by Gary Griffin
TRANSITION TO THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
If postindustrial society simply defines a transitional period for America from the middle of the twentieth century until today, what then is an information society? Such a conceptualization is readily apparent throughout the literature in the use of terms such as information workers and information revolution. During this time period, new information technologies that quickly permeated offices, industrial processes, schools, and homes seemed to be everywhere. With the arrival of such technologies, came many sudden changes and a desire to better understand these changes and their impact. The changes in contemporary society are certainly obvious in terms of technological innovations, but they also have significance in terms of social change.
Just as there was a transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, so, too there was a transition from the industrial society to the information society. The information revolution of the last fifty or so years saw a shift from production of material goods through physical labor in industries to intellectual work and an increase in consumption of services. In 1993, Dordick and Wang used informatization to describe the process of social change that resulted in an information society. A new and challenging explanation of a changing social structure resulted in a definition of the information society as one whose infrastructure is closely defined by information technology and characterized by the development of a large service sector that is heavily dependent upon professional and technical occupations denoted by the increasing intellectualized nature of work that can only be performed through ongoing educational endeavors where the knowledge theory of value gets translated into information and treated as commodity.
Using this definition as the starting point, a simplistic view of the information society can be constructed. Specifically, the information society involves four key areas that serve as pillars to both anchor and support the basic social structure of the information society within twenty-first- century America. These four pillars are information, technology, human capital, and a political economy. To illustrate the importance of each and the role it plays in the information society, there are five conceptions of the information society that include technological, economic, occupational, spatial, and cultural.
The technological conceptualization is probably the most common definition of the information society. Technology provides the infrastructure of the information society. It emphasizes technological innovation and the idea that breakthroughs in information processing, storage, and transmission through IT (information technology) have applications in every sphere of life. The design, production, and use of technology are human activities that produce tools. The development of technology, therefore, is significantly dependent on human capability and will to create and generate new solutions and unique products and systems.
The economic view is based on the idea that information industries such as media, education, and information technology, and research-based industries such as pharmaceuticals are making an ever-greater contribution to the economy. Globalization, which characterizes contemporary society, has accelerated over the past thirty years and is more visible now than ever. Positive economic growth, combined with constantly growing foreign investments and higher international trade, are the main characteristics of the global economy. This produces a growing inequality and widening of the wage gap in developed societies, while in developing countries, there is a dramatic drop in the number of people living in poverty. Globalization influences the rise of human aspirations on a personal level; it also increases immigration and heterogeneity within a society, while people develop a multiple identity.
The occupational definition focuses on the change in organizations and the nature of work. There is a significant job increase in the field of automatic management of information, while other jobs have a psychological element that brings about new and, until now, unknown work-related satisfactions. White-collar employment in manufacturing industries will be drastically reduced, although the number of white-collar jobs in service industries will not necessarily increase sufficiently to absorb job losses in the manufacturing sector; thus, advances in information technology will likely bring more unemployment, hold down the growth of unskilled workers’ wages, and widen income and regional disparities.
This is similar to the claim that automated technologies are not only diminishing the proportion of manufactured work available but rapidly shrinking the need for human labor in the white-collar sector as well. With manufacture and service work daily displacing workers with new technologies, and with the shift from mass employment to elite employment, joblessness will become widespread. But just as there are notions of jobs becoming scarce, people seem to be working harder than ever as demonstrated by the fact that in the United States work time has actually increased since 1948 and Americans now work 320 more hours than their west European counterparts.
The spatial conceptualization of the information society stresses space and place. The changes that occur when information networks connect locations dramatically change the organization of activity in time and space. Urbanization is a dynamic social and economic process that transforms societies from primarily rural to primarily urban ways of life. There is a spatial reorganization of population and economic activities in postindustrial societies where a large majority of people, jobs, and organizations are concentrated in or dominated by urban agglomerations.
Lastly, the cultural dimension of the information society is probably the most easily acknowledged but also the most difficult to define or measure. This perspective has emerged particularly with the convergence of communications and information technology, which is now turning computer networks into mass-media networks and communication systems such as satellite TV, the World Wide Web, and mobile phone networks. Media and communication provide people with more than information. The messages received in the form of sounds, images, texts, and stories can reinforce or challenge a person’s identity, values, ideas, understanding, and ways of relating to the world and to one another.
Workers engaged in intellectual work (whether called information or knowledge) now are the owner of the means of production. This change represents a significant shift in the production processes of the information society. In the early 1960s, economists and social scientists began to think about a fourth occupational sector of the work force, one in which workers were engaged in knowledge- or information- intensive occupations.
