Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

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CHAPTER EIGHT
Information, reflexivity and
surveillance: Anthony Giddens
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Anthony Giddens (b.1938) is the most important sociologist Britain has produced
in over a century (Anderson, 1990). His ambition has long been both to recast
social theory and to re-examine our understanding of the trajectory of ‘modernity’.
He has tackled these daunting tasks in an astonishingly imaginative manner,
integrating sustained theoretical critique with an enviable capacity to conceptualise
and explain changes in the world. From a detailed critique of social theorists
he developed his ‘structuration theory’ in the early 1980s, after which he turned
to more substantive analysis of ‘reflexive modernisation’. Since the late 1980s
Giddens has applied this conception and its attendant emphasis on the ‘choices’
we make in a world of ‘manufactured uncertainty’ more directly to practical
changes. It is for this that he has become best-known, beyond academic circles,
as the formulator of ‘Third Way’ politics that enjoyed considerable popularity
during the late 1990s and beyond amongst such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair,
though it should be emphasised that the intellectual foundations for his support
of New Labour are rooted in his long-term academic work (Giddens and Pearson,
1998). What I intend to do in this chapter is take insights from Giddens which I
think help us to explore the significance of information in an illuminating way.
What follows is not a full exposition of his thinking, but rather an interpretation
of trends in information that is grounded in my understanding of his writing
(Craib, 1992; Kaspersen, 2000).
Giddens does not write much, at least directly, about the ‘information
society’. It is not a concern of his to discuss this concept, not least because
he is sceptical of the proposition. It is his view that we live today in an epoch of
‘radicalised modernity’, one marked by the accelerated development of features
long characteristic of modernity itself. In fact, he has asserted that ‘Although it
is commonly supposed that we are only now . . . entering the era of information,
modern societies have been “information societies” since their beginnings’
(Giddens, 1987, p. 27). Accordingly, Giddens’s theorisation leads one to argue
that the heightened importance of information has roots so deep in history that,
while information has a special significance today, it is not sufficient to mark a
system break of the kind Daniel Bell conceives as ‘post-industrialism’. In other
words, in Giddens we find ways of accounting for the informatisation of relationships
in the modern world, though he would not argue we are entering a new
‘information society’.
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