A Curmudgeonly Look at the Myth of the "Information Age"
Jim Thomas / Department of Sociology
Northern Illinois University
(jthomas@sun.soci.niu..edu)
(Fall, 2000)
(Early draft; Later published in SSSI Notes, 27(December): 8-9.
In discussing some of my increasing discomfort with online
distance education, an interactionist colleague suggested that I
simply did not understand the "information revolution." Nothing
like it has ever occurred before, so the argument went. "You
can't escape it. Publishers are adding a Net component to their
text books, and qualitative data coding software is changing how
we view symbolic interaction. You can't get in the way of
history." Maybe not, but we can briefly examine the social
construction of a historical moment.
As one whose living derives primarily from computer technology,
I'm quite happy to ride the wave. But, as an interactionist, I
have a few reservations about the glib, and somewhat cavalier,
use of the term "information age" (or "information revolution" -
the terms are often elided) and how it becomes a symbolic meme, a
genetic-like cultural replicator, for conferring identity on an
era. Even granting the formidable impact of computer-mediated
communications, the term "Information Age" arguably takes on a
mythopoetic function that symbolizes an extreme representation of
social processes in ways that gloss over broader social and
historical processes.
Myths, those narratives we weave to help make sense out of our
world, are helpful to provide a sense of conceptual and
theoretical order to guide our thinking and actions. But, myths
also can distort and obscure our existence as easily as they can
help us understand it. Labelling contemporary society as a new
"information age" not only promotes a set of erroneous images
that distort how we understand our culture, but it also obscures
the historical role that information has played in cultural
formation. It feeds a mindset that offers a totalizing theory of
social development and obscures its historical antecedents.
What difference does it make whether we call the period we're in
an "information revolution" and see it as a dramatic transition
in social relations? One maddening characteristic of modernist
society is the tendency to reduce complex phenomena to a single,
simple entity and then give the entity a name. The name, an
arbitrary symbol for a set of arbitrary characteristics, becomes
"real." We call this reification: We reify the label in that we
change the symbol to a "thing" and act on that thing as if it
were non-arbitrary, real, and substantial. As Baudrillard might
say, the simulacrum becomes the thing itself. Modernist thought,
proceeding from the Enlightenment tradition, seeks forms of
knowledge and understanding that unify and ultimately provide a
grand explanatory theory. Some call this "totalizing knowledge,"
because the goal is to provide a complete, interconnected system
of concepts and theories that give us a total picture of whatever
we are trying to explain. For interactionists especially, this
leads to sticky questions, because modernist thought generates
broad concepts such as "pre-industrial society," "industrial
society," or post-industrial society," all of which are useful
analytic types, but none of which is a completely accurate term
to describe any given culture or epoch. To confound this problem
by labelling the present system as a transition to an information
society strikes me as intellectually irresponsible. Not only do
we deceive ourselves about social structure, but we avoid
confronting the classic problems underlying social information
and its role in society. The labels of our discourse provide a
unifying narrative that gives us a common set of shared
assumptions about our experiences and how to talk about and act
upon them. "Information Age" suggests something new, something
dramatic, something mysterious. The consequence is that we, or
some of us, develop a false sense of cultural identity and fail
to realize this identity is shared by only an elite few. We fail
to recognize how the "new" is built upon and blends with the old,
and we lose sight of who we are. Or, more accurately, we think
we're something we aren't, and our focus emphasizes novelty
rather than substance.
To view the present as an "information revolution" requires a
certain hubris. It assumes that we are the first society to take
information seriously and make it central in daily life.
However, there is an abundance of anthropological literature
illustrating how information played a central role in the
development of some so-called primitive societies, and Durkheim's
discussion of "primitive" science, based on religious precepts,
illustrates the importance of information in social organization
of some pre-literate cultures.
"History begins at Sumer," and we forget that the Sumerian
contribution to society was the written symbol, the word, the
record, the archival documents. The symbols contained
information, and this revolutionary innovation shaped how
information would be coded, recorded, and employed. Yet, in our
enlightened and sophisticated culture, we think that we, the
pioneers of the 21st century, are revolutionizing information.
Yes, to some extent we are making a dramatic impact, but our
folly is in thinking we are unique or that we are special because
we are an "information society." We are not.
Gutenberg's Mazarin Bible, considered the first significant
document printed with movable type (circa 1455) was an
information revolution similar in many ways to the computer
revolution. For the first time, information could be quickly
accumulated, compiled, and disseminated. By providing a means to
quickly and easily put data and ideas to paper, the printing
press expanded literacy, contributed to the breaking down of
cultural barriers, and capped the late Renaissance's influence
that, by the sixteenth century, had spread through most of
Europe. Like computer technology, the spread of information
through this new technology created new and often competing ways
of thinking. It was a major step toward formation of the "global
village" that later technological advances in communication
(including computer-mediated communication of the present)
intensified.
