Information Society Syllabus

Sociologyindex, Abstracts on Information Society, Bibliography, Information Society Syllabus, Journals, Books on Information Society, Mass Communication & Mass Society, Social Informatics, Sociology of Cyberspace, Sociology Books 2012

Globalization and the Information Society

Information and Society - Syllabus Dr. Sal Restivo

University of Notre Dame - Sociology - 503 The Information Society - Professor Hachen

Manchester Metropolitan University - Sociology of Cyberspace - The Information Society

Objectives
to look at definitions of information
to introduce the arguments for and against the thesis that a radically different Information Society is emerging
to summarise Webster's 5 categories of defining the Information Society
to explore postmodern approaches to the information society
Information Society - Continuity or Radical Change?
The main reference for this week is a book - Theories of the Information Age by Frank Webster, Routledge, 1995 (303.4833/Web). The main emphasis of this book is to question the notion that we are moving into a new Information Society which will radically change the world that we live in and the ways that we think about that world. In doing this Webster looks at the major sociological theories about modern society and, farily simplistically, divides them into two camps - those that agree that we are in or moving towards a totally new type of society shaped by the new information technologies era, and those who disagree with this thesis and stress continuities.

Pro Information Society Thesis:
Post industrialism (Daniel Bell)
Post Modernism (Baudrillard, Mark Poster)
Flexible Specialisation (Piore and Sabel)
Informational mode of development (Castells)
Anti Information Society Thesis:
Neo Marxism (Schiller)
Regulation Theory (Aglietta, Lipietz)
Flexible Accumulation (David Harvey)
Nation State and Violence (Anthony Giddens)
the Public Sphere (Jurgen Habermas)

What is Information ?
The dictionary definition - "Intelligence given, knowledge; intelligence or instruction about something or someone".
Information has semantic content, but information theorists often ignore the meaning part of the definition. For example: "information is whatever can be coded for transmission through a channel that connects a source with a receiver, regardless of semantic content" (Roszak).
This quantitative approach to information needs to be supplemented by looking at meaning to understand the qualitative changes that are occurring and the issues these highlight such as:
information rich v information poor
consumer capitalism and the commodification of information
new international division of labour
information based global finance networks
flexibility of employees, work patterns, production, lifestyles and cultures
Definitions of Information Society
Webster neatly bundles definitions of the information society into five categories - technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural.

Technological
The spectacular growth of technological innovation in the last few decades has been documented in 'gee whizz' fashion by Alvin Toffler ("The Third Wave") amongst other. More recently the increasing convergence between telecommunications and computers has been seen as the powerhouse of economic growth:
"Computer technology is to the information age what mechanisation was to the industrial revolution" (Naisbitt, 1984).
Chris Freeman talks of techno-economic paradigms which stimulate 'long waves' of economic growth every 50 years or so.

The problem with this sort of approach is that there is a vagueness about how much technology there is. How do you measure the rate of diffusion of IT and at what point do you make the transition to an "information society"?. There is also the danger of subscribing to a technological determinism which view technology as the prime social dynamic, i.e.: technology as the Premier League factor whilst social, economic and political factors are very much consigned to the second division. However, technology is part of the social world and does not in itself define it.

Economic
Based on the work of Malchup in the 1960's, this approach tries to gather statistics on the industrial groupings in which information has a central role. Malchup focussed on 5 such groupings:

Education
media and communications
information machines
information services
'other' information activities
From his research on 1958 figures, Malchup concluded that 29% of the US GNP was part of the information economy. Using a similar methodology Porta concluded that this figure had gone up to 34.3% by 1980.
Whilst this statistics approach gives some indication of the growing importance of information based occupations in the economy, there are all sorts of value judgments in the 'data' (e.g.: when does a job involve more thinking than doing?). This approach also fails to differentiate between quantitative and qualitative changes.

Occupational
This approach asserts that the information society has arrived when most people work in 'information work'. According to Porot, the numbers involved in the information workforce in the US double every 18.7 years between 1860 and 1980. Much sociological research has gone into analysing the consequences of the changes from a predominantly blue collar workforce to a 'white collar society'. But this approach is not without its problems:
Involves the arbitrary allocation of workers to categories
categories of 'information work' are often extremely heterogeneous
failure to identify the 'inner circle' of strategically central information occupations - Gouldner's 'new class' of intellectuals and a technical intelligentsia

Spatial
Geographers stress the importance of the spatial features of an information society. John Goddard identifies 4 elements in the transition to an information society:
information becomes a key strategic resource in the global economy
IT and telecommunications provides the information infrastructure - networks and 'information superhighways'
growth of a 'tradable information sector' - new multimedia, on-line databases etc.
'informatisation' of the economy. The integration of national and regional economies
But the shrinking of time and space is nothing new, and why exactly should an increase in the velocity and volume of information create a substantially transformed society?

Cultural
The view of the post modernists (PM) is that the huge increase in information does not mean that we are just presented with information via the media - it now constitutes part of us. We now live in a 'sea of signs', there is "more and more information and less and less meaning" (Baudrillard). The PM view is we now all live in "hyper reality" where we are awash in an artificial world of simulations. It is not just that Disneyland typifies this artificiality, but that everywhere has become artificial, and that we have learned to cope with and even revel in it.
The PM approach is an important one for the study of the information society and I will return to it later. However, the conclusion that Webster reaches is that key difference between commentators is between those who stress the continuities with the past, and those who think 'now' is radically different to any other time. The key question for him, is how does quantitative increases in the amount of information in a society lead to qualitative changes. Webster himself seem to agree with Roszak that it is big ideas that are transforming, not just an increase in the volume of information per se.

Postmodernism
Of all the theories of the Information Society, Post Modernism (PM) is perhaps the most far reaching and radical. 'Modernity' can be seen as the changes in science, industry and ways of thought known as the Enlightenment that brought to an end Feudal and Agricultural society. Modernism summarises the 1880-1920's period incorporating impressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism which stood in opposition to classical culture. PM is primarily about Culture. In itself it is not a decisive break with representational culture, since it shares this approach with Modernism.
Characteristics of Postmodernism
Intellectual Characteristics
Opposition to Enlