Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

REGULATION SCHOOL THEORY
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place in the future. There have been similar such uprisings in places as far apart
as Paris (where the banlieu raged for weeks late in 2005) and Los Angeles (where
intermittent riots broke out during the 1990s, causing massive property damage
as well as costing dozens of lives). Less dramatic, but perhaps as unsettling, we
are experiencing disquieting changes in intimate relations, all reflected in
changing family forms (what sociologists like to call ‘families of choice’ to encompass
gay and lesbian relations, cohabitation and remarriages) and the daily
anxieties of parents about what to do for the best for their offspring (and, increasingly
common, stepchildren). Moral guardians may cry ‘back to basics’ and
politicians insist on ‘respect’, but few think that urban lawlessness will be easily
halted or that it is possible to resurrect marriage ‘till death us do part’ when children
were just ‘brought up’.
It is easy enough to admit of all this turmoil, not least because we are made
aware of it by more intensive and extensive mass media than have ever before
been available. Every day on our televisions we learn about political instabilities,
about economic problems and about disturbing social issues. Since every home
has access to television, and since each television set is supplemented by several
radios, newspapers, magazines and free sheets, we are not surprised to learn that
people can agree things are changing radically and at an accelerating pace. What
these changes mean is, of course, a matter of intense debate, but of the scale and
rapidity of change itself there is little dispute.
That people become aware of changes largely through media alerts us to the
fact that a key feature of upheaval is information and, of course, the technologies
which handle, process and act upon it. The mass media themselves have
been radically changed by new ways of gathering and transmitting information –
from lightweight video cameras which make it possible to access areas once hard
to penetrate, to global satellite links which make it feasible to receive pictures on
screens thousands of miles away in the space of a few minutes. The whole world
could watch as the Berlin Wall came down, when the former Yugoslavia was torn
apart between 1992 and 1996, and when the Twin Towers were demolished by
highjackers using civilian aircraft as bombs in September 2001. Huge expansion
of the symbolic environment – books, pamphlets, radio, television, video, the
Internet – has also meant that information on issues such as sexual relations,
their satisfactions and their difficulties (from expectations of behaviour to the
AIDS epidemic) is more widely available than hitherto, and this unavoidably
enters our consciousness.
But the import of information in current change is much more than
the matter of increasing the messages audiences receive. Many new jobs, for
instance, are today what one might call informationally saturated, requiring not
manual dexterity and effort, but talking, writing and guiding, something illustrated
poignantly by those former coal miners now employed in showing visitors around
the reconstructions of collieries in industrial museums such as at Beamish in
County Durham. There is also a widespread awareness that ICTs are an integral
element of the turmoil itself: the application of computers in factory work means
we cannot expect much job expansion there, and many of the jobs of the future
presume familiarity with computerised equipment. Moreover, computerisation
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