Informationalism

All societies are to a certain extent shaped by human activity that produces subjective and objective information—cognition, communication, cooperation, [Page 447]and the informational products produced by these processes can be found in all societies. All labor is based both on mental and manual aspects, that is, on a dialectic of mental labor and manual labor. Nonetheless, the terms informationalism, information society, postindustrial society, and knowledge-based society are reserved to characterize a social formation that is shaped by knowledge, information technology, science, and expertise as immediate factors of social production in its entire realm. Social production is increasingly shaped by mental and informational labor and less by manual labor. Informationalism is a mode of development of modern society that is structured by and based on knowledge, science, expertise, and information technologies.

Technologically achieved increases in productivity allow the reduction of the share of manual aspects and the increase of the share of mental aspects of labor, that is, the composition of labor shifts from the dominance of high-energy manual labor to the dominance of cognitive, communication, and cooperative labor (informational labor). Informational labor and informational production dominate and restructure all realms of the economy and society. The emergence of the information society is a multidimensional shift that involves the rise of knowledge as a strategic resource in all societal areas. Information has become, besides labor, capital, property, and power, a defining characteristic and mechanism of modern society. This shift has ecological, economic, political, and cultural dimensions and is accompanied by both new opportunities and new risks in all subsystems of society. Networked computer usage has resulted in a real-time globalization of social relationships; knowledge flows today transcend national borders; and they result in the globalization, intensification, and time-space-distanciation of social relationships and establish a more intensive and extensive interconnection of humans. The twentieth century has seen an unprecedented increase in intensity, extensity, and velocity of global communication that is closely related to the rise of radio, television, satellite transmission, the micro-electronic revolution, and digital fiber-optic cable networks or digital data processing. We today live in an information society in the sense that information and information technologies have become immediate forces of production that influence and change all subsystems of society. The increased informational character of society is the result of the rising importance of expertise, scientific knowledge, and information technologies.

The information economy can be characterized as an economy where labor is mainly cognitive, affective, communicative, and cooperative labor. Such labor produces symbols, social relationships, knowledge products, and expertise. Services, especially information-based services, have become the main sector of the economy. Networked electronic communication allows a reorganization of the corporation and mediates the emergence of transnational corporations, flexible production systems (lean production, outsourcing, just-in-time-production), and the decentralized, networked firm. Informational labor, communication, information products, research, expertise, and marketing have become central aspects of value production. There is an increasing importance of engineering, management, researchers, and technological jobs in firms. The information economy has a polarized social structure, both low-paid/low-qualified and high-paid/high-qualified informational labor have been rapidly increasing. Hence, one can also speak of the rise of a white-collar proletariat, a cybertariat, or cognitariat. The main antagonism of the information economy is the one between information as a public good (open source) and a commodity (intellectual property rights).

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