Information Society Theories

he technologic development in XX century – from large scale use of telegraph, telephone, electromechanical processing of data and etc. to microelectronics and computer networks is connected with the big business growth and with the necessities for centralized control over manufacture and marketing in expanding national markets. The big companies orientate their investments in new technologies, because they understood that in base of successful business is conveying of messages and processing of information.

In the middle of XX century sociologists and economists started to raise the question how will the new epoch will look like, following agrarian and industrial epochs. In the conception of ″a postindustrial society″ three stages of community progress are treated-up to industrial, industrial and post industrial. The authors of this concept – the American sociologists Daniel Bell, Alvin Toffler and Zbignev Bzchezhynsky prognosticated the transition from industrial to post-industrial society with displacement of ″blue collars″ class/ workers/ from the ″white collars″ / information professionals/ who will constitute the main part of the working force in an advanced market economy. This theory examines the information as a factor, which will narrow the capital and working force in manufacture industry. The transition to postindustrial society is characterized with transit from a commodity producing economy to an economy with service superiority and social structure change, where professional one replaces the class division. Daniel Bell’s futuristic concept /1965/ foresees de-ideologization and transformation of capitalism into a new social system under the influence of scientific-technical revolution, where microprocessor as an intellectual technology will be driving force.

After the first two waves ″brought″ the agriculture and mass industrial society, A. Toffler points as a ″third wave″ the change of social and technologic reality, leading the humankind to the epoch of technologic creation of an individual. ″The third wave″ according to Toffler, corresponding to the post-industrial society, will be characterized with the individuality and pure human technology and the contradiction between labour and capital, typical of the industrial epoch, will be replaced with a conflict between knowledge and incompetence. The new class called by Toffler ″cognitariat″ will be based on knowledge and will control the means of information production, cognition and mental tools. ″The third wave″ will not only quicken the information streams, it will transform information structure, will change the kinds of energy and geopolitical balance in world, will influence our everyday activities, will restructure the economy and whole civilization. Many researchers among who are the American economist John Keneth Gulbright, the American futurist German Kann, the English sociologist Keneth Bowlding, elaborate the post-industrial community concept.

A number of similar theories for the future society appeared, it is designated in different ways – ″a service economy″, ″a cognition society″, ″an information economy″. The followers of these ideas M. Port, W. Lizard and Dr. Edwen Parcker develop the thesis for social orientated economy, developing in a society where creation, distribution and using of information in economy, education and business are strongly affected by computers.

Variety of the New Social Wave theory is J. Pelton’s project for ″global electronic civilization, representing integration between TV, computers and energetic called ″telecomputerenergetics″. The main idea is that democracy’s development is connected with information technology distribution and telecommunicates cable networks providing two-way connection between citizens and government. Similar theories support F. Williams for ″communicative revolution″ and E. Masuda for society, in which classes are substituted with socially unidentified information communities with differentiated ″info-spheres″, ″techno-spheres″ and etc. created as a result of a microelectronic revolution. The fundamentals of all these theories called in different ways the new social transformations – ″third wave″, ″service economy society″, ″cognitive society″, ″postindustrial society″, ″communicative revolution″ and etc., stays the understanding that driving force in social development will be the information and communication technologies. The European commission adopts the concept ″information society″ as in this way imparted a special attention of the social role of information processes. The information society covers building and developing of information infrastructures, which strongly influence not only over states economies but also more over and mostly over people who are consumers and creators of information