The Information Society: An Introduction

Citation

Duff, A.S. (2004), "The Information Society: An Introduction", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 60 No. 2, pp. 228-231. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410410522304

The information society thesis has long been the stuff not only of PhD dissertations and research papers but also of most of the other media constitutive of the scholarly information chain. I have argued elsewhere that information society studies is a new academic field (Duff, 2000), although incisive subsequent feedback from the late Rob Kling among others induced me to scale down the claim to that of a new research specialism (Duff, 2001). But if the proliferation of textbooks is a bibliographic sign of the arrival of a field then perhaps the academic community does need to recognize the standing of information society studies as something more than a confluence of research fronts. At any rate, Professor Mattelart's The Information Society: An Introduction – a translation from a French original entitled Histoire de la Societe de l'Information (published in 2001) – represents one of the recent additions to the student primer market, where it will nestle alongside works like John Feather's (2000) The Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change, Dearnley and Feather's (2001) The Wired World: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of the Information Society, and Mackay et al.’s (2001) Social Science in Action: Investigating the Information Society.

The Information Society: An Introduction begins very well, drawing attention to the spread of the information society concept beyond the academy and into official and policy‐making discourses:

A whole machinery of apologetic discourse has developed, including promotional sales pitches, official proclamations, trendy manifestos and scientific or quasi‐scientific studies … We are promised a new society that will necessarily demonstrate “greater solidarity” and be “more open and more democratic”. The referent of this inevitable “Republic of Technology” has thus been sealed off from controversy and debate at the grassroots level. Yet the notion of a global information society itself is the result of a geopolitical construction (p. 1).

Such assumptions, we are told, are going to be challenged, echoing the bracing start of books like Christopher May's (2002) The Information Society: A Sceptical View and Frank Webster's (2002) Theories of the Information Society. The next four chapters, however, comprise a more or less routine, and not very critical, potted history, under the respective titles: “The cult of numbers”, “Managing the industrial and scientific age”, “The emergence of computers”, and “Post‐industrial scenarios”. Rather than developing the analysis of the information society thesis these chapters for the most part rehearse, in a largely descriptive vein, standard accounts of the antecedents of the contemporary information society. Most of the familiar names are there, each dealt a page or two, and all portrayed as having contributed to the eventual emergence of the information age. We hear about Leibniz, Bacon, Pascal, Saint‐Simon, Babbage, Taylor, Mumford, Turing, Shannon, Wiener, Machlup, Porat, McLuhan, Bell, Toffler, Brzezinski, Nora and Minc, Lyotard, and Drucker. These chapters read, indeed, like a history of modern thought generally, although Mattelart does not seem to see any need to articulate why the history of the information society should be thus co‐extensive. That is, of course, a typical result of whistle‐stop historical tours of ideas.

I am not implying that Mattelart's account lacks merit. He is generally steady, scholarly, and precise on the topics upon which he chooses to touch. For example, he accurately traces first use of the term “post‐industrial”, although curiously he does not go into the Japanese origins of “information society”, despite his evident interest in Japanese information society initiatives. Moreover, the historical tour manages to rope in some less well‐known (in information society circles) figures, such as the meteorologist Sebastien Vauban, the political philosopher Amitai Etzioni, and also Melvil Dewey, whose bibliographic innovations are credited with facilitating in a roundabout way the growth of global communication. There is an interesting strand, too, on futurology, one of those disciplines or would‐be disciplines which lie, epistemologically, uncomfortably close to information society studies. Mattelart notes the role of future‐oriented think tanks like the RAND corporation, inventor of the Delphi method for “researching” the future, in the evolution of the information society thesis. Yet he seems here to miss obvious opportunities to be more incisive, mentioning without censure those absurd 1960s predictions about the end of the second millennium sealing the accomplishment of increased leisure and liberty for all. Daniel Bell, as one of the most famous futurologists, receives due coverage, as does Bell's more direct contribution to the information society thesis. And here we are treated to some memorable commentary, where Mattelart accuses Bell of “shooting at anything that moved on his [Bell's] left” (p. 87). That nuanced proposition is probably accurate, although the more common stereotype of Bell as a man of the Right is definitely wrong: Bell is actually, as he confirmed to me in an Edinburgh taxi as we drove past the Scott monument, an admirer of European‐style non‐Marxist socialism.

In the fifth and sixth chapters, on “The metamorphoses of public policy” and “The geopolitical stakes of the global information society”, respectively, Mattelart turns his attention from historical to normative issues. Chapter 5 contains a reliable summary of information policy developments across the world. National initiatives in Japan, North and South America, and Europe are discussed, often astutely. Thus this French professor sums up neatly the regressive politics of the New Labour project:

It is clear, however, that the “neoliberalism with a human face” of market‐driven society, as promoted by New Labour in Great Britain and its “Third Way”, has little to do with the idea of public policy (p. 126).

Yet again, however, space constraints mean that this quotation is the highlight of the chapter, rather than a taster for a more searching analysis.

Given, though, that the information society is a putative global phenomenon, what has the “international community” done to safeguard the idea of public policy? The answer, as Mattelart deftly shows, is not very much: from the Reagan‐riling MacBride report on the New World Information and Communication Order down to recent European Commission directives, it has been a story of well‐intentioned left‐of‐centre proposals being undermined or torpedoed by the forces of the global industrial complex and its political champions, mainly in the USA. It is clear that, rather than rejuvenating the public service ethic, the information society has been largely appropriated by those actors who care least for it. In other words, the metamorphosis has been a reverse one, from butterfly back to caterpillar – or so Mattelart implies, and many of us would agree. The world will remain a planet characterized by regimes of information scarcity next to open societies of information abundance. We can only hope that the World Summit on the Information Society, referred to by Mattelart and sitting in Geneva as I write (December 2003), will be more fruitful in the field of genuine distributive justice.

Armand Mattelart, Professor of Information and Communication Sciences (which sounds like an admirably convergent chair!) at the University of Paris, is a distinguished communication scholar. He has written, among much else, one of the best short introductions to communication theory (Mattelart and Mattelart, 1998). But this primer on the information society, while respectable, is not outstanding. For an introductory text I would still be happier to recommend some of British information science's worthy in‐house productions, such as the Dearnley and Feather (2001) volume mentioned above.