Information Society

Information society refers to a society driven economically and politically by nonmaterial products like information and knowledge. To be considered an information society, a society must evolve beyond the trade of material goods and generate at least half of its GNP (gross national product) through information and knowledge. Information society is also referred to as knowledge society, network society, postmodern society, postindustrial society, and so on. All these terms describe a socioeconomic reality in which information is a commodity, an essential resource used to create new products and services and to generate wealth to those who have it.

Economist Fritz Machlup (1962) is credited for first developing the concepts of information society and knowledge economy. Machlup immigrated from Austria to the United States in 1933; his research on patents led him to calculate the cost of knowledge and information to economic enterprises. He estimated that about a third of the 1959 GNP in the United States was generated by the five knowledge industries, which he identified as education, research and development, mass media, information machines (signaling machines, instruments, office equipment, and computers), and information services (or the activity of generating and distributing knowledge). Machlup also classified the types of knowledge into practical knowledge (cultural, political, etc.), intellectual knowledge, pastime knowledge, spiritual knowledge, and unwanted knowledge outside a person's interest and acquired by accident. Based on content analysis of 130 daily newspapers in 1954, Machlup claimed that more than half of print media content falls under the pastime knowledge category, which represents knowledge for entertainment purposes. Only about a third of print media content contains intellectual knowledge, and less than a tenth conveys practical knowledge. Advertising, which made up for about 70% of newspaper content, was classified mostly as unwanted knowledge.

Machlup's views on information and knowledge as the main commodity of a modern society were developed by other scholars. Economist Peter Drucker (2002) studied the transition between societies driven by material goods to societies driven by information. Economist Marc Porat classified the various economic sectors into primary and secondary and calculated their share to the GNP based on their information generating capacity. Economist Daniel Bell explained that transitioning from material goods to trading information will result in a postindustrial society based on services rather than tangible items. Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard argued that the reliance of information and its diffusion to all levels of society will end centralized perceptions of the world, called “metanarratives,” because information about the outside world makes people aware of the differences rather than the similarities between them.