This led to a heated debate on the social and economic consequences of American society and its growing information industries. About this time, an increasing share of government expenditures was in activities that produced no material output, and increasing amounts of resources were being spent by industry on similar nonmaterial outputs. Such expenditures are necessary for the production of knowledge and are centrally important to the nation’s economy.
Knowledge is anything that is known by somebody, and knowledge production is any activity by which someone learns of something that was previously unknown. Following these definitions, five groups of knowledge-producing activities—education, research, and development, media and communication, information machines, and information services—constituted the knowledge industry. Knowledge-producing occupations such as professional and technical workers, managers, officials and proprietors, clerical and sales workers, and craftsmen and foremen in printing trades were responsible for a growing percentage of knowledge work in the United States, which would account for 29 percent of the gross national product and slightly less than 31 percent of the work force would be engaged in knowledge-producing industries in 1959.
Another way of thinking about knowledge industries is that they include only research, higher education, and the production of knowledge as intellectual property. Instead of trying to pinpoint knowledge workers across multiple occupations, it is much simpler to include only two groups of professionals—scientists and engineers. This estimate of information workers yields a much smaller contributio
n to a nation’s gross national product. In examining changes in the information or knowledge work force over time through longitudinal data for the contribution of knowledge industries and workers to the nation’s gross national product, the importance of knowledge and/or information in the American economy and the information society is better defined and understood.
Ancillary workers and firms who support the production and distribution of information and who generate income by information activities are not limited to the selling price of a product. It is a better basis of measurement because it more accurately reflects the wealth generated by the information economy. Activities may not be directly involved in the production of information, but they contribute to the value of the product or service produced and should therefore be included. For example, the use of information obtained by remote sensing satellites is used in the fishing industry to locate schools and increase the catch. While not produced in an information industry, the information gathering by satellite is attributed to information consumed internally by the fishing industry.
Other research of importance has been conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce to examine the differences in computer ownership and access to the Internet. As previously covered, the digital divide is the unequal level of Internet access by specific groups. By the end of 1998, over 40 percent of Americans had computers in their homes and about 25 percent accessed the Internet. By the end of the third quarter of 2001, that number had increased with over 66 percent of the population owning a computer and 54 percent were using the Internet regularly.
Second, Internet usage is increasing for all groups regardless of location, marital status, income, education level, age, race, ethnicity, or gender. However, there are disparities within these groups. High-income urban households are more likely to have a computer and access the Internet than low-income rural households. Single mothers with children have the highest growth rate in Internet usage but still lag behind other groups. Those with higher incomes are more likely to access and use the Internet as compared to those with lower incomes. The better educated use the Internet more than the less educated. People over the age of fifty are the least likely to use the Internet, while children and teenagers use computers and access the Internet more than any other age group. Whites and Asian Americans are the most likely to use the Internet. Blacks and Hispanics are the least likely to use the Internet. Males are more likely to use the Internet than women.
Third, not all people have access to the Internet at home. Public access to the Internet through locations such as schools and libraries plays an important role for those groups who have the least access such as lower-income, less-educated, and minority groups. However, those with access to the Internet at home have a clear economic advantage. Fourth, Americans are expanding the range of activities and behaviors in making choices about the use of the Internet. By 2001, about 45 percent of the population used e-mail, 33 percent searched the Internet for product and service information, and about 39 percent make purchases online.
LIFESTYLE IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
Observable macro-level changes in a society also influence micro-level changes in the lives of the people who are a part of that society. In America in the latter part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, these social changes are apparent in the day-to-day lives of people, including work and leisure activities. To more fully understand these changes, a different body of literature must be examined that covers the postmodern society ideas. In the postmodern tradition, there’s a different focal point in terms of explaining the social changes within contemporary American society. In this body of literature, theorizing and study is more focused on culture and is deeply engrained in Weberian theory of lifestyles.53 Among the classical theorists, Max Weber provides the deepest insight into the lifestyle concept. Lifestyle is linked to status by highlighting prestige as the distinguishing characteristic of status, which is normally expressed by the fact that a specific style of life is expected from all those who belong to that status. Status, not class plays the larger role in Weber’s perspective. Status groups originate through a sharing of similar lifestyles or as a means to preserve a particular style of life.
