Lecture 9: Explorations in Social

Theory a.k.a. Understanding Our Society

• In the closing decades of the last century, the world have experienced an IT revolution that was as epochal breaking as the transformation of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

• Some social theorists have argued we left the age of industrial society and have entered into the age of post-industrial/information society.

• At the heart of this argument is that ‘information processing’ characterized the new era, just as agriculture and industrial production have characterized the previous two ages.

• The era-shift hypothesis was premised on the view that new communications technologies and new media are radically altering human interactions and socio-economic organizations which have led to

the view that politics and governance would be altered with the deployment of new media technologies.

• In this week lecture, we will be looking at the some of the key theories of the post-industrial/information society in order to gain an understanding of the transformation that our society is undergoing and its consequences to politics and society.

What is Post-industrial/Information

Society?

• A post-industrial/information society is a proposed name for an economy that has undergone a specific series of changes in structure after a process of industrialization.

• Such societies are often marked by the following characteristics:

a) A rapid increase in the size of the service sector, as opposed to the manufacturing sector,

b) An increase in the amount of information technology, often leading to an ‘information age.’ Information, knowledge and creativity are the new raw materials of such an economy.

Introducing Two Theorist of the Post-Industrial/Information Age

• Alvin Toffler and the ‘Third Wave’ theory.

• Daniel Bell and the ‘Post-industrial Society’ theory.

Toffler’s Third Wave Theory

• Highly influential theory developed by Alvin Toffler (1991) in his book The Third Wave.

• The central premise of Toffler's theory was that human history, while it is complex and contradictory, can be seen to fit patterns. The pattern he has been seeing in his career takes the shape of three great advances or waves.

First Wave: Agricultural Civilisation

• Timing circa 8000 B.C. - 1650/1750 A.D.

• The first wave of transformation began when some prescient person, about 10,000 years ago, planted a seed and nurtured its growth. The age of agriculture began, and its significance was that people moved away from nomadic wandering and hunting and began to cluster into villages and develop culture.

Second Wave: Industrial Civilisation

• Timing circa 1650/1750 A.D. -1955/1965 A.D.

• The second wave was an expression of machine muscle, the Industrial Revolution that began in the 18th century and gathered steam after 19th century.

• The main components of the Second Wave society are nuclear family, factory-type education system and the corporation.

• Toffler writes: "The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass

destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy."

Third Wave: Information Civilization

• Started circa 1955/1965 A.D.

• Just as the machine seemed at its most invincible, however, we began to receive intimations of a gathering third wave, based not on muscle but on mind. It is what we variously call the information or the knowledge age, and while it is powerfully driven by information

technology, it has co-drivers as well, among them social demands worldwide for greater freedom and individuation.

• At the heart of Toffler’s theory is the proposition that posits technological change is a powerful, autonomous force for social and economic change.

Characteristics of Third Wave Societies

• Economic and industrial system undergoing fundamental shift from the production and distribution of material goods to immaterial, information products and services

• Change global in scale: “boundless frontiers”

• In this post-industrial society, there is a lot of diversity in lifestyles ("subcults").

• Adhocracies (fluid organizations like, e.g., the Wikipedia community) adapt quickly to changes. Information can substitute most of the material resources and becomes the main material for workers (cognitarians instead of proletarians), who are loosely affiliated.

• Mass customization offers the possibility of cheap, personalized, production catering to small niches. The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology. ‘Prosumers’ can fill their own needs (e.g., open source, assembly kit, freelance work).

Bell’s Post-industrial Society

• Highly influential theory developed by Daniel Bell (1973) in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.

• In this book, Bell (1973) outlined a new kind of society - the post-industrial society. He argued that post-industrialism would be information-led and service-oriented.

• Bell also argued that the post-industrial society would replace the industrial society as the dominant system.

• There are three components to a post-industrial society, according to Bell:

a) The economics of such a society would be based primarily upon the service-sector.

b) Hence the occupational structure of this new society would be transform itself from a dominance of manual, blue-collar workers to the increasing dominance of white-collar and professional employees.

c) Politically the post-industrial society would see the creation of a 'knowledge-

class’ which would challenge the traditional sources of power of business and politicians.

d) Theoretical knowledge would now the dominate the 'culture' of the post-industrial society.

e) Finally such a society would be future-oriented.

