Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
upshot of this is that, in my view, we can appreciate information today by locating
it firmly within the context of capitalism’s ongoing development, to which we
need to acknowledge that reflexive modernisation and the theoretical knowledge
which accompanies it provide opportunities for directing our futures in
unprecedented ways.
This may be contrasted with the position of those many who argue for the
emergence of an information society and recourse to highly deterministic explanations
for the coming of the new age. These are considerably more sophisticated
than the crude technological determinism adopted by technoboosters such as
Alvin Toffler (1990), Nicholas Negroponte (1995) and Michael Dertouzos (1997).
Nonetheless, there remains a strong undercurrent of technological determinism
in those who conceive of a ‘second industrial divide’ (Piore and Sabel), a new
‘mode of information’ (Poster) or an ‘informational mode of development’
(Castells). Moreover, as Krishan Kumar (1978) definitively showed, at the back of
Daniel Bell’s concept of post-industrialism lies a similarly, if much more sophisticated,
deterministic account of change, this time through the hidden hand of
‘rationalisation’ which, of course, finds its major expression in the application of
improved technologies but which also is evidenced in the development of more
refined organisational techniques. In the foregoing chapters I have been at pains
to underline the shared way of seeing of thinkers who, however apart they might
seem at first sight, hold in common certain principles. With those who assert that
we are witnessing the emergence of an information society, high on that list of
shared principles is technological (or in Bell’s case technical) determinism.
To repeat the two major complaints about such an approach: it at once
singles out technology/technique as the primary cause of change (which is oversimplistic)
while – and in my view more significantly still – simultaneously
presuming that this technology/technique is aloof from the realm of values and
beliefs. I do not think it has been difficult to demonstrate that this is a misleading
perception, but, as we have seen, it will keep infecting analyses of informational
developments. Above all, it seems to me, it is an approach which misconceives
social change because it desocialises key elements of social change, persistently
separating technology/technique from the social world (where values and beliefs
are found), only to reinsert it by asserting that this autonomous force is the
privileged mechanism for bringing about change. Not surprisingly, those who
envisage a dramatic but asocial ‘information technology revolution’ and/or
radical shifts in technical efficiency, are easily persuaded that these impact in such
a manner as to bring about an entirely novel form of society.
As I argued in Chapter 2, those who argue that an information society has
arrived (or is in the process of arriving) in recent years operate with measures
that are consonant with this technical determinism. That is, it is striking that
they seek to identify the information society by counting phenomena which they
assume characterise the new order. These may be information technologies, the
economic worth of information, the increase in information occupations,
the spread of information networks, or simply the obviousness (and hence
not needing to be counted) of an explosive growth in signs and signification.
Subscribers to the notion of an information society quantify some or other of
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