Is Post-industrial Society the Same Thing as Information Society - Essay Example

Is Post-industrial Society the same thing as Information Society? If we look back at the chronology of the history of human civilization, we see that our story has so far embraced three types of society: hunting, agricultural, and industrial. An underlying variable in this evolution is the fact that rapid innovations in the system of societys technology have usually become fundamental in bringing about societal transformations. Today, we are now standing at the threshold of a period of the same innovation which fuels a rapid development in every fiber of contemporary society. This is the societal technology based on the combination of computer and communications technology. This is a completely new type of societal technology, essentially from the tangible technologies of the past societies. Its substance is information, which is intangible. Information technology, as we now popularly call this innovation, has significantly transformed peoples lives and relationships and dimensions of the present society. This paper will explore whether information society is indeed the emerging postindustrial society as described by Daniel Bell. The “Post-Industrial Society” What Mills did in the 1950s to call attention to the rise of a modern middle class, Daniel Bell did in the 1970s with the notion that society and its economy was evolving out of industrialism into a new form. In the process he coined the term so widely used since then, “post-industrial society.” In 1973, he published the book, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society. In this book, he linked his earlier thesis about the end of ideology to the concept of post industrial society – a system that would be free from ideology. According to Bell, “The starting point for me was a theme implicit in my book The End of Ideology – the role of technical decision-making in society. Technical decision-making, in fact, can be viewed as the diametric opposite of ideology: the one calculating and instrumental, the other emotional and expressive.” (p. 34) The term “post industrial society” would henceforth be used to describe a series of contemporary macro-social changes. In Bells view, it was, initially, better suited to suggesting, on the one hand, that we live in an interstitial time, when new social forms have not yet clearly emerged, and on the other hand, that the sources of this upheaval are, first and foremost, scientific and technological. (Mattelart, Taponier & Cohen 2003, p. 78) Bell, revised this later on adding up a more decisive aspect with the expansion human services such as health care, education and social services, and, above all, the development of technical and professional services like research, evaluation, data processing and systems analysis. Extrapolating from observable structural trends in the United States, Bell built an ideal type of society and predicted it would undergo five fundamental mutations: “a change in the main economic component (from a production economy to a service economy); a change in the structure of employment (pre-eminence of the professional and technical class); the new core role played by theoretical knowledge as a source of innovation and in formulating public policy; the need to stake out the future by anticipating it; the rapid rise of a new intellectual technology oriented towards decision-making.” (Mattelart, Taponier & Cohen, 78) Many sociologists found the argument valid. For instance, Frank Webster (2002) offered a “prima facie evidence” as support for the occupational aspect of Bells post-industrial society. He said, “in Western Europe, Japan and North America over 70 per cent of the workforce is now found in the service sector of the economy, and white-occupations are now a majority.” (p. 14) The post-industrial society further differs from its predecessor in that public choice rather than individual demand becomes the arbiter of services. Here, the society multiplies the definition of rights (such as the rights of the poor, of women, of minorities, and so forth), and translates them into claims on the community and at the same time increases the aspirations of various groups for material goods, education, health, and for general upgrading of the quality life. (Etzioni-Halevy 1981, p. 45) Presently, for followers of Bells post-industrialism, the highly-developed Western countries are examples of post-industrialist society. Even sociologists and economists append various texts to this rubric, but most often describe countries marked by the ascendancy of the service sector, with attendant economies, technological and social changes that transform the character of contemporary life. (Moen, p. 17) Information Society as Post-Industrial Society Frank Webster referred to Bells theory of post-industrialism in linking information society to the notion of the new and emergent sort of society. According to him the two terms are generally used by Bell simultaneously: the information age is presented as expressive of post-industrial society and post-industrialism is regarded as an information society. (p. 30) John Naisbitt (1982) illustrated the crux of argument that information society is the post-industrial society as he talked about the far reaching, complex and multifaceted effects of information technology on national, international political, economic and social order: Now, more than 100 years after the creation of the first data communication devices, we stand at the threshold of a mammoth communication revolution. The combined technologies of the telephone, computer, and television have merged into an integrated information and communication system that transmits data and permits instantaneous interactions between persons and computers. As the transportation network carried the products of industrialization in the past, so too will this emerging communication network carry the new products of the information society. This new integrated communication system will fuel the information society the way energy... electricity, oil, nuclear... kept the industrial society humming and the way natural power... wind, water, and brute force... sustained agricultural society. (p. 23-24) Indeed, telecommunications is the head and heart of Bells post-industrial society or information age. It is, wrote Donald Cushman and Dudley Cahn (1985), one new and important aspect of modern society, the soul of a future-oriented and consumer-oriented nation. (p. 147) And so, while the development of capitalism was combined with a process of industrialization in which industrial production came to the centre of socio-economic life, the more recent change supposedly is one in which the importance of knowledge has come to the fore. It might be said that knowledge is fundamental in any economic process, and that no production can be accomplished without a certain know-how. But due to the breakthroughs in science and technology, the knowledge that came to be so important in Western societies is distinctive. According to Eva Etzioni-Halevy (1981), “it is abstract, theoretical knowledge especially that pertaining to multi-variate systems, rather than the common sense knowledge utilized in most other societies.” (p. 45) To put it in another way: In industrial society knowledge is important but that the accumulation of capital, investment, and production are the main concerns. Only in post-industrial society have these problems dropped in the background and permitted knowledge to emerge as the central axis of society. Criticisms In his critique of branding the information society as the postindustrial society, Webster argued that Bell is profoundly mistaken in interpreting the part played by information in social, economic and political affairs. He further