SOCIOLOGY OF WORK (SEMESTER-5) INFORMATION SOCIETY

An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information are significant activities. Its key drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in a rapid variety of information growth and are somehow transforming all facets of social organization, including education, economy, health, government, war, and democracy levels. Technological, economic, occupational, spatial, cultural, or a combination of all of these may be some of the markers of this steady transition. Intellectual society is considered a successor to industrial society.

 

Norbert Wiener, propounds that, for our existence, knowledge is a necessity. This makes the requisite exchanges between us and our surroundings. To live efficiently is to live with adequate data. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man's inner life, even as they belong to his life in society. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wiener, the founder of 'cybernetics', the 'message principle', was writing. The timing is substantial. In these years, the grand claim for information emerged from some groundbreaking advances in control and communication technology -' information technology'. Or IT, as they have come to be called. The birth of knowledge is inextricably connected to the creation of the machine, not only as a term, but also as a philosophy. This was an achievement in the years of war and the immediate post-war era. The timing as well as the tempo of growth indicates the close relationship of the machine to the west's changing military requirements, primarily as perceived by the United States. The Americans developed such main components of the computer as miniaturized electrical circuits during the Second World War for unique military purposes-in this case, proximity fuses for bombs. The electronic digital computer itself was created primarily for ballistics calculations and atomic bomb analysis. The civil science center where several of these inventions took place, such as AT&T's Bell Laboratories, was heavily funded by the American wartime government and overseen by government agencies such as the Office of Scientific Research and Development of Vannevar Bush.

 

Such a movement has been taking place for over a century. The electric telegraph, the telephone, the gramophone, film, radio, and television were his earlier expressions. But the computer was what marked its culmination. For, as one of America's most distinguished computer scientists, Herbert Simon, put it, the computer is exceptional in its ability to control and transform information and, thus, to perform functions that had previously been performed only by the human brain, automatically and without human interference. It is the machine, too, which Daniel Bell places at the center of his account of the coming of the Information Society as the central emblem and 'analytical engine' of transformation.

 

Post-Industrial Society's Coming Bell reported that 'post-industrial society is a knowledge society, since industrial society is a society that creates products.' The system alone would change many of the practices of industrial society. But what brought the Information Society into being is the explosive convergence of the computer with telecommunications, argues Bell. The increase in knowledge is qualitative, not just quantitative. The old mass media transmitted standardized messages to uniform mass audiences. The new media of communication allow narrowcasting'. As well as broadcasting. In a global sense, the current info-sphere operates. No need to move; it is possible to carry the data to your home or local office. There is a worldwide electronic network of libraries , archives and databases, open to everyone, in general. Where, and at any moment. The icons of the industrial era are the clock and the train timetable. In hours, minutes and seconds, they convey time.

 

According to its supporters, a knowledge society brings in progress at the most basic level of society. It initiates a new development mode. The very source of wealth-creation and the guiding factors in development are altered. Facts and information are replaced by labor and capital, the core variables of industrial society, as the central variables. The labor principle of. Value, as a succession of thinkers from Locke and Smith to Ricardo and Marx classically articulated, must give way to a 'value theory of knowledge'. The root of value is now information, not labor.

 

From this statement, as well as from the entire cast of the accounts provided by the theorists of the information society, it is clear that what the Information Society Masuda calls 'the past developmental pattern of human society' is used as 'a historical analogical model for future society, so that as industrial society replaces agrarian society, the information society replaces industrial society. Bell produces an elaborate and systematic comparison of all three types of society using a three-fold evolutionary scheme based on the movement from 'pre-industrial extractive' to 'industrial-fabrication' to 'post-industrial-information' activities. The three are seen as distinct but equivalent production modes, analyzable according to the same structure and function principles, which is the view of the majority of advocates of information society.

 

For example, Toffler interacts as a systematic pattern shifts in the 'info-sphere' with the 'techno-sphere' changes, the 'socio-sphere' changes, the 'power-sphere, the' bio-sphere and the psycho sphere' changes. In addition, it is clear that the new information society, for all its stresses and problems, is to be welcomed and celebrated not merely as a new mode of production, but as a whole way of life for most of these thinkers. Toffler speaks of industrialism 's death and the emergence of a new civilization. Information society takes on positively utopian dimensions in the hands of Tom Stonier and Yoneji Masuda. According to Stonier, information society eliminates the primary social need for war, the need to expand resources to suit growing populations.

 

Old and New: Work in the Information Society

Denying the reality of much of what the theorists of information society assert would be perverse and foolhardy. To confirm that, the common experiences of daily life alone are enough. Automatic bank tellers, automatic supermarket check-out billing, the virtual disappearance of cheque and cash in most monetary transactions, word processors and fax machines, direct online booking of hotels and airlines, direct satellite broadcasting from any part of the world: all these are facts of everyday life for most sections of the population in the advanced industrial countries. Our homes have been invaded most clearly by the information revolution. Television is still the most evident symbol of this, enhanced now by the video cassette recorder’s additional facility and the range provided by cable and satellite. But now too, telebanking, teleshopping, and teleworking are making significant inroads into our lives. Tele-education may prove to be an even more important development. At the younger ages collective institutionalized provision would still seem to be desirable, for social as much as educational reasons.

