The Digital Counter-culture - Digital Culture - page 97

in the service sectors. The result of this is a society in which infor-
mation and knowledge would be the dominant focus of production,
the progress towards which Bell saw in evolutionary terms. At the
same time Bell foresaw an increase in the number of people involved
in working with 'theoretical knowledge', as opposed to the kinds of
empirical investigations more typical of an industrialized society.
With hindsight Bell's ideas have been shown to be inadequate
to the realities of contemporary information society, and he himself
has repudiated some of his earlier claims. In particular his assump-
tion of a technological determinism, however nuanced, has been
the cause of criticism. Nevertheless the idea of the post-industrial
society is still widely invoked as a kind of master explanation for
present social and cultural realities. Such invocations are, as Frank
Webster points out, often heavily stamped with the imprimatur
of Bell's name and his rank as a Harvard professor. 3 But the diffu-
sion of the post-industrial society as a concept probably owed
more to the apocalyptic and populist writings of Alvin Toffler, who
first made his name in with his topic Future Shock, 4 which

proclaimed the need to understand the future as much as the past
and predicted that culture would be increasingly mediated by tech-
nology. A decade later he wrote The Third Wave , 5 which celebrated
the on-coming Knowledge Age in which computers and communi-
cations technology would play crucial roles. Toffler advanced a
number of strategies for avoiding 'future shock' and preparing the
way for the imminent radical social and cultural changes, including
'anticipatory democracy' and 'flexible planning'.
Between the late

1970

s the technological means
to realize the post-industrial information society were developed,
firstly with the simultaneous appearance of the minicomputer and
of networked computing, then with the development of the personal
computer. The last, in particular, became the technology that, simul-
taneously, enabled the development of a paradigm of computing
congenial to a new generation of users with new needs and cultural

1960 s and mid ' 70