From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 31

2. The Information Society thesis
Several revolutionary developments in the late 1940s and early 1950s
formed the foundation for the later claim that information and infor-
mation technology had become the central resources and production
forces, and the main ideology, structuring modern society. The birth
of the computer, accomplished during World War II and in the direct
after-war years in close relation with military requirements, stood cen-
tral (Noble, 1986 ). As is the case for many scientific developments, such
as those around nuclear energy and chemicals, military needs and mili-
tary funding speeded up research and development in electrical circuits
and computer technology (Saxby, 1990 ; see on the - modest - influence
of the military on the development of Internet: McPhail, 2006 : 291ff).
Although “origins do not determine destinations” (Kumar, 1995 : 7),
the origins do teach us a vast amount about technological trajectories,
motivations and major social forces shaping directions. And, as we will
come to see later, these learning moments have been used especially by
the critics of the Information Society.
As will become clear in this section, it is almost impossible to give
one leading definition of the Information Society, as different authors
emphasise different aspects and developments of what they see or inter-
pret as key to the idea of Information Society. But, generally, it is the
computer that stands symbol for and is put central in the develop-
ment of the Information Society idea: “Computer technology is to the
information age what mechanization was to the industrial revolution”
(Naisbitt, 1984 : 22). The computer transformed many operations of
industrial society, but it has been especially the marriage of the com-
puter with telecommunications that brought the Information Society
into being, as an ideology and a material reality. It is from then onwards
that not only scientists but also popular authors such as Toffler ( 1970 ,
1981 ) and Naisbitt ( 1984 ) started to include information technology in
their analyses of a changing world order, of a third industrial revolution
(Bell, 1987 : 11). The combination of television, computers, telephone,
microelectronics, satellites and fibre optic cable brought new flows
and dynamics in information processing, making available all forms
of information over ever-larger geographical stretches in decreasing
amounts of time. But this was as much a quantitative change in infor-
mation flows, as a qualitative transformation: “The Third Wave thus