Keywords
Citation
Duff, A.S. (1999), "The Information Society: A Study of Continuity and Change
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
The greatest temptation in Information Society studies is to be so intoxicated with unfolding trends that one falls into a radical failure of perspective. Such lapses are evident, for example, in the claim that the USA or the UK has suddenly become a completely new type of society, the Information Society, or in the claim that the current information technology revolution enjoys conceptual parity with the industrial revolution. Agrarianism (c. 3000 BC to c. AD 1800), industrialism (c. AD 1800 to c. 1975), informationalism (c. AD 1975 to): after a leisurely 4,800 years of agriculture the developmental escalator has somehow managed to compress the late great industrial revolution into less than 200 years and the information revolution into 20 or 30 years or perhaps 50! The first two chapters of John Feather′s book, devoted to The historical dimension′′, demonstrate that there is one author at least who is not guilty of such overestimation. Tracing the history of information and communication technologies from cave paintings and clay tablets to photography, telephony and the mass media, before reaching contemporary telematics, he puts the Information Society in much‐needed context as more or less a function of the past. Thus in spite of the word change′′ in his sub‐title, Feather is essentially a continuist as opposed to a transformist, an evolutionist as distinct from an information revolutionary, an exponent of realism and commonsense rather than of Star Trek sociology′′ (Daniel Bell′s caustic sobriquet for the speculations of impressionable Information Society theorists). For this stance alone, The Information Society deserves its status as a dependable undergraduate primer.
Professor Feather′s distinctive slant as an historian of publishing comes to the fore in the following chapters, on the economic and political dimensions. He treats the publishing industry as what he calls a ‘paradigm of information transfer′′, showing how new technologies have changed the roles of authors, publishing houses and other links in the information chain. He then proceeds to consider the important question of whether electronic publishing is taking us towards a new paradigm′′. Doctrinaire sociologists might object that the development of publishing is hardly a broad enough platform on which to mount a theory of the Information Society, but against this it should be noted that studies of the (alleged) paradigm shift in information publishing can be particularly useful in indicating the kinds of changes which may be awaiting the wider socioeconomic and cultural milieu. Thus Feather′s discussion of the contrasting circumstances of publishing firms in the rich north and poor south gives a powerful angle′′ on the whole problem of global information gaps. Similarly, a publishing studies perspective enhances the author′s treatment of political issues like freedom of information and data protection. The point here is that the Information Society is a multi‐disciplinary subject which cannot be monopolised by professional sociologists riding one or other theoretical (Marxist, Weberian, or whatever) high horse. We should be grateful for any light that is shed on the social role of information.
The Information Society closes with a brief chapter on the implications of the Information Society for the information professions. Like the rest of the book, the discussion is for the most part well‐balanced, but in his comments on the employment prospects of librarianship graduates in the health service Feather is gravely over‐optimistic. He states that a sector that once employed a few score librarians as its only information professionals is now irrevocably committed to the use of information professionals at the core of the management of its activities′′. But whatever lip‐service NHS managements may pay to the concept of information management ‐‐ and they are masters of the public relations spin′′ ‐‐ the harsh reality on the ground is that many professional librarians in the health service still endure the pay, status and promotion prospects of semi‐educated clerks; it is extremely difficult to see an employment El Dorado beckoning from such quarters! Generally, it is time that people in responsible positions in library education stopped pretending that there are job opportunities galore outside the traditional routes. There is, on the contrary, a corrosive unemployment crisis among qualified librarians, both in the UK and abroad.
The style of The Information Society is painstakingly pedagogic and circumspect, which unfortunately throws into relief the many typographical errors. For example, Trevor Haywood has become Trevor Hayward (p. 211). More seriously, on page 76 we read that ‘the UK book market was worth some 2.8 million in 1994′′. Publishers may be having a hard time of things nowadays but surely their total turnover was a trifle higher than that? Moreover, while we can expect Library Association Publishing to want to republish a book which has been doing well, we should also expect it to do so wholeheartedly. A few pages of extra descriptive material on some of the latest major classes of gadgetry, such as hypermedia and mobile phones (pp. 47‐51), are welcome, but why does the new edition on page 80 simply repeat the statistic given on page 58 of the first edition, that in 1992, nearly 4,500 databases were available worldwide′′? Such a figure is now so out‐of‐date as to be quite useless. But the major criticism of the publishing strategy must be economic: Why are LAP trying to sell a short paperback at a price well beyond the means of the average student? Why not price it at, say, 9.99 and thereby enable a good textbook to be owned by those who need it most?