Mass Communication & Mass Society, Books on Information Society
What is Information Society? What is the role of information in human behavior, organization, and society? Sociology of the information society, in particular the social-cultural, political, and organizational aspects.
We are beginning to live in an "information economy" and an "information society" - we are entering an "information age." - Tom Forester
"Information society is enslaved in its freedom." - vpr
The crucial point about a post-industrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the information society. - Daniel Bell
"Human societies have seen four distinct revolutions in the character of social interchange: speech, writing, printing and now telecommunication. Each revolution is associated with a distinctive, technologically-based, way of life." - The Social Framework of the Information Society, (Bell 1989).
Now we have moved into a global information economy and identify societies that have bridged the digital divide, such as the United States, Japan, Germany, and other nations with an informed way of life as information societies.
In the study of information society we try to understand the complex relationship between technological change, its effect upon social divisions, its consequences for social action and the emerging strategies for social inclusion in the Information Age.
Definitions of the Information Society: Webster bundles definitions of the information society into five categories - Technological, Economic, Occupational, Spatial and Cultural.
Geographers stress the importance of the spatial features of an information society. John Goddard identifies 4 elements in the transition to an information society:
Acacia Initiative - The idea of Acacia emerged at the 1996 Information Society and Development Conference, the first event of its kind held in a developing country, South Africa, and was thus closely associated from the outset with efforts by developing countries, particularly in Africa, to ensure that their voices would help shape the Global Information Society.
End of Millennium : The Information Age, Economy,
Information Society and Culture
By Manuel Castells
Description: The final volume in Manuel Castells' trilogy is devoted to processes of
global social change induced by interaction between networks and identity. Castells
studies empirically the collapse of the Soviet Union, tracing it back to the incapacity of
industrial statism to manage the transition to the information age.
What Information Society?
by Frank Webster
Commentators increasingly talk about information as a defining feature of the modern
world. Much attention is now devoted to the informatization of social life: we are told
that we are entering an Information Age, that a new mode of information predominates, that
we have moved into a global information economy. Many writers even identify as information
societies the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, and other nations with a similar way
of life. Indeed, it appears that information has "become so important today as to
merit treatment as a symbol for the very age in which we live."
Theories of the Information Society (The International
Library of Sociology)
by Frank Webster - Theories of the Information Society provides commentaries on all the
postwar theories of the information society--Bell, Schiller, Baudrillard, Giddens and
Castells. Interest in "information" is growing in the wake of the modernity
post-modernity debate. The debate suggests that the Western economic base has shifted from
production/manufacturing to service and information, which has the changed the class
structure and political process.
The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986.