Is the ‘Information Society’ a useful concept for Civil Society?

Is the term ‘The Information Society’ (or the related ‘Knowledge Society’) useful for civil society? Does it adequately describe the changes in global social structures and processes that are currently taking place? Is there really a new form of society emerging? And if so, a society for whom, and how can it be harnessed to enhance human rights and fulfil pressing human needs?

The Information Society is not Ideologically Neutral

The answers to these questions are not at all obvious, as the term bears a heavy ideological burden. As the post-war industrial boom spiralled into stagflation and recession, Daniel Bell’s (1973) book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society set the stage for the development of the idea of the “information society”. Bell argued that the economic upheaval being experienced by the industrial economies of the North heralded a shift from their being based on the production of goods to that of human services. Computing, scientific research and development, education, health care – such knowledge based services were to become the backbone of a new post-industrial economy and an information based society.
Through the 1980’s and early 1990’s the wholesale transfer of industrial manufacturing to low wage arenas of the South picked up steam, and a flood of studies and reports sponsored by governments and think tanks followed Bell’s lead and framed this economic restructuring as the rise of an ”information society.” Fuelled by neo-liberal economic policy, free trade, privatization, deregulation, and structural adjustment became the bywords of a an emerging plan that was essentially a means for breathing life back into an ailing capitalist system.

Information technology played a key role in this process. In the global arena it facilitated the rapid movement of both capital and goods, linking the new manufacturing centres in the South with markets in the North. In the North, deregulation of telecommunications markets was envisioned as helping fuel investment and R&D in information technology and thereby providing the technical infrastructure for production and exchange of new information commodities.

Like others before them, when the European Union embarked on a major drive to re-regulate and privatise the telecommunication sector in the mid-1990’s, they used the term “information society” specifically to underline that the new society towards which they were striving would have an important social focus. Restructuring was not simply about infrastructure (ultimately to be owned and controlled by the private sector), but also about societal development and investment, ensuring that the benefits reach people.

Unfortunately, activities and budgets targeted at achieving the social goals were minuscule as compared to huge changes wrought by re-regulation and privatisation of the infrastructure. In 1995, the G7 group of industrialised countries introduced its own version of the Global Information Society, again offering a few small pilot applications to promote universal service while vigorously pursuing liberalisation policies that have largely succeeded in de-nationalising the telecommunication industry and are proceeding with the media sector more generally.

In this respect, the ‘Information Society’ is an invention of the globalisation needs of capital and their supporting governments. While there has, as a result, been major growth in access in many countries of the South, this is largely confined to urban areas and more profitable markets, and most have found themselves on the wrong side of a growing ‘Digital Divide’ - a multi-faceted divide that has well-educated, high-income males with 'Western' perspectives clearly on top everywhere, North and South.

The World Summit on the Information Society, the Dot Force, and even the UN ICT Task Force are seen by many as simply the latest round in this imbalanced policy development – window dressing on the most recent drive to impose a neo-liberal model of communications in every corner of the globe. While focusing (to limited effect) on the latest wave of inequity, the ‘Digital Divide’, they fail to tackle, or articulate, deeper issues of the huge structural changes we see in the whole information and communication arena.

Rescuing the Concept: Back to Origins

This vision of the Information Society, driven by the needs of transnational corporations with little more than lip service to real human needs and ever growing inequities, is not endorsed by many in civil society. Thus a first step is rehabilitating the term the ‘Information Society’ to assert that there is no single model of the information society, but many possible ‘information societies’. The next step is to determine what kind of information society will best enhance social development and human rights, and whether the WSIS offers an opportunity to join with others in designing and implementing this.

A problem with the current use of Information Society is that it often presents information and communication technologies, and access to them, as ends in themselves rather than as enabling tools. A focus on the latter would soon raise more fundamental questions that were at the heart of the earliest debates on the information society, or what was then known as ‘post-industrial’ society. In the 1970s, policymakers realised that information was playing an increasing role not only in economic sectors (the growth in information workers, services, intelligent goods etc.), but also in social, cultural and political life. The generation, dissemination and effective use of information were becoming critical factors in the dynamic of society. This trend gained impetus in the decades following, and has given rise to the idea of the ‘knowledge society’. Closely related to the ‘Information Society’, this notion posits a link between information and knowledge, but in a competitive market-led environment. (The ‘Knowledge Society’, however, comes with its own ideological baggage, that will not be gone into here.)

Key Questions for the WSIS

If civil society is to embrace and rescue the notion of an information society it must return to these basics by posing the right questions:

• Who generates and owns information and knowledge? Is it utilized for the private benefit of a few or the public benefit of many?
• How is knowledge disseminated and distributed? Who are the gatekeepers?
• What constrains and facilitates the use of knowledge by people to achieve their goals? Who is positioned best, and who worst, to take advantage of this knowledge?

Many subsidiary questions this framing of the issue: Have global trends in copyright gone too far in supporting corporate owners, at the cost of creativity and the public domain? Is concentration of media ownership threatening political participation and cultural diversity? Will liberalisation in telecommunication constrict universal service policies, especially for rural and poorer users? What impact will the creeping privatisation of radio spectrum have on this public resource? What are the long-term implications of the commercialisation of the knowledge environment, through advertising and the promotion of a consumer ethic, especially in poorer countries? Is the current erosion of privacy and growth in surveillance necessary? What actions are needed to address the causes of the digital divide? How can youth and women participate and shape information society policies? Can current trends in global governance put human rights at the centre of the information society agenda? Will the Information Society bring sustainable development for all? The WSIS might offer a timely forum in which to raise these vital issues.

Is the “information society” a useful concept fosample.der civil society? Potentially, yes - if it is fleshed out to embrace the full dynamic of information and knowledge in society, and if it focuses on enhancing human rights and social, cultural, and economic development. But if it stops short at discussing the ‘Digital Divide’; if it confuses the means – technologies – with the ends – human development – then it fails to transcend its narrow ideological roots.

Further Reading:

Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Polity, 2002);
Subhash Bhatnagar & Robert Schware (eds.), Information and communication technology in development. Cases from India, Sage, New Delhi, 2000.
Gert Nulens, Nancy Hafkin, Leo Van Audenhove & Bart Cammaerts (eds.), The digital divide in developing countries: Towards an information society in Africa, VUB Press, Brussels, 2001.
Jan Servaes (ed.), Walking on the other side of the information highway. Communication, culture and development in the 21st century, Southbound, Penang, 2000.
Robin Mansell and Uta Wehn (eds.), Knowledge societies. Information technology for sustainable development, Oxford UP, Oxford, 1998.
Frank Webster, Theories of the information society, Routledge, London, 1995.