Inert America: Crossroads to the Future

by Gary Griffin

  The World Bank released Beyond Economic Growth: Meeting the Challenges of Global Development in 2000 in which postindustrialization was defined as dein-dustrialization. They suggest that leading developed countries such as the United States are deindustrializing. In short, it’s the decline of industrialization in America. The postindustrial society signified not only the decline of industrial society but also the rise of the information society. Essentially, two macro-level processes overlapped at a given point in human history to define a transitional moment in two distinct phases of American society.

  Postindustrialism is the notion that the process of social change took America beyond the industrial society order. It is based on the production of information, rather than on the production of material goods. According to those who favor this concept, contemporary society is currently experiencing a series of social changes as profound as those that initiated the industrial era some two hundred years ago. We are entering a new system, a postindustrial society that, while it has several distinguishing features, is characterized throughout by a heightened presence and significance of information. Information and knowledge are crucial for Post-Industrial Society both quantitatively and qualitatively.

  Within the postindustrial society, we saw the emergence of a new social framework heavily dependent upon telecommunications. New infrastructures that utilize information technologies contribute decisively to the way economic and social exchanges are conducted, the way knowledge is created and retrieved, and the nature of work and occupations in which people must now be engaged. The computer and the Internet play a key role in this new information revolution.

  While new information technology plays a central role in the postindustrial society paradigm, it’s not just about technological change. The social changes witnessed during this same time period have been just as deep. It is impossible to argue that new information technology did not play a role, and I wouldn’t attempt to do so. However, such assumptions around the role of information technology that is described as technological determinism insists that technology acts as an independent force in our life. If this is true, then people are the servants of technology instead of its master. I reject the claim of technological determinism, as technology operates in a context not always of its making. It is so often shaped by social structures such as economics, politics, and culture.

  New technology is one major instrument that serves to bring about social change. This newer information technology has served as the basis of the postindustrial society paradigm. While few would deny that technological advances in computing and telecommunications collectively known as information technology, the idea that this convergence is the start of the age of information technology and that everyone would welcome such a marked beginning is highly doubtful. However, the assumption that deserves exploration is the one that places the relation between society and technology solely as technology’s influence on society.

  Information technology in contemporary society seems qualitatively different from new technology of past societies. Perhaps, this can be explained in three ways. First, current technology is more powerful than any before it. For example, with the shovel man could dig a hole in the ground, but with a single cell phone we can talk to people today on the other side of the world tomorrow. Second, the explicit awareness of technology as a critical determinant of social life and social institutions was instigated by the quality of modern technology. Third, the result is that contemporary society is going to great lengths to understand and control technology for good social purpose, and therefore much effort is expended to measure the influence of technology and its effects beyond simply the economy.

  An examination of the technical texts that give an historical account of the marriage of computing and telecommunications reveals a tale that maintains that convergence is based purely on technologic events.50 Certainly such events are vital, and they make their contribution to changes around us that place us squarely in the age of information technology and the information revolution. However, such accounts give the impression that new technology is somehow outside society, impinging upon it, that the marriage is an entirely spontaneous technical affair that gives birth to a new, contemporary society.

  While it is already clear that the social influence of information technology is profound, though not necessarily for the reasons given by the more visionary technologists, to focus only on the influence is to take the new technologies and their convergence as given. This neglects the equally important question of the origins of the technologies, and the nontechnical reasons why they have converged. There are at least three reasons for this. First, the social influence is poorly understood unless the origins of new technologies are taken into account. To take the most extreme position, information technology reduces the likelihood of a global nuclear disaster. It is difficult to square this with the palpable fact that military and defense-oriented requirements and funding provide the biggest single thrust behind information technology. Besides military involvement, one must also consider the involvement of commercial interests in information technology—companies and businesses wish to sell new technologies. Furthermore, governments whose activities are bound up with military and commercial interests, also promote information technology in specific ways. Technological impacts are seen more clearly when such social origins are examined.

  Alongside these macro-level interests are many familiar micro-level movements, organizations, and processes that mediate the economic and political interests to the population at large, acting as social carriers of new technologies. They drive to put computers in schools or in other instances, mediate government and commercial interests. On the domestic front, crazes like computer games, the advertisers’ promise of greater choice in entertainment, and the magazine racks laden with computer-related magazines are obvious instruments of commercial interest.