Lifestyles were based not so much on what people produced but on what they consumed. One might thus say that classes are stratified according to their relations to the production and acquisition of goods, whereas status groups are stratified according to the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special styles of life. In other words, lifestyle differences between status groups are based on their relationship to the means of consumption not the means of production, although this does not mean that consumption is independent of production. The economic mode of production sets the basic parameters within which consumption occurs, but it does not determine or even necessarily affect specific forms of consumption because the consumption of goods and services conveys a social meaning that displays the status and social identity of the consumer. Consumption can then be regarded as a set of social and cultural practices that establish differences between social groups, not merely as a means of expressing differences that are already in place because of economic factors. The use of particular goods and services through distinct lifestyles ultimately distinguishes status groups from one another.
In the information society, a lifestyle represents definable patterns of behavior that reflect the current conditions now prevalent in American society. Lifestyles in postmodern society are mixed, interwoven, and flexible, and thereby preclude clear maintenance of hierarchical distinctions and a standardization of lifestyles. Such lifestyles grounded in consumerism, such as choices of clothes, leisure activities, consumer goods, and bodily dispositions are not fixed to specific status groups. This situation is not evidence of a dramatic change in groups, but this development is a new improvement within the existing class hierarchy consisting of an expansion and legitimization of upper- and middle-class lifestyles.
Lifestyles are utilitarian social practices and ways of living adopted by individuals that reflect personal, group, and socioeconomic identities. They consist of self-selected forms of consumerism, involving particular choices in food, dress and appearance, housing, automobiles, work habits, forms of leisure, and other types of status-oriented behavior. The social changes currently experienced in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century involve massive social, economic, technological, and political changes that dramatically influence lifestyles. Lifestyles comprise patterns of related behaviors, values, and attitudes adapted by groups of individuals in response to their social, cultural, and economic environments. As Weber argues, lifestyles are realized primarily by choice within the social context provided by chance. Lifestyles typically consist of choices and practices influenced by an individual’s life chances or probabilities for realizing them.
Just as early modernization dissolved the structure of feudal society and created the industrial age, modernization today is changing industrial society and modernity is being established. One way is the effect of modernity on the individual, especially in relation to the metropolis and the mature money economy. Yet the dialectical opposite of the submersion of individuality under the weight of modern living is the greater intensity, stimulation, and diversity of urban life that enhance the opportunity for individualization. Although the metropolis, science, and especially the money economy foster the dominance of abstract, analytical, calculative, and rational modes of thought that promote impersonal forms of interpersonal relations, they also promote a sense of individuality. Lifestyles are one way in which individuals seek to define their identity in relation to mass population. A goal of individuals is to determine their self-identity as a fixed and unambiguous point of reference. It is up to individuals to produce their own identity, and lifestyles are a strategy for accomplishing this.
Weber’s insight concerning the interplay of choice and chance remains the central feature of the lifestyle concept. Howe
ver, in the rapidly changing late or postmodern situations, lifestyles not only provide self-identity, but they also promote a sense of stability and belonging for an individual by providing an anchor in a particular social constellation of style and activity. He believed that choice is the major factor in the operationalization of a lifestyle, but the actualization of choices is influenced by life chances. Life chances are not a matter of pure chance. Instead, they are the chances people have in life because of their social situation. Chance is socially determined, and social structure is an arrangement of chances. Lifestyles are, therefore, not random behaviors unrelated to structure but are typically deliberate choices influenced by life chances. Choices and constraints work off each other to determine a distinctive lifestyle for each individual or group. People have needs, goals, identities, and desires that they match against their chances and probabilities of acquiring. They then select a lifestyle based on their assessments and the reality of their circumstances. Unrealistic choices are not likely to be achieved or maintained, whereas realistic choices are based on what is structurally possible and are more likely to be operationalized, made routine, and can be changed when circumstances permit.
Individuals have a range of freedom but not complete freedom in choosing a lifestyle. That is to say, people are not entirely free to determine their lifestyle, but they have the freedom to choose within the social constraints that apply to their situation in life. Lifestyle constraints, in a Weberian context, are primarily socioeconomic in origin; therefore, they can account for the interplay of individual choice and structural constraints in operationalizing a lifestyle. Those who have the desire and the means may choose, while those lacking in some way cannot choose so easily and may find their lifestyle determined more by external circumstances.
Weber’s overall contribution to the understanding of contemporary lifestyles is that lifestyles are associated with status groups and are principally a collective, rather than an individual phenomenon; represent patterns of consumption not production; and are formed by the dialectical interplay between life choices and life chances, with choice playing the greater role.