Information Society

Origins and Accounts of the Information Society

It might be thought that a safe way to define an information society is to say that it is an information-based or information-centered society. However, this is to imply that every community, past and present, qualifies. Knowledge of the whereabouts of potable water and other natural resources was, and still is, central to the cultures and economies of indigenous and aboriginal societies. It is better, therefore, to say that an information society is one where information is of unprecedented abundance, where there has been an information explosion, since that captures an aspect of what seems to be unique about contemporary experience in advanced nations.

Such has been the path taken by researchers in Japan, a country that can lay claim to being the leading information society. Not only did the Japanese coin the term—Joho Shakai (that is, information society) was first used in 1964 in the media periodical Hoso Asahi [Rising Sun Broadcasting]—but they have spared no effort in attempting to measure the information explosion and thus in supplying concrete evidence that infor-mationization—or Johoka—was definitely occurring. Using words as their unit—a picture, incidentally, was calculated to be worth 80 words (not a 1,000, as the proverb has it)—their annual information flow census counted the total volume of data flowing across all media. The early returns confirmed that Japan was undergoing an intensive process of informationization, particularly in the area of electronic media. Censuses also revealed the flowering of point-to-point telecommunications, as distinct from traditional mass media. Indeed, as far back as the 1970s Japanese officials were predicting that personalized communications would be the nucleus of the information society—what is today, following Manuel Castells, sometimes referred to as the “network society.”

As regards Western thinkers, the outstanding exponent has been Daniel Bell, whose Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) is usually credited as the foundational text of the information society thesis. Bell's position defies neat summary, but it is clear that the book's main message is that the economy of the United States has undergone a major shift from industrial manufacturing to postindustrial services and information. Data pointing in that direction had already been examined by precursors, notably the economist Fritz Machlup, whose Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962) argued that knowledge—very broadly defined—had become the largest industry in the United States. Marc Porat and others did additional journeyman work in establishing the concept of the information economy, demonstrating, at least to their own satisfaction, that information workers would outnumber noninfor-mation workers from approximately the year 1980. However, it was Bell who composed a sophisticated, and, for many, persuasive sociological story around this theme. Blue-collar, he explained, has given way to white-collar, and life for the majority has thus become a game between persons. This metamorphosis is seen as being as significant as the industrial revolution, which supplanted the agrarian form of life (game against nature) with factories and mass production (game against fabricated nature). And at the heart of the socioeconomic trans formation is theoretical knowledge, which has superseded the trial-and-error inventing of the past. We are, Bell concluded, in the preliminary stages of a new, more scientific era.

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