Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

WHAT IS AN INFORMATION SOCIETY?
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lives than all US war casualties combined since – some 600,000 men died then).
Abraham Lincoln evoked the idea of 1776 to conclude his short speech:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent
a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all
men are created equal . . . we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have
died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom;
and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not
perish from the earth.
(Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863)
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One hundred years later, in Washington at the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther
King recollected Lincoln’s idea. Speaking to a vast crowd of civil rights
campaigners, on national television, at a time when black people in America were
beaten and even lynched in some states, Luther King proclaimed:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true
meaning of the creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men
are created equal’ . . . I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia
the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able
to sit down together at the table of brotherhood . . . I have a dream that my
four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged
by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
(Martin Luther King, address to the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom, 28 August 1963)
It is hard to imagine a more powerful idea in the modern world than this assertion
that ‘all men are created equal’. Though a mountain of information can be
found that demonstrates that this is not so, Roszak is surely correct to insist
that this and similar ideas are more foundational to society than any amount of
accumulated information. Accordingly, his objection is that information society
theorists reverse this prioritisation at the same time as they smuggle in the (false)
idea that more information is fundamentally transforming the society in which
we live.
What is information?
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Roszak’s rejection of statistical measures leads us to consider perhaps the most
significant feature of approaches to the information society. We are led here
largely because his advocacy is to reintroduce qualitative judgement into discussions
of information. Roszak asks questions like: Is more information necessarily
making us a better-informed citizenry? Does the availability of more information
make us better-informed? What sort of information is being generated and stored
and what value is this to the wider society? What sort of information occupations
are expanding, why and to what ends?
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