Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
thinkers therefore prioritises in their separate accounts phenomena which, over
time, have shaped, and in turn have built upon, informational patterns and
processes to ensure, as best they could in uncertain and always contingent circumstances,
that existent social forms might be perpetuated. Thus, for instance,
in Herbert Schiller’s work we get a recurrent insistence that it is capitalist characteristics
which predominate in the origination and current conduct of the
informational realm: it is the primacy of corporate players, of market principles
and inequalities of power which are most telling. Similarly, those who argue that
the ‘public sphere’ is being diminished recourse to explaining the expansion of
misinformation, disinformation, infotainment – information management in
all of its guises – in terms of the historical expansion and intrusion into all spheres
of life of commodification and market criteria. Hence the ‘information explosion’
is to these thinkers comprehensible as an integral part of the up-and-down history
of capital’s aggrandisement.
Again, Giddens’s approach towards information is one that places its
development in the context especially of the development of nation states and
associated historical patterns of the making of modernity, such as the industrialisation
of war and the spread of citizenship rights and obligations. A similar
emphasis comes from Regulation School theorists who explain informational
trends in terms of requisites and outcomes of advanced capitalism following
recession and restructuring brought about by the threats and opportunities
associated with the spread of globalisation.
Those who emphasise historical continuities are not alleging that nothing has
changed. Quite the reverse: the very fact of informatisation is testament to their
concern to acknowledge the changes that have taken place and that these are
such as to promote information to a more central stage than previously.
Nevertheless, what they do reject is any suggestion that the ‘information revolution’
has overturned everything that went before, that it signals a radically other
sort of social order than we have hitherto experienced. On the contrary, when
these thinkers come to explain informatisation they insist that it is primarily
an outcome and expression of established and continuing relations, relationships
that continue to resonate. It is therefore the conviction of each of these
thinkers that the forces they have identified as leading to the informatisation of
life still prevail as we enter the third millennium.
My reason for preferring the idea of an informatisation of life which stems
from the continuity of established forces becomes clearer when we contrast it
with the propositions of the likes of Daniel Bell, Gianni Vattimo and Mark Poster.
Here, again amidst marked divergences of opinion and approach, is a common
endorsement of the primacy of change over continuity. In these approaches
change is regarded as of such consequence that reference is recurrently made to
the emergence of a novel form of society, one that marks a system break with
what has gone before. Such thinkers use various terms, from the generic information
society, to post-industrial society, postmodernism, the information age
and flexible specialisation.
To be sure, none of these thinkers is devoid of historical imagination, but the
emphasis of their analyses is constantly one that centres on the novelty of the
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