argued that the very concept of post industrial society itself, especially in the context of information society, is unsustainable once one examines it in light of real social trends and that it could be sustainable as an “ideal type” construct only by adopting a theoretical starting point and methodological approach to social analysis, which, for its part, is considered faulty when applied in real social conditions. (p. 33) David Lyon (1995), one of the most distinguished interpreters of Bells notion of post-industrialism, criticized his notions, arguing that Bell underestimates both the resilience of some familiar features of modern societies, and the extent to which new conflicts and struggles could arise within the information society. (p. 56) His point is that IT may not bring a new society without precedent because it helps to intensify certain processes in todays society. Lyon explored the effects that the concept of cyberspace is having upon ideas such as post-industrial society, perspectives on information as well as modes of social explanation. His approach to ideas such as cyberspace and those other concepts it is related to in the sociological context, is to explore what they tell us about current social-cultural transformations. For instance, he stressed that capitalists and the government are actively promoting IT to suit and advance their ends. The capitalists do this to capture more market, and the government, to monitor peoples activities. As shown in the commentaries of Lyons and several other sociologists, Bells work routinely incorporates two charges. First, the failure of his attempt to escape the accusation of “technological determinism”, the assumption that technological development has a relentless logic of its own, separate from human agency, and, second, the indictment that Bells post-industrial conception overemphasizes social change while under-appreciating its continuities. According to Lyon, in his book called, The Information Society (1988), technology actively erodes social boundaries. The significance of this is not in creating a new social structure or order but it reinforces the elements found in the industrial and capitalist societies. David Harvey (1990) explored this as well in his book, The Condition of Postmodernity as he tackled the issues such as fragmentation, pluralism and the authenticity of other voices and other worlds. He argued that postmodern or post industrial thinkers look to the new possibilities for information and knowledge production, analysis and transfer to solve the problems but that they are not as forces that bring about a new society. (p. 49) Conclusion According to Oettinger (1980), every society is an information society and every organization an information organization, just as every organism is an information organism. Information is necessary from a cell to General Motors or the Pentagon. (p. 192) In Bells perspective information society is synonymous to post-industrial society or at least a fundamental variable in the concept – the heart and soul. And since we are using his concept in this discourse, it carries a lot of weight as an argument. Even critics agree to most part. Webster admitted that the concept of the information society as a post-industrial society is a novel concept that must be seriously considered. Speaking about the concept, he said, “There may be many things wrong with it, but we should acknowledge its qualities: it is academically rich, boldly constructed, imaginative, a remarkable impressive achievement.” (Webster, p. 32) One should take a closer look, however, on Manuel Castells view on the matter: knowledge and information seem indeed to be major sources of productivity and growth in advanced societies. However... knowledge base of productivity growth was a feature of industrial economy when manufacturing employment was at its peak in the most advanced countries... The appropriate direction is not between an industrial and a post-industrial economy, but between two forms of knowledge-based industrial, agricultural and services productions... I propose to shift the analytical emphasis from post-industrialism (a relevant question of social forecasting still without an answer at the moment of its formulation) to informationalism. (p. 219) For Castells, societies should be informational, because information is present and is important in the functioning of societies, whether they are industrial or postindustrial. (p. 219) This perspective seems to be a compromise between Bells perspectives and its critics. It acknowledges that information technology, indeed, revolutionized society and at the same time, it presents the idea that information is also a feature in other types of societies. An underlying issue in Castells position is that although the services sector indeed has expanded, it does not mean that manufacturing have already met its end. This is true in other aspects of the social structures as well. So, all in all, while information technology have drastically changed society, economically, culturally and politically, it did not completely eradicate the major features of the industrial society. At least, in this respect, post-industrialism or the information society has not yet succeeded in superseding its “predecessor.” On the one hand, I would like to point out the transition from hunting to agricultural and agricultural to industrial did not render the preceding societies to be completely eradicated by the emergent one. For instance, the entry of industrial society did not stop the production of agricultural goods. Agriculture is still a feature of the industrial economy. I, therefore, disagree when critics point out that the social structure is resilient in the context of the argument that information technology is merely a tool to reinforce such structure. Information technology is changing the way we live. It is driving the service sector to the fore and the manufacturing sector to the background. Technology is not merely a new network or arena where goods are exchanged because, in a broader sense, it empowers people not just the capitalist or the government. As a result, features of industrial society are being reduced and marginalized because technology has changed the way man interact with the machine that powered the industrial society. This development changes the social structure by disturbing the hierarchy of the social classes and by rendering economic models obsolete. In the US and the UK, where Industrial Revolution began - this is already happening. Manual labor is increasingly marginalized. It is in this regard where a new class structure will emerge, one that is connected to the growing importance of knowledge and skills. References Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books, 1973. Castells, Manuel, The Rise of Network Society: Economy, Society and Culture, Blackwell Publishing, 2000. Cushman, Donald and Cahn, Dudley, Communication in Interpersonal Relationships, SUNY Press, 1985. Etzioni-Halevy, Eva, Social Change, Routledge, 1981. Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell Publishing, 1990. Lyons, David, "The Roots of Information Society Idea." In Nick Heap and Ray Thomas, Information Technology and Society: A Reader, SAGE, 1995. Lyons, David, The Information Society: Issues and Illusions, B. Blackwell, 1988. David Lyon, The Information Society: issues and illusions, Polity, 1988 Mattelart, Armand, Taponier, Susan and Cohen, James, The Information Society: An Introduction, SAGE, 2003. Moen, Phyllis, Working Parents, University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Oettinger, AG, Information Resources: Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century, Science, 209, 1980. Webster, Frank, Theories of the Information Society, Routledge, 2002. Read More