Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
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of empirical evidence wherever it might be brought into play. Attentive readers
will have gleaned a good idea of my own position from what has gone before in
this study. However, for the sake of clarity, in the following pages allow me to
be more explicit about my own conclusions.
It is my belief that if one is trying to make sense of the information realm
and its import in the present age, then one should be drawn primarily towards
the ideas and research, above all, of Herbert Schiller, Jürgen Habermas and
Anthony Giddens, as well as to the significant body of work that has been influenced
by their themes. This does not for a moment mean that the contributions
of Daniel Bell or of Jean Baudrillard or of Mark Poster and other scholars are
negligible. Quite the contrary, I have attempted, when analysing such thinkers,
to indicate and evaluate the positive elements of their work as well as to point
out any weaknesses I may have found in it. Indeed, Manuel Castells’s trilogy, The
Information Age, seems to me to be the single most persuasive analysis of the
world today, albeit that I remain critical of some aspects of his work (Webster
and Dimitriou, 2004).
There are two major reasons for my preferences for some thinkers rather
than for others. The first concerns the capacity of these approaches to illuminate
what is actually going on in the world and how well their propositions stand up
to empirical scrutiny. On the whole the Critical Theory of Herbert Schiller
(in whose writing theory is decidedly and advantageously subordinated to a
concern with substantive developments) and Jürgen Habermas, and the historical
sociology of Anthony Giddens, seem to me more persuasive than the writings
of post-industrial and postmodern enthusiasts. Perhaps, to state the obvious, to
admit my preferences means neither that I endorse everything each of these
scholars forwards nor that Schiller, Habermas and Giddens are altogether agreed
on what are the salient features of the informational domain. It will be obvious
to readers that Schiller’s focus on the imperatives imposed by capitalism differs
from Habermas’s concern with the requisites of democratic debate, and both
differ from Giddens’s emphasis on ways in which the state especially, and particularly
in its military and citizenship dimensions, influences the collection and use
of information.
However, there is one crucial point of agreement within the diversity of views
of these thinkers and it is something that sets them apart from those other contributions
that I have found less helpful in understanding and explaining the role of
information in contemporary affairs. It is this that takes me to the second reason
for my preferences. What Schiller, Habermas and Giddens do share is a conviction
that we should conceive of the informatisation of life, a process that has been
ongoing, arguably for several centuries, but which certainly accelerated with the
development of industrial capitalism and the consolidation of the nation state in
the nineteenth century, and which moved into overdrive in the late twentieth
century as globalisation and the spread of transnational organisations especially
have led to the incorporation of hitherto untouched realms – far apart geographically
and close to one’s intimate life – into the world market.
That is, these scholars believe that informational developments must be
accounted for in terms of historical antecedents and continuities. Each of these
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