Here are some notes I wrote when I first started thinking about these issues (and, thankfully, started blogging so I still have those notes) back in 2002. As you might expect, I no longer agree with everything I wrote, and I’ve developed my thinking about this stuff over the last 7 years – but since I’m using this blog as a scrapbook and a single place to capture all this stuff, it would be useful to throw it up here.
If you can think of any texts that would be useful along any of these lines, or have any thoughts on any of this, please be sure to let me know in the comments.
=================
How do you measure the point at which an ‘industrial society’ becomes an ‘information society’?
Digitisation
The reduction of knowledge to binary data marks a significant shift from analogue, linear, sequential and continuous thought patterns, to non-linear, non-sequential and discrete thought. Technology itself does not does not distinguish a significant break in societal patterns (how do you measure when there is sufficient technology to make for a break from one to another?) – otherwise what we would be living in would be a ‘high-tech’ (or possibly ‘high-mech’) cuture. Digitisation – moreover, binary digitisation – leads to an informational society.
Economy
In fact, since the development of labour capital, economy has always been informational. Money is an exchange of value – or of perceived value. An amount of work is assigned a value, then exchanged. This representation of labour in fiscal terms is no more than informational, despite the direct, tangible effect of its exchange (food, clothing, shelter, freedom of movement). Arguments over whether an ‘information economy’ has superceded a goods and services economy overlook the fact that all economy is, by definition, informational. However, at the basis of this economy, labour is no longer the sole or even primary means of deriving value. Knowledge, thought, ideas, creativity – these become the basis of a knowledge-based informational economy. That information can be codified and transmitted at light speed around the world provides a seemingly significant break. Ideas have always been exchangable for money. But money, unlike those ideas, has always been tangible. In an ‘information age’, finance is no more real or tangible than the thoughts for which they are exchanged.
The economy of a computer gaming community – Everquest, for instance, with its Platinum Points, or the Neopets web community, with its neopoints monetary system – is freely convertible (often sold for US dollars on e-Bay) and of as much tangible value as any other currency. The monetary system – an abstract construct like any other monetary system (at least since the removal of ties between the US dollar and gold bullion) – is represented as an exchange of value for time spent labouring online in the context for which that economy exists – no longer geographically place-bound, but set in the context of the space of the online game or web community.
Occupation
The point at which an information society commences can be perceived, at least in part, at the point at which the majority of employment becomes informational. However, this too overlooks certain key criteria of the digital mode. “Digital Man” is defined not in terms of what he does, but how his reality is interpreted and mediated.
A farmer still grows crops, but these are now configured in calculated yield ratios, price per hectare and so on – and these ratios are even analysed in a paddock-by-paddock analysis with the aid of GPS devices; linked to multinational conglomerates and computer-mediated accounting practices. That said, a farmer’s existence, whilst dominated by day-to-day activity, is still shaped by forces outside the manual labour engaged in as ‘work’. He is not his job. Recreational time is largely computer-mediated. Satellite TV, the Internet and mobile phones all play their part. The isolationism once experienced as a West Coast farmhand is intruded upon by an ability to participate in global events. He is brought face-to-face with murderers and politicians, the world of the celebrity and the arguments of the political dissident. Compact discs, DVDs, email – a proliferation of digital media impacts as significantly upon the thought processes of the manual labourer as on his white collar information sector counterpart.
A knowledge-worker is not necessarily someone whose livelihood depends upon the movement (or storage) of information – lawyer, accountant, teacher, librarian, network consultant – but someone whose daily activities are bound in informational representation. While your activities and the fruit of your labour may well be completely organic, tangible and physical, the conception of that labour is typically understood and configured digitally.
Lifeworlds
‘Digital Man’ speaks of lifeworlds – interior existence configured digitally, rather than merely behavioural exteriors. ‘Information Workers’, though – both information providers and information distributors (perhaps even information storers – and information gatekeepers) – are not distinguished hierarchically in this analysis. The sheer ratio of info workers to non-info workers does not provide any information as to the perceived importance of what it is they do. As more people enter the digital “priesthood” (priests were perhaps the only real pre-Gutenberg information workers), the social status of these latter-day priests is devalued – or rather, revalued – to be no more or less significant than that of their non-info counterparts. The de-mystification process that mass media provides impacts heavily on this: the curtain behind which the priesthood operates has been drawn back.
Education
The electric ground came into its own when the first generation of children grew up watching TV before learning to read. The digital ground seems likely to follow the same path, as the first generation of children grows up using digital services (playstation, the Internet, CDs, DVDs) before attending school.
Interestingly, the new mindset is not reinforced – or even reflected – in the school system. While nobody would argue that text literacy should be phased out in schools, they remain largely immune even to the electric age – let alone the digital age.
New forms of intelligence are being exhibited by the Playstation generation. For instance, the ability to cope with simultaneous multiple strands of problem solving goes far beyond the mere hand-eye coordination advantages typically ascribed to the medium. Complex problem solving skills operating with multiple variables goes beyond the print-bound, ’cause and effect’ single strand analysis currently favoured in scientific schools of thought. Is it possible that a cure for AIDS or cancer could result from an approach that does not simply look for linear causality from within a print-bound culture?