Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
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these indicators and then, without any justification other than that there is a lot
more information and information technology around, they claim that these quantifiable
elements signal a qualitative transformation – namely the emergence of
an information society.
Similarly, when we press forward to examine their definition of information
itself, most often we come across a related principle: information is presumed to
be a quantifiable phenomenon that is separable from its content – hence it
is so many ‘bits’, or so much ‘price’, or so many ‘signs’, seemingly anything
but something which has a meaning (though, as Theodore Roszak [1986] reminds
us, to most people the content of information – what it means – is of the essence).
Then, having adopted a non-semantic definition of information that can more
readily be quantified, we again come across the allegation that a quantifiable
increase in information heralds a qualitative change in society and social arrangements
(an information society).
It appears to me that those who explain informatisation in terms of historical
continuities give us a better way of understanding information in the world
today. This is not least because they resist artificial measures of the information
society and of information itself. While of course they acknowledge that there
has been an enormous quantitative increase in information technologies, in information
in circulation, in information networks and what not, such thinkers turn
away from such asocial and deracinated concepts and back to the real world.
And it is there, in the ruck of history, that they are able to locate an information
explosion that means something substantive and which has discernible origins
and contexts: that these types of information, for those purposes, for those sorts of
group, with those sorts of interest are developing.
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