  Secondly, and on a more theoretical point, the perspective that concentrates on social consequences of given technology neglects the role of human action within the technological process. To give it its proper name, technological determinism assumes that technology has a kind of life of its own that then shapes social existence. It’s true enough that no one living in the nineteenth century could have guessed that the motorcar would have contributed so deeply to everyday life in the twentieth-century. Too often cities built with car transport in mind discourage pedestrians and cyclists, pollute the atmosphere, and oblige people to make many transactions—shopping, sporting, and eating, and so on— at some distance from their homes. Moreover the car has been augmented internally by modifications for luxury, safety, and speed and externally by generating new forms of support and service. It seems to have grown almost autonomously.

  Here is the major point—none of this could have occurred without people being involved in its development. Technology—whether one is talking about machines or systems or both—possesses no life of its own. It is a human product, a social construction. Very powerful social forces, especially military, economic, and political ones, achieve their social shaping. But in these cases it is also clear that active human agents are involved; people are constantly monitoring, evaluating, and justifying their activities.

  Thirdly, if the interplay between the social shaping of technology and the technological shaping of society is examined, then the door is opened for reshaping, redirecting, or simply resisting certain technological developments. The worst forms of hype present contemporary society as unavoidable; a result of the social diffusion of information technology, but there is nothing that is inevitable about it at all.

  Along this line of thinking, it is quite plausible that technological change only appears to induce social change in that it creates new opportunities for human beings and for societies, and it produces both positive and negative consequences that result in new problems. There is a close relationship between technological and social change. This relationship itself helps to identify the reason any technological development
such as those experienced within contemporary society induce massive social changes. Technological advance creates a new opportunity to achieve some desired goal. This opportunity requires alterations in social organization if advantage is to be had. This is turn means that existing social structures will be interfered with, and the end result is that older structures that were adequate to meet goals are now inadequate.

  To summarize, social change occurs when great advances in technology are experienced within a society. However, it is not the technology itself that causes the social change to occur. From the postindustrial society perspective, technology is the centerpiece that acts as an impetus for social change. Information technology is a social object that needs to be studied and better understood. However, technology is but a tool; it is a prerequisite and an enabler for information that defines the new opportunities within society, and thus the catalyst for the social change experienced within contemporary society.

  MORE THAN TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT

  There is no doubt that the transitional period referred to postindustrial society is heavily reliant on an advanced information technology infrastructure, and information and knowledge are central to this phase of development in society. However, the conceptualization goes much deeper and must also include an examination of the forces of production. In doing so, one aspect of postindustrial society that must be considered is that of social class.

  In the industrial society, one central focus was on inequality among certain groups such as women, elderly, and minorities. If the information society has in fact replaced the old industrial society way of life, then what does this mean for these same groups? There are three possible views of class in the information society. One, information society is characterized by classlessness achieved by technical not social revolution. Two, information technology strengthens the hand of the already powerful capitalists simply reinforcing class lines. Three, the introduction of new technology tilts the balance of power in different ways, realigning classes and releasing new social movements, and this redefines social class altogether.

  The cornerstone of the popular information society thesis is that a new information sector comprising information workers has become a dominant economic factor in advanced societies. However, the evidence points, not to an information sector but to the increase of a diverse range of information activities whose social significance depends on a complex series of variables. Many kinds of work are likely to become information intensive, but this does not add up to a new sector. This does not add up to a new social class.

  Similarly mistaken is the notion that the new classes may be accompanying the spread of information technology. Education and skill levels are becoming a more important criterion for determining social position, but this does not affect the basic social divisions based on property ownership.51 Some technocrats may have more power but do not rule. On the other hand, the simple Marxian view of class polarization is also open to serious question. First, a smooth transition to an information society is highly unlikely. Second, the idea that class struggle is the only axis along which conflicts occur in modern societies is not reasonable. To restate, new technology mediates other kinds of social relationships as well as class.

  For example, information technology, the centerpiece of postindustrial society, often designed, developed, sold, and used by some to channel power. Yet women are not meekly accepting such subordination. The slowly increasing strength of female participation in technology may open up new areas of contested terrain over fundamental issues. While women are challenging male predominance in high-technology jobs, their involvement also leads to a refusal to make the sharp separation between work, family, and personal life that is dictated by the male work world.