 

The Industrial Revolution, Beniger claims, so accelerated society's material processing system that it precipitated a control crisis. Information-processing systems and communication technologies have lagged behind those that generate and utilize energy. In every sphere of society, the first application of steam power and later of electricity forced innovations in communication and control. For urgent security reasons, the fast-moving steam trains had to be carefully monitored and controlled. Acceleration of commercial distribution due to steam trains and steam ships: wide-ranging changes in wholesale and retail organization have been imposed. In factories, the rate of material throughput called for the moving assembly line (Fordism) and the 'scientific management of labor.

 

A similar charge of historical short-sightedness is made by those who see the information society as essentially the further application of Taylorism, such as Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1987, 1989). In fact, Taylorism, the principles of scientific management advocated in the early years of this century by Frederick Winslow Taylor, is best thought of as a powerful system of work organization capable of being applied more or less indefinitely in a variety of industrial contexts. (The Taylorism).

 

Of course,' Taylorian organization' can be adapted not only to routine white-collar work, but to the work of many new and old professionals and skilled technicians. The computer was hailed by many as an instrument of liberation. The tedious and tiring work and free workers will be automated to engage in more interesting and creative tasks. The familiar pattern of the separation and division of tasks was followed by computer work, leading to increasingly routine work for the mass of employees and highly specialized work for a small group of designers and researchers.

 

The Knowledge Worker

According to the theorists of information society, knowledge is progressively meant to influence work in two ways. One is the upgrading of the content of existing work knowledge, in the sense that the new technology adds rather than subtracts from employee skills. The other is to create and expand new jobs in the knowledge sector, so that information workers are predominant in the economy. In addition, the more qualified, more knowledgeable information workers are assumed to constitute the core of the information economy. One of the most hotly debated issues of the 1980s was the impact of information technology on employment.

 

Indeed, the majority of job growth over the last two decades has come from a very different quarter: not from the knowledge sector, but from the lower levels of the tertiary economy, where skills and knowledge are not particularly high. For example, almost 13 million new jobs were created in the United States between 1973 and 1980. Most of these were in the private sector, and most of them were in services and retail trade-more than 70 per cent.

 

Politics and Markets

It is clear from this account of the developments in the information economy that the information society has a distinct policy, as well as a political economy. For example, the growth of knowledge work has obviously been directly affected by recent governmental policies. Knowledge workers in the public sector-particularly in the human services sector-have declined, while those in the private sector, particularly in the business services sector, have increased. The state’s participation in the information economy, however, also operates at a much deeper structural level. In fostering and spreading the concept of an information society, governments have taken a leading role, including robust efforts to foster a 'computer culture' in schools and universities. In Britain, not particularly at the forefront of the information technology revolution, more than half of all information technology (IT) research and development (R&D) is funded by the government, the government is responsible for more than half of the total electronics market as a customer, and it absorbs more than a third of all military-connected computer capabilities.

 

About half of the government-financed R&D in the United States is military R&D. In fact, information technology makes most of the traditional industrial categories meaningless. Hallowed divisions of secondary and tertiary operations are becoming increasingly unreal. The electronics industry, the heart of the IT revolution, now combines production and service operations so completely that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other starts- for example, computer manufacture and computer services.

 

Ideology of the Information Society

The key burden of the criticism of the concept of information society is that no radically new theory or path in society has been implemented by the production and diffusion of information technology. In a political and economic context that reinforces and accentuates current trends, the latest technology is introduced rather than giving rise to new ones. Job and leisure are further industrialized, subjected to mechanization, routinization and rationalization by Fordist and Taylorist strategies. Social differences that exist are preserved and magnified. It opens up a new 'gap of expertise.'

 

Between the producers and users of the latest technology and other average citizens, semi-skilled operators. The focus of this criticism of the culture of knowledge is that of critical continuity. Instruments and techniques may change, but capitalist industrial societies' overriding aims and purposes remain the same as before. The entire theory of knowledge culture has gone so far as to see one of the most far-reaching criticisms as merely the latest manifestation of a long-standing pattern of thinking and practice that they call 'social Taylorism'. Frank Webster and Kevin Robins claim that Taylorism was not only a factory management ideology, but a modern social theory, a new principle of social revolution, and a new imaginary institution in society'.

Taylorism became the center of a new technocratic philosophy that moved out to the world at large, not stopping at the factory or workplace. It has now turned its attention on consumption, having dominated manufacturing. In the end, what was needed was the scientific management of need, desire and creativity and their reconstruction in terms of the commodity type. Thus, the entire growth of the state and culture of the twentieth century can be regarded as the implementation of the principles of scientific management. Obviously, the central requirements of this phase are facts, expertise and research, including social science.

 

However, this is not the whole tale of the knowledge society. It is to begin, not to end the study, to call the information society an ideology, and to apply the ideology to the contemporary needs of capitalism. Over the past two hundred years, capitalism has had many ideologies: laissez-faire, managerialism, welfare, and, arguably, forms of fascism and communism. Each has its own kind of relationship with capitalist society and each has its own distinctive contradictions.

 

To sum up, we can say that, the information society may be a partial and one-sided way of expressing the contemporary social reality, but for many people in the industrial world it is now an inescapable part of that reality. “Information is the new coin of power.