Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2
From Information Society to
Information Age
1. The transformation of modern society
In the 1960s and 1970s, the postindustrial society idea was developed
by a growing number of respected authors, who started to investigate
the discontinuities in modern society. These scholars believed and illus-
trated that modern society was moving from an industrial society to
what they labelled a postindustrial society. According to them, this
transformation meant a radical change of the modern order, compa-
rable in magnitude to the transformation of the agricultural society
into the industrial society. Publications of the famous Harvard sociol-
ogist Daniel Bell (
1973
,
1976
,
1979
), and more popular studies such as
Future Shock
(Alvin Toffler,
1970
) and
The Age of Discontinuity
(Peter
Drucker,
1969
), started a period of intense and stimulating debate on
the future of industrial society and the contours of a new phase of the
modern order, markedly different from the heydays of industrialised
modernity.
According to Kumar (
1995
:2)the debate on the postindustrial soci-
ety ended more or less with the oil crisis in 1973. From then onwards,
the 'limits to growth', the containment of industrial capitalism rather
than the dynamic potential of industrialism, dominated the debate.
With deindustrialisation and economic decline as the main headlines
in the newspapers, visions and agendas of a postindustrial society were
no longer very attractive. But, at the same time, classic industrialism
and industrialisation seemed no longer adequate to characterize West-
ern society as it entered the last quarter of the twentieth century. There
is an additional reason why the concept of a postindustrial society lost
some of its attraction. Notions of
post
generally do not hold very long
in labelling new times. They are basically referring backwards to char-
acteristics that are no longer adequate (postindustrial, postmodern,
postmaterialism and so on), without being clear on what has instead
become the central common denominator of the new time.
29
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