From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 32

begins a new era - the age of the de-massified media. A new info-sphere
is emerging alongside the new techno-sphere” (Toffler, 1981 : 165). As
many advocates of the Information Society noticed the time- and space-
scapes of past societies were undergoing radical changes during what
they saw as the emergence of the Information Society. The geographi-
cal space for social processes enlarged to the entire globe and the slow
rhythms and tempo of nature were replaced by real-time, instant-time
or timeless-time processes and interactions.
In his informative and rich overview of Information Society the-
ories, Webster ( 2002 ) concludes that the analyses on the coming of
the Information Society focused not only on indicators of the volume
and direction of technological innovations, of the kind identified ear-
lier. Webster identifies five sets of criteria or indicators (technological,
economic, occupational, spatial, cultural) by which various scholars
have tried to qualify, but also especially to quantify, the change from
an industrial society into an information society. In arguing that these
quantitative changes turned into a qualitative transformation, each of
these sets of indicators have met their own problems of measurement,
as we will see later. Questioning the measurement along these indicators
is more that just a methodological problem; it touches the very essence
of the question whether we indeed have radically and fundamentally
changed from an industrial society to an information society.
So, the radical changes in the structural and material features of
the Information Society come along with the rapid enlargement of
the information sector in the economy. Machlup ( 1962 ), Bell ( 1973 ),
Porat ( 1977 ), Stonier ( 1983 ), Castells ( 1996 /1997), Wilson ( 2004 )
and others have reported on the rapid increase in several economic
indicators when referring to the information sector in the late 1960s
and 1970s. Jobs, gross national product (GNP) percentages and wages
related to the informational sectors of society enlarged quickly in the
1970s. Using advanced and detailed calculation methods, Porat ( 1977 ),
for instance, concluded that by the late 1970s 50 percent or more of the
U.S. workforce was employed in the information economy and almost
half of the U.S. GNP came from the informational sectors . 1 Daniel Bell

1

Porat ( 1977 ) distinguished two informational sectors: the primary sector
consisting of all direct informational organisations, and the secondary sector
involving informational activities in other firms and state organizations (e.g.,
research and development sections of companies). Thirty years later, McPhail
( 2006 ) came to exactly the same figure: 50 percent of U.S. GNP is related to
information-based services.