The Social Practices of the Post-Industrial Age

• As new communication technologies become more accessible (in terms of cost and convenience) more people will adopt this technologies.

• Shift in economic structure that focus on knowledge which utilized the new communication technologies rather than physical production.

• Created a new social structure between ‘information-rich’ and ‘information-poor’ based on access to new communication technologies.

• The coming of a global village where everyone is connected to everyone else regardless of time and space.

• Shift with regards to our lifestyle in terms of work and play.

• The erosion of the state and traditional politics which rely heavily on ‘mass-communication and political mobilization.’ The coming of ‘postmodern politics’

New Media and the Post-Industrial/Information Society

• The explosion of new information technologies have witnessed the rise of what rise of what is now called as the ‘New Media.’

• What exactly is the ‘New Media?’

• It refers to a group of relatively recent mass media based on new information technology. Most frequently the label would be understood to include the Internet and World Wide Web, video

games and interactive media, CD-ROM and other forms of multimedia popular from the 1990s on.

• The phrase came to prominence in the 1990s, and is often used by technology writers like those at Wired magazine and by scholars in media studies.

New Media and the Media Industry

• The arrival of the new media have transformed the practices of the media industry in the following ways:

a) New media technologies have altered the flow and increase the volume of social communication by decreasing costs and distance sensitivity of moving information; increasing the speed and

volume of communication. The exchange of information have become instantaneous and global.

b) New media technologies have changed the way journalists work through the abundance of easily accessible information over the net as well as giving portability for journalist to produce news, e.g., notebook, PDAs, etc. Together with

advances in long-distance traveling have make it possible to down-size and de-skill newsroom by increasing reliance on pooled information fed into eth information net by PR firms and news agencies.

c) The transformation of ‘broadcasting’ to ‘narrowcasting’ to audience.

Two Views on the Post-Industrial/Information Age

The Optimistic View

• Believes that the new media would generate social improvements:

1. Facilitating two way communication in contrast to the one-way communication of traditional mass media. Such inteactivity would mean the death of traditional passive mass media audience.

2. An active participatory democracy and citizen could be built upon this interactivity because citizens could now be regularly consulted about their views, i.e., instead of being spoken through in the mass media, the new media made it possible for them to make their voices heard;

3. New media’s interactive nature provide new communicative spaces where

people could discover common concerns and discuss possible solutions. It was suggested that this would generate an activated civil society and re-invigorate democracy.

4. The new media were seen to deliver greater abundance and greater diversity of information than ever before. This would ensure that information would be less open for manipulation.

5. The new media offered the means to break up the mass media market into smaller niche markets. In this way, we can ensure that no one control the media scene.

6. The realization of the ideals of cosmopolitanism through the new media. Cosmopolitans hold to the idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community. Therefore, they believe

there is a burden on all of the people to cultivate and improve humanity as a whole and to provide enrichment in the best way that they can. This ties into ideas of brotherhood of humanity, and how the human race is one entity that humans must all band together to support.

The Skeptical View

• Skeptics argued that new media does not mean the advent of improved social arrangements. They argued that:

1. Although new media facilitate two way communication, most people still prefer their information to be pre-packaged rather than sort through the massive amount of information themselves.

2. The idea of a new public sphere via new media has not produced active citizenry but rather generate electronic plebiscites, where quick polling produces, at most, partial kind of participation. Instead of real deliberation, debate and engagement with issues, this form of ‘democracy’ has produced something more akin to entertainment and a media-ized spectator sport.

3. Instead of creating a more informed audience, the explosion of information facilitated by the explosion of the new communication technologies, particularly the net, may have created ‘information fatigue and overload’ among its audience leading to manipulation where exhausted audience welcome others ‘pre-packaging’ of information for easy consumption.

4. The explosion of new information technologies are restricted to those with access to such technologies.

5. More importantly, the creation of niche media simply means its contents are targeted at audience who can afford their products which aims at creating a ‘lifestyle’ with narrowcasting. This only widens the socio-economic gap between the rich and poor.

Conclusion