Characteristics of the Information Society

Some characteristics of the modern Information Society would include:

• the development of information as a central strategic resource in industrial and economic development (hence the centrality of Drucker's 'knowledge workers') on the management and application of which individual units (companies, nations, geographical regions) are increasingly dependent for their competitiveness; of course, all technological changes have always been dependent on information, but 'what differentiates the current process of technological change is that its raw material itself is information, and so is its outcome' (Castells (1989)) or, again, 'what is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity' (1996 )

• the very rapid growth in informatization of the economy which allows closer links between regional, national and international economies, as well as breaking down the conventional barriers between financial sectors as all work, including manufacturing, becomes increasingly a matter of the transmission of information

• the development of global information networks on which what Castells refers to as the 'network society' is based (1996) and without which the rapid rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) would have been impossible; there are now only around a couple of dozen national economies bigger than the economies of the major TNCs

• the globalization of capitalism which is facilitated by and is dependent upon those networks, permitting economic decision-making on a world scale in real time; the term globalization does not refer simply to improved ease of communication and interaction between nation states, nor is it purely limited to the economic and business spheres; certainly, globalization does refer to such developments, but refers also to significant cultural changes, including for example greater migration, more international tourism, the development of 'world music', greater international co-operation in political, economic and ecological matters; a minor, but none the less telling, example of this cultural change can be found in the international advertising of certain consumer goods such as jeans, where advertisers often no longer see any necessity to provide different ads for different national markets; it is important, too, to consider the detachment from local constraints, which is afforded by internationalization of the economy, leading to 'a trend that we would call "bureaucratrization" in the Weberian sense, that is the predominance of the rationality of means over the rationality of goals .... the interests of a local business élite, or of a local resident working class, or of a local market, will be constantly subordinated to the need for the organization to be connected simultaneously with the financial markets, the pool of professional labor, the necessary technology...' (Castells (1989))

• the reduction in the constraints of space, whereby Silicon Valley, for example, becomes just another node in the network society, its actual geographical location being largely irrelevant in an economy which has passed, in Negroponte's terms, from shifting around atoms to shifting around bits:

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