The once and future information society (original) (raw)
In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an "information society." Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support for them has never been strong, and consider the durability of their social appeal. Intellectuals love to vie in the effort to name their own ageto define the essential and salient qualities that distinguish the times in which they live from every other. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the upper hand in this struggle often seemed to go those insisting that we were entering an "Information Society." Beginning in the 1960s the idea took hold among many social scientists that information had assumed a new and decisive role in human affairs. For exponents of this idea, social processes based on innovative information uses, and particularly the transformation of information into authoritative knowledge, manifestly represented the distinguishing feature of the age. Characterizing the world's "advanced" societies as "information societies" became as axiomatic as bracketing other eras as "Neolithic societies" or "feudal societies."
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