Page 10 - DLIS101_LIBRARY_AND_INFORMATION_SOCIETY

Unit 1: Library in Social Context

postindustrial society makes knowledge accessible to the layman because knowledge and information Notes
technologies would diffuse into society and break up Grand Narratives of centralized structures
and groups. Lyotard denotes these changing circumstances as postmodern condition or postmodern
society.
Similarly to Bell, Peter Otto and Philipp Sonntag (1985) say that an information society is a society
where the majority of employees work in information jobs, i.e., they have to deal more with
information, signals, symbols, and images than with energy and matter. Radovan Richta (1977)
argues that society has been transformed into a scientific civilization based on services, education,
and creative activities. This transformation would be the result of a scientific-technological
transformation based on technological progress and the increasing importance of computer
technology. Science and technology would become immediate forces of production.
Nico Stehr (1994, 2002a, b) says that in the knowledge society a majority of jobs involves working
with knowledge. “Contemporary society may be described as a knowledge society based on the
extensive penetration of all its spheres of life and institutions by scientific and technological
knowledge”. For Stehr, knowledge is a capacity for social action. Science would become an immediate
productive force, knowledge would no longer be primarily embodied in machines, but already
appropriated nature that represents knowledge would be rearranged according to certain designs
and programs. For Stehr, the economy of a knowledge society is largely driven not by material
inputs, but by symbolic or knowledge-based inputs, there would be a large number of professions
that involve working with knowledge, and a declining number of jobs that demand low cognitive
skills as well as in manufacturing.
Also, Alvin Toffler argues that knowledge is the central resource in the economy of the information
society: “In a Third Wave economy, the central resource – a single word broadly encompassing
data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is actionable knowledge”.
In recent years, the concept of the network society has gained importance in information society
theory. For Manuel Castells, network logic is besides information, pervasiveness, flexibility, and
convergence a central feature of the information technology paradigm (2000a: 69ff). “One of the key
features of informational society is the networking logic of its basic structure, which explains the
use of the concept of ‘network society’”. “As an historical trend, dominant functions and processes
in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new
social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the
operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture”. For Castells
the network society is the result of informationalism, a new technological paradigm. Jan Van Dijk
(2006) defines the network society as a “social formation with an infrastructure of social and media
networks enabling its prime mode of organization at all levels (individual, group/organizational
and societal). Increasingly, these networks link all units or parts of this formation (individuals,
groups and organizations)”. For Van Dijk networks have become the nervous system of society,
whereas Castells links the concept of the network society to capitalist transformation, Van Dijk sees
it as the logical result of the increasing widening and thickening of networks in nature and society.
Darin Barney uses the term for characterizing societies that exhibit two fundamental characteristics:
“The first is the presence in those societies of sophisticated – almost exclusively digital – technologies
of networked communication and information management/distribution, technologies which form
the basic infrastructure mediating an increasing array of social, political and economic practices.
The second, arguably more intriguing, characteristic of network societies is the reproduction and
institutionalization throughout those societies of networks as the basic form of human organization
and relationship across a wide range of social, political and economic configurations and
associations”.
The major critique of concepts such as information society, knowledge society, network society,
postmodern society, postindustrial society, etc., that has mainly been voiced by critical scholars is
that they create the impression that we have entered a completely new type of society. “If there is
just more information then it is hard to understand why anyone should suggest that we have before
us something radically new”. Critics such as Frank Webster argue that these approaches stress

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