Environmental Engineering Reference
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that this started to change. Joseph Huber ( 1982 ) was perhaps one of
the first to fully acknowledge the significance of the information revo-
lution for environmental reforms, as will be further elaborated in the
next chapter .
Assessing and debating the Information Society claims
In the debate and discussions following the Information Society the-
sis, there exists remarkable agreement on the significant impact infor-
mation and information technology have on various aspects of life.
Even the most severe critics of the Information Society thesis join in
noting the massive consequences of the information revolution on,
among others, households and homes (Miles, 1988 ), on lifestyles, on
work and on the capitalist economy (Morris-Suzuki, 1984 ). Informa-
tion technology is generally not seen as just another new technology
but identified as a revolutionary technology, causing radical changes.
But the acceptance of the fundamental contribution of information
technologies and information to modern society does not automati-
cally result in acceptance of the Information Society thesis in its full
breadth: the thesis that a new society has emerged, fundamentally dif-
ferent from the 'old' one. Not surprisingly, criticism against the idea of
an Information Society parallels to a large extent the objections against
the postindustrialism thesis, as both theses are so strongly related to
each other. We can summarize the objections against the Information
Society thesis in five main points.
First, there is significant criticism on the statistical and quantita-
tive approach in claiming the coming of the Information Society. As
noted earlier, much of the Information Society literature qualifies the
changes taking place along various indicators, claiming that massive
quantitative changes (in jobs, GNP composition, technology gener-
ation and penetration, etc.) result in qualitative transformations of
society at large. Roszak ( 1986 ) and Webster ( 2002 : 21-23), among
others, denounce the 'more-quantity-of-information-to-new-quality-
of-society' argument. According to them, Information Society scholars
put together all kinds of different sorts and forms of information (or
information workers, informational GNP, information sectors), dis-
guising the fundamental differences in (sorts, forms, dimensions of)
information and their impacts on the wider society. Without look-
ing into the quality of information, the economic activities related to
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