knowledge production” and foresaw their increasingly dominant role in the new information-based economy.

Bell's thesis has been arguably the most prominent, however, and has attracted important critiques, a key one being Frank Webster's criticism that, in his 1973 book, Bell conflates “information” with “knowledge.” The general thrust of this critique is that when the term information is used with respect to database content, it should refer only to the functional ability to access (digital) data from computers or other networked devices. Webster maintains that the analytical separation of these concepts is critical because information is ultimately reducible to computer coding, whereas knowledge is far more rooted in social contexts and is always vulnerable to value judgment. The problem is that the dominance of the former over the latter, he argues, constructs a barrier to the necessary development of theoretical knowledge that has historically contributed to the evolution of modern societies.

Several scholars have argued that the growing tendency to equate digitally based information with knowledge is a central element in the ascendancy of computing in society, leading to what Doug Henwood terms an info fetishism. Here, the practical function of information to produce measurable outcomes has been valued over the more critical and contextual modes of knowledge that are more difficult to quantify. In the capitalist economy, this line of argument goes, information, through its expression and deployment in the computing revolution, has laid the basis for an information society that looks only to computer-based solutions—whether or not they may be the most appropriate.

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