Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

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CHAPTER TEN
The information society?
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The main purpose of this book has been to examine the significance of information
in the world today. It has asked how, why and with what validity is it that
information has come to be perceived as a – arguably the – defining feature of
our times. My starting point was to remark on this consensus among thinkers
that information is of pivotal importance in contemporary affairs: it is acknowledged
that not only is there a very great deal more information about than ever
before, but also that it plays a central and strategic role in pretty well everything
we do, from business transactions, to leisure pursuits, to government activities.
But beyond these observations consensus about information breaks down.
While everyone agrees that there is more information and that this has increased
in pertinence nowadays, thereafter all is disputation and disagreement. Recognising
this, I have tried to identify major attempts to understand and explain what
is happening in the information domain and why things are developing as they
are, at once to make clear the bases of different approaches while simultaneously
testing them against available evidence, against one another, and with any
additional critical insight I could muster.
I have questioned, occasionally forcefully, the validity of the concept ‘information
society’, even though it is much used in and outside the social sciences.
This does not mean it is worthless. Concepts are tools to think with and as such
they help to organise ways of seeing. They can help us to think more clearly.
Part of that thinking involves criticising that which we use to further our understanding.
And part of that critique can be to jettison the concepts with which we
began in favour of more adequate terms. The information society concept has
been useful in so far as it has served as what David Lyon calls, after the late
Philip Abrams (1982), a ‘problematic’, a ‘rudimentary organisation of a field of
phenomena which yields problems for investigation’ (Abrams, in Lyon, 1988,
p. 8). The concept has helped scholars to focus attention on, and to collect
together, a wide-ranging and diverse number of phenomena, from occupational
shifts, to new media, to digitalisation, to developments in higher education.
Despite this, the information society concept is flawed, especially in the ways it
asserts that it depicts the emergence of a new type of society. I am convinced
that a focus on information trends is vital to understand the character of the world
today, though most information society scenarios are of little help in this exercise.
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