Debating Information Society and the Context

When debating “information society”, “information revolution”, “information explosion”, “information overload” and other related notions the question what is information is basic. What is the relationship between information and meaning? What is the relationship between meaning and sign? What is the relationship between sign and word? These questions are neglected by Manchlup’s and Porat’s a decades old narrow “economic” understanding of information: “Both view information as a commodity made up of goods and services that have costs as they are created and that can be bought and sold.” (Crawford, 1983: 382) The goal of their economic analysis was not just to measure the trends of “information society”, but to use national income accounts to explain the causes of these trends. In recent cultural and historical context these analysis are not suitable due to the inability to differ “information sector” and “other economic sectors”.
Their often criticized and at the same time praised work was the groundwork for Ithiel de Sola Pool 1983 article Tracking the Flow of Information in which he approached “informational society” on micro-level through the prism of “all flows of information” simply translated in the unit of words (Pool, 1983/1998: 251–253). By using words transmitted and words attended to as common denominators, novel indexes were constructed of growth trends in seventeen major communications media from 1960 to 1977. In that period there have been extraordinary rates of growth in the transmission of electronic communications, but much lower rates of growth in the material that people actually consume, representing the phenomenon often labeled information overload (Pool, 1983/1998: 249). In methodologically dubious and historical context reflecting Pool’s article does not include changes in flow of information, which were anticipated by Pool as well (1983/1998: 261).
Crawford (1983: 384) and Pool (1983/1998: 261) concluded in similar fashion that “the new information technologies” and “new styles of use of information media, including interactive retrieval, long-distance communication, and intelligent processing of records” will be taken into consideration in future discussions of information society, media consumption/production, media literacy, transformations of the information flow and power relations in author-text-audience relationship in the years to come – especially in the context of the historical evolution of the internet (cf. Leiner et al, 2003).

Igor Vobič, 2007


References
- Crawford, S. (1983). The origin and development of a concept: the information society. Bull Med Libr Assoc. October; 71(4): 380–385. Available at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pagerender.fcgi?artid=227258&pageindex=5#page, December 10, 2007.
- Leiner, B. M. et al. (2003). A Brief History of the Internet. Version 3.32Last revised 10 Dec 2003. Available at: http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml, December 10, 2007.
- Pool, Ithiel de Sola (1983/1998). Tracking the Flow of Information. Politics in Wired Nations, 249–262. New Burnswick, London: Transaction Publishers.