Advances in the printing press made possible the "penny papers"
that contributed to eighteenth century political upheavals, and
Thomas Paine's _Common Sense_ in 1776, along with the Federalist
Papers, were examples of how ideas distributed through the
information technology of printing, shaped the political and
social structures across two continents. Television technology
was a dramatic change in how we conveyed information. Rather than
rely on symbolization, the graphic immediacy of t.v. brought
information about news, other cultures, life, and death directly
to us. This was a qualitative shift from previous forms of
conceptualizing information, yet we did not recognize it as an
information revolution. And, other than convey images and facts,
it did not directly stimulate any fundamental change in social
relations--in how we live, work, procreate, or die.
To see computer technology as a revolutionary new phenomenon
glosses over the fact that it reflects existing social practices.
Like the printing press or t.v., what we do with computers is
generally just a fancier way of what we did before we had them.
The difference is that now we can do more of it faster. Granted,
the potential of computers to change aspects of our lives is
profound. Gameboy, Nintento, cellular telephones, and the
Internet are fine. But, these new changes have not yet
qualitatively altered our social existence. We arguably have more
poverty, more homelessness, more overt intolerance and bigotry,
more ecological destruction, more crime, and more illiteracy in
2000 than we did in 1980. Computer technology did not cause
this, but neither can it change it. The dramatically increased
information processing spawned by computers simply processes old
ways of doing things much more efficiently.
The information-processing capacity of computer technology both
liberates and constrains. It facilitates research by allowing
data collection and analysis, modeling, and other tasks to do in
hours what once took weeks or years. It allows for more safety in
autos, appliances, and shopping malls, provides a means for
hitting military targets with reasonable precision, and subtlely
improves our lives often for the better. But, it also creates
problems. It allows students to click on www.schoolsucks.com to
purchase term papers, allows Metallica and Debbie Does DeKalb to
be downloaded more easily, and lets students query their
instructors via email. Less benignly, computers allow law
enforcement agents, mass marketers, and others, to compile
extensive records on the populace, raises new issues of privacy,
security, and interaction, and creates new classes of
deviance--and thus crimes--by providing a new means for predatory
behavior. There is no evidence, however, that these advantages
and problems represent a qualitatively new type of society.
To view the start of the Twenty First century as a qualitatively
new information society, then, is to fail to recognize the
historical role that information has played in previous societal
transformations. Worse, it creates a myth that fails to explain
both the nature of current society how it came to be as it is.
The term "information society" reduces social processes to a
single, simplistic metaphor that provides a set of legitimating
myths to guide education, communication, politics, and social
life. The term makes us believe that we something we are not. We
may have more, faster, in information, but this hardly translates
into more wisdom or enlightenment.
Yes, the innovations in science have been aided by information
technology. Cashing checks is easier. Television technology will
change and give us better pictures and more of them. But, such
changes have been occurring for decades, and they are not
indicative of a dramatically different way of life. The same
social problems remain, the same ways of laboring persist, and
the traditional forms of social domination and oppression
continue.
Even though we now produce and process information in a
technologically sophisticated way, it still tends to be a
labor-intensive enterprise. Computer manufacturing, data
accumulation, and data processing, even though aided by hi-tech
applications, remain the task of individuals tediously working
over a keyboard or production line in much the same way as
typists, weavers, or assembly line workers also engaged in what
was once an equally new technology. Information workers still
sell their labor to a producer or to agencies (such as computer
companies or universities) that indirectly support production.
The wage system still dominates. The class structure survives
and, if anything, information technology creates increasing
polarization between a techno-literate group and a marginal
population left on the periphery. To view our current status as
a new "information revolution" glosses over the fact that a)
information dependance is not new, b) the society being shaped by
technology is only superficially different, and c) the historical
roots of social development are far more complex than "end of
ideology" theorists recognize.
The danger in uncritically accepting the label "information
revolution," then, is that it distorts the nature in which human
struggles and conflict have shaped the world. To fail to
recognize this is to fail to recognize the role of human agency
in bringing about a more just society and instead becoming more
passive as those who control both the technology and the
information simply invent new forms of unnecessary social
domination.
In _Snow Crash_, Neal Stephenson suggests that religion is a type
of virus analogous to a biological or computer virus. We can look
at information in the same way. Information has a habit of
replication, installing itself in the minds of its hosts,
re-programming the synapses of those infected, and producing
outcomes that can be both benign and malign. I am not arguing
that information is bad. However, I am suggesting that the term
"information age" is itself a type of coded information that
perniciously, and inaccurately, shapes how we think and act. To
uncritically accept this information without recognizing that it
is an arbitrary metaphor that creates a new myth without creating
new forms of cultural existence or social justice is to ignore a
long history of "information revolutions." The dangerous irony is
that we celebrate the myth and are inattentive to how it prevents
us from recognizing the information about history, society, and
social organization that the myth conceals.
====================
Much in these comments is probably floating around cyberspace
somewhere. After all, that's what happens when we post in the
"information age."
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