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Thursday, November 8, 2012

Bigger, better, faster...the economy of the info society

In his 2010 research paper, The Life and Times of the Information Society, Robert Mansell states:

“We might expect an interdisciplinary body of intellectual inquiry to have emerged during the past 50 years or so since scholarly work started to focus on issues around information and communication control systems...  However, …it is mainly, though not exclusively, insights arising within the discipline of economics that seem to influence policy makers, albeit indirectly, in this area.  This has major consequences because it means that many of the important social dynamics of societal change are persistently downplayed.   This process of exclusion of certain issues from the agenda of policy makers is aided by the continuing dominance of what is called here the ‘Information Society vision’”  (p.166).

It appears then, according to Mansell, that the study of an information society is largely focused on the economics of such a society, how the production and consumption of information supports the production and consumption of material wealth. And, the consequence of this focus is an ignorance of the social dimension - how does the proliferation and accessibility of information contribute to or detract from a more livable society? 

But is this predilection toward the study of the economics of the information society really just a characteristic of scholarly research and inquiry?  Or is this a characteristic of today's society in general?  I mean, let’s take the idea of the information age out of the equation here.  Generally speaking, are we not living in a materialistic society, one where economy is of chief importance in all things?

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles, freedigitalphotos.net

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