Information Society Definitions Questions

Information Society

• Definitions

• Questions

• Daniel Bell

• Post industrial society (Daniel Bell)

• Network society (Manuel Castells)

Definitions

• Technological

• Economic

• Occupational

• Spatial

• Cultural

Technological

• New technologies lead to social change (Toffler, 1980; Negroponte, Gates, De Hond)

Questions

• How much technology

• Technologically determinist

Economic

• How much is the economic worth of informational activities

Question

• Defining (e.g. R&D)

Occupational

• How many people work in the industry (Bell, Castells)

Question

• Definitions (repair of a copier)

Spatial

• Information networks influencing organisation of time and space

Question

• What is a network

• Why now (networks have been around)

Cultural

• Information in life

General questions

• Quantity: more information is not information society (e.g. Food)

Daniel Bell: The coming of the post-industrial society (1973)

• Dominant mode of employment (pre-industrial, industrial, post-industrial)

• Effiency and increases in productivity make it possible (3% of the population taking care of 50% of the food production)

Consequences

• White collar employment

• Central position for the professional

• Greater role for the intellectuals

• More person-to-person employment

• Less laissez-faire, more planning

• Game between people (doctor does not see a patient as x amount of income)

• From economising to sociologising

Problems

• Technological emphasis for social changes

• Emphasis on rationalisation (Weber)

• Is there a shift from industry to services (only in UK)

• Wealth creation in industry -> services

• Definition of services

• Services within a sector (intra-sector versus inter-sector)

• Increasing division of labour, oriented at production

Results

• Decline in industry workers

• Increase in industrial output

• Increase of wealth

• Creation of jobs in services (never ending)

• Services can not be automated (Internet?)

Cf. Levy and Murnane (2004)

• Expert thinking (designers, doctors)

• Complex communication (face to face interaction)

• Routine cognitive tasks (ICT jobs?)

• Routine manual tasks

• Nonroutine manual tasks (housecleaning)

Manuel Castells: The Information Age

• Development of networks (ICT enabled)

• Informational capitalism

• Not: information or knowledge society, but network society

Consequences

• More transnational companies

• Hierarchies pulled down, power to “movers and shakers”

• 2007 © Wolters-Noordhoff

Globalisation

• Growing interdependence and interpenetration of human relations alongside the increasing integration of the world’s socio-economic life (Webster, 2006; p. 69)

• Globalisation of the market

• Globalisation of the production

• Globalisation of finance

• Globalisation of communications

From Ford to Cisco

• “The logic of the network is more powerful than the powers in the network”

• (ICTs have reduced the effectiveness of global corporations and empowered people and organisations who are entrepeneurial and effective in terms of netwerking; Webster, 2006; p. 105)

The decline of the working class

• Knowledge and information are the essential materials of the new production process

• 30% participant ratio in higher education

The end of Fordism

• Flexibility of employees

• Flexibility of production

• Flexibility of consumption

Questions

• What is a network

• What is information

• Is the capitalist class gone

Herbert Schiller (1919-2000)

• IT and enabling technologies make transnational companies possible

• Information networks link companies

IT revolution

• Companies (e.g. AT&T)

• Privatisation in Europe

• Media dominated by US

Market criteria: Research & Development

• Philips Nat Lab

• KPN Research Centre

Market criteria: The consequence

• Public mask of progress and the private face of conservatism (Sharpe)

• The Television: (video, cable, computer games); the new box??