Category:Information Society

This category has a little easter egg in it. This is the first easter egg on this site.

'A little aside by the author of this wiki. This is a commentary on where information comes from, where it spreads, and a comment on the Wikipedia entry for Information Society itself.

It's curious to ask where a definition of something comes from. During a cold winter's day in January 2024, I looked up the definition of Information Society on Google, and I found that the same definition was linked all over the web.

The definition on Wikipedia, which is that "The information society refers to a society where the creation, distribution, manipulation, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic, political, and cultural activity. An information society is also characterized by the use of information and communication technologies to store, process, and transmit information rapidly." actually seems to come from Soll, Jacob, 1968- (2009). The information master : Jean-Baptiste Colbert's secret state intelligence system. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-02526-8. OCLC 643805520. Quite an interesting book, indeed!

Techtarget.com mentioned that "an information society can be simply understood as a society where the usage and knowledge of information and computer technology is at a high level." https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/Information-Society

Sometimes wikis can be such high results when searching, that people don't look more deeply to see where a term comes from. The citing of the first sentence of wikipedia is definitely expected, but I'm interested in reading the book that the quote is from.

What's more interesting is this UK-based free essay site. It doesn't cite a single resource it uses, but it does seem to compress information together like a chatbot might.

"The expression ‘post-industrial society’ was first coined in 1914 in Great Britain by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and Arthur J. Penty. It was later revived from 1958 in America (primarily by Daniel Bell) and from the end of the 1960’s in French social sciences (by Alain Touraine). However, the collocation “information society” as it is now used first emerged in Japanese social sciences in the early 1960’s. The Japanese version of the expression (Joho Shakai) was born during a conversation in 1961 between Kisho Kurokawa, the famous architect, and Tudao Umesao, the renowned historian and anthropologist. In regard to technology, which forms the basis of production, the term ‘automation’ (later ‘cybernation’), introduced by the automotive engineer of the Ford company D. S. Harder in 1946, facilitated the discussions for decades. Dozens of evocative terms were originated to designate the sweeping changes generated by the hurtling development of information technology; of these the most well-known were the various manifestations of the computer and the scientific-technological revolution."

Back to the Wikipedia article. When trying to cross-reference this with the Wikipedia article, it mentions "Kasiwulaya and Gomo (Makerere University) allude[where?][dubious – discuss] that information societies are those that have intensified their use of IT for economic, social, cultural and political transformation."

Antonio Negri characterizes the information society as one in which people do immaterial labour. "Magic Lantern Empire: Reflections on Colonialism and Society", Magic Lantern Empire, Cornell University Press, pp. 148–160, 2017-12-31, doi:10.7591/9780801468230-009, ISBN 978-0-8014-6823-0.

I'm very interested in the Japanese social science defintion, which is why I always recommend one of my favorite historic books, The Information Society as Post-Industrial Society, which details a Japanese experiment in information connectivity. Although I've added many books to my reading list from this Web Dérive.