The Wired World: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of the Information Society

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2002), "The Wired World: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of the Information Society", Library Management, Vol. 23 No. 8/9, pp. 454-455. https://doi.org/10.1108/lm.2002.23.8_9.454.8

If the information society existed, then people would write lots of books about it. And this is so. It does and people have: Katz (1988), Lyon (1988), Webster (1995), Martin (2nd ed., 1995), and Castells’s trilogy of The Rise of the Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997), and End of Millennium (1998). Dearnley is lecturer and Feather is professor in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University. Feather’s own The Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change (3rd ed., LAP, 2000) is a standard student text with an elegant logic – the information society has three dimensions (historical from script and print to new technology, economic in terms of a marketplace of many players including the Internet, and political as a convergence of state and citizen over intellectual property and privacy and censorship). By the way, with the emergence of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals CILIP (from the Library Association and the Institute of Information Scientists), Library Association Publishing is now called Facet Publishing.

People come at the information society from many directions, call it many things, and define themselves in many ways. Information society, science, theory, communication, IT, digital technology, legal issues, information and knowledge management: a wide area, so wide in fact that it always amazes me that information specialists claim it as their own, when really it is everyone’s, pluralistically created and used. So in fact it becomes a shorthand way of introducing students to the world of information work and ideas, and this is just what The Wired World is for.

Its whole structure and tone indicate its origins in lectures, for its five chapters introduce complex ideas in simple ways, conversationally and even anecdotally, very much for a UK audience of beginners, providing lavish reading lists. It asks what the information society is (some theory about Shannon, Porat, and Bell here), what new technology is (computers from Arpanet to e‐commerce), how information flows (above all the Internet, but all is not quality), what information policy is (information rich and poor, work, broadcasting and privacy), how things are working out in Europe (access, digital literacy, social inclusion, DG XIII and ISPO), and what the future holds (convergence, new formats, e‐commerce, globalisation).

No surprises for someone in the know, a convenient digest of topical themes for the beginner, interpreted by two experienced hands. The “world” of this book is much more a UK and Europe perspective than anything else, and I can see its main use being there. I was interested in the structural implication, too, that an introduction to the information society (essentially chapter 4) deals with “traditional” issues of media regulation, legal issues, and the role of libraries, while the information society transforms itself into “practical experience” by following the European experience of economic, political, social and cultural regulation and convergence. Somewhere there is an undistributed middle. The chapter on Europe is strikingly more probing and complex than the others. It is also a very top‐down and infrastructural and policy‐led perspective, asking us to take it back ourselves to what is going on nationally and regionally and sectorally, fostered as these are by such institutional policy making. I looked too for the place of the private or business sector in this picture – it peeps out when the authors talk about the future. I would like to know more about the present: convergence and deregulation implies as much.

Where it all came from is interesting: where it’s all going is possibly more so. The authors speculate that the future will bring convergence and change, globalisation and the re‐engineering of the public space. New problems are posed and old ones restated. The authors reject any deterministic model of the information society (that technology drives social change), arguing for personal democratic freedom and choice, that governments and supranational bodies have only a limited amount of control. The Habermasian and post‐modern ideas of the start are only partly worked out – postmodernism alone, post Lyotard, would suggest a real challenge for anyone arguing for meaning and coherence, and asks for a bottom‐up rather than a top‐down perspective.

All of which takes us back to what and who this book is for – students mostly, lecturers, practitioners wanting a quick review, students in cognate fields like telecoms and management keen to get background before striking at specifics. Such books remind me of encyclopaedias, and I wonder sometimes whether a good encyclopaedia would do the job better. Such a work as the International Encyclopedia of Information and Library Science, edited by Feather and Sturges (Routledge, 1997) springs to mind, and I think I prefer it. But The Wired World provides a friendly conversation and that’s good. Given change and the ephemeral character of much of the fact, I give The Wired World a shelf life of two years but its life will be quite active in academic and professional collections. Paperback (the only) format is just right.