Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

WHAT IS AN INFORMATION SOCIETY?
1
1
1
2
1
1
come across a similar elision of meaning from economists’ definitions. Here it may
not be in terms of ‘bits’, but at the same time the semantic qualities are evacuated
and replaced by the common denominator of price (Arrow, 1979). To the
information engineer the prime concern is with the number of yes/no symbols,
to the information economist it is with their vendability. But, as the economist
moves from consideration of the concept of information to its measurement,
what is lost is the heterogeneity that springs from its manifold meanings. The
‘endeavour to put dollar tags on such things as education, research, and art’
(Machlup, 1980, p. 23) unavoidably abandons the semantic qualities of information.
Kenneth Boulding observed in the mid-1960s that
The bit . . . abstracts completely from the content of information . . . and
while it is enormously useful for telephone engineers . . . for purposes of
the social system theorist we need a measure which takes account of significance
and which would weight, for instance, the gossip of a teenager rather
low and the communications over the hot line between Moscow and
Washington rather high.
(Boulding, 1966)
How odd, then, that economists have responded to the qualitative problem which
is the essence of information with a quantitative approach that, reliant on cost
and price, is at best ‘a kind of qualitative guesswork’ (ibid.). ‘Valuing the invaluable’,
to adopt Machlup’s terminology, means substituting information content
with the measuring rod of money. We are then able to produce impressive statistics,
but in the process we have lost the notion that information is about
something (Maasoumi, 1987).
Finally, though culture is quintessentially about meanings, about how and
why people live as they do, it is striking that with the celebration of the nonreferential
character of symbols by enthusiasts of postmodernism we have a
congruence with communications theory and the economic approach to information.
Here, too, we have a fascination with the profusion of information, an
expansion so prodigious that it has lost its hold semantically. Symbols are now
everywhere and generated all of the time, so much so that their meanings have
‘imploded’, hence ceasing to signify.
What is most noteworthy is that information society theorists, having jettisoned
meaning from their concept of information in order to produce quantitative
measures of its growth, then conclude that such is its increased economic
worth, the scale of its generation, or simply the amount of symbols swirling
around, that society must encounter profoundly meaningful change. We have, in
other words, the assessment of information in non-social terms – it just is – but
we must adjust to its social consequences. This is a familiar situation to sociologists
who often come across assertions that phenomena are aloof from society
in their development (notably technology and science) but carry within them
momentous social consequences. It is inadequate as an analysis of social change
(Woolgar, 1985).
27