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Library and Information Society
Notes
4 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY
1.3 Development of the Information Society
One of the first people to develop the concept of the information society was the economist Fritz
Machlup.
In 1933, Fritz Machlup began studying the effects of patents on research.
His work culminated in the study “The production and distribution of knowledge in the United
States” in 1962. This book was widely regarded and was eventually translated into Russian and
Japanese. The Japanese have also studied the information society.
The issue of technologies and their role in contemporary society has been discussed in the scientific
literature using a range of labels and concepts. This section introduces some of them. Ideas of a
knowledge or information economy, post-industrial society, postmodern society, network society,
the information revolution, informational capitalism, network capitalism, and the like, have been
debated over the last several decades.
Fritz Machlup (1962) introduced the concept of the knowledge industry. He distinguished five sectors
of the knowledge sector: education, research and development, mass media, information
technologies, information services. Based on this categorization he calculated that in 1959. 29% per
cent of the GNP in the USA had been produced in knowledge industries.
Peter Drucker has argued that there is a transition from an economy based on material goods to one
based on knowledge. Marc Poratdistinguishes a primary (information goods and services that are
directly used in the production, distribution or processing of information) and a secondary sector
of the information economy. Porat uses the total value added by the primary and secondary
information sector to the GNP as an indicator for the information economy. The OECD has employed
Porat’s definition for calculating the share of the information economy in the total economy. Based
on such indicators, the information society has been defined as a society where more than half of
the GNP is produced and more than half of the employees are active in the information economy.
For Daniel Bell the number of employees producing services and information is an indicator for the
informational character of a society. “A post-industrial society is based on services what counts is
not raw muscle power, or energy, but information. A post industrial society is one in which the
majority of those employed are not involved in the production of tangible goods”.
Alain Touraine already spoke in 1971 of the post-industrial society. “The passage to post-industrial
society takes place when investment results in the production of symbolic goods that modify values,
needs, representations, far more than in the production of material goods or even of ‘services’.
Industrial society had transformed the means of production: post-industrial society changes the
ends of production, that is, culture. The decisive point here is that in postindustrial society all of the
economic system is the object of intervention of society upon itself. That is why we can call it the
programmed society, because this phrase captures its capacity to create models of management,
production, organization, distribution, and consumption, so that such a society appears, at all its
functional levels, as the product of an action exercised by the society itself, and not as the outcome
of natural laws or cultural specificities”. In the programmed society also the area of cultural
reproduction including aspects such as information, consumption, health, research, education would
be industrialized. That modern society is increasing its capacity to act upon itself means for Touraine
that society is reinvesting ever larger parts of production and so produces and transforms itself.
This makes Touraine’s concept substantially different from that of Daniel Bell who focused on the
capacity to process and generate information for efficient society functioning.
Jean-François Lyotard has argued that “knowledge has become the principle force of production
over the last few decades”. Knowledge would be transformed into a commodity. Lyotard says that