From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 39

profited from the information revolution, which makes the claim of a
new and better society awkward, according to these critics.
Fourth, according to its critics, the Information Society thesis falls
short in its short-sighted historical perspective and as such neglects
long-term developments. From different perspectives and with various
empirical and theoretical evidence, a number of authors have argued
that the changes emphasized in the Information Society thesis are rather
part of long-term historical developments (and not of sudden revolu-
tionary changes in the third quarter of the twentieth century). Several
economists have interpreted the Information Society developments as
not much more than a further application of Taylorism (cf. Braverman,
1974 ), or part of a much wider and longer-term Control Revolution
(Beniger, 1985). Work under conditions of an Information Society is
as much part of routinisation, fragmentation, deskilling and subject to
'scientific management', as blue-collar work was during the heyday of
industrial society (and following the Industrial Revolution). Comput-
ers have hardly changed fundamentally the organization and control
of economic processes.
Fifth, and last, the idea of the Information Society is an ideology
propagating radical transformation, whereas in fact information tech-
nology only brings fundamental continuity. Existing patterns continue
rather than showing discontinuities: work and leisure are further indus-
trialized, social inequalities do not diminish, political arrangements
and institutions continue and capitalist relations of production are far
from abandoned but, rather, refined. When the importance of informa-
tion, knowledge and information technology increases in society, the
main consequences are not cultivating wisdom and free access. Rather,
with the Information Society knowledge and information become pri-
vatised, commodified, appropriated for marketising and profit. Infor-
mation becomes a mass-marketed product in and of itself, not unlike
what befell all previous new services and technologies. Information
technology has been shaped, developed and used in conformity with
the dominant social and political interests. And although these inter-
ests cannot determine all details of information technology structures,
outcomes and effects, they push for continuity rather than for radi-
cal change. Quite recently, Paehlke ( 2003 ) has repeated this criticism,
in stating that the central axial principle of what he calls electronic
capitalism is capitalist growth, and not the codification of theoretical
knowledge, as Bell claims.