  Traditionally, women have had slightly higher levels of formal education than men. Postindustrial occupations in areas such as health, education, and research that are based on education are now open to women. Today, women make up about 49 percent of the managerial class, about 30 percent of the natural scientists, about 40 percent of the college teachers, 30 percent of the lawyers, and more than 50 percent of the teachers, librarians, designers, and psychologists.

  Minorities do not appear to enjoy the same level of positive social change that seems to have accompanied women’s roles within the postindustrial society. The distinguishing factor for minorities within the postindustrial society is in the new interactions that are enabled through the use of technology such as the Internet to form new social networks. One of the consequences of these networks is an increase in the importance of social capital and social influence. Social capital is the awareness of new opportunities and possibilities for advancement through new information, by acquiring social relationships.

  In agricultural societies, the elderly exercised considerable power and were given a very high status. However, in the industrial society, they exercised relatively little power and were given a low position of status. American society has a well-developed and sophisticated educational system that is designed specifically to train and prepare young people for entry into their chosen professions. However, the institution is ill equipped to retrain older workers when new technologies require additional schooling. In a rapidly changing society younger people are nearly always better educated and posses more knowledge of recent technology than their elders; thus, the latter lose their utility and the basis of their authority.

  The use of and access to information technology throughout all levels of society is tied to economics. Technology is a necessary prerequisite to the creation and distribution of information throughout the postindustrial society. The U.S. Department of Commerce identified the digital divide as the prohibitive cost of technology and suggested that this factor acts as a deterrent for some groups to access the Internet.52 Therefore, not all people will have access to the Internet at the same time. This argument around the digital divide presumes that access to the Internet is the same as Internet usage. However, giving the poor access to technology does not guarantee equality. That is to say, that just because all people have Internet access, there is no a priori reason to assume equality will be evident in Internet usage.

  Therefore, one model of the postindustrial society must encompass a micro-level view of social changes embodied by the lifestyle of people within society. Such a lifestyle reflects the technical, informational, economic, social, and cultural dimensions that are manifested in the way people live, work, and play in society. Central to lifestyle is a determination of how life chances mitigate life choices around Internet usage that results in an informatizationalized lifestyle within the information society. A lifestyle is a collective pattern of related behavior based on choices from options available to people, and an informatiza-tionalized lifestyle is a collective pattern of behavior based on choices from Internet usage options available to people according to life chances. A person’s life chances are socially determined by his or her socioeconomic status, age, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors that influence informatizationalized lifestyle choices.

  Lifestyle is what distinguishes one status group from another, such as Internet users and non-Internet users, or to use another term the information rich and the information poor. The famous sociologist Max Weber in 1922, put forth the notion that life chances refers to the probability of acquiring a particular lifestyle such as the informatizationalized lifestyle described here. In order to have a chance to gain that lifestyle, a person must have the financial resources, status, rights, and social relationships to support that lifestyle.

  Internet access is a prerequisite before one can make the choices about the activities and behaviors that result in an informatizationalized lifestyle. However, Internet access does not automatically dictate Internet usage around those choices. As stated previously, the informatizationalized lifestyle must encompass not only the technical (i.e., computer ownership and Internet access are technical in nature) and economic (i.e., Internet access requires computer ownership and
access via an Internet service provider both of which cost money), but also informational, social, and cultural dimensions that are manifested in the way people live, work, and play in the information society. Specifically, the informa-tizationalized lifestyle of contemporary society is recognizable as activities and behaviors surrounding Internet usage resulting from the choices they make. The choices available around Internet usage include such activities as sending and receiving e-mail; taking educational courses online; doing research for school; checking news, weather, or sports; making phone calls; searching for information; searching for jobs; doing job-related tasks; shopping; paying bills or other commercial activities; and playing games. Moreover, a person’s life chances in the information society are socially determined by their socioeconomic status, age, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors that influence those choices, thereby resulting in the informatizationalized lifestyle.

  Unfortunately, lifestyle studies have not focused on lifestyle in the postin-dustrial society. The informatizationalized lifestyle as defined by Internet usage choices by examining differences in a person’s life chances as determined by the individual’s socioeconomic status, age, gender, race, ethnicity, and other factors that influence lifestyle choices. Informatizationalized lifestyle choices are defined as Internet usage based on the options that are available for those who have Internet access at home. By examining only those who have access at home, the technical and economic barriers defined by the digital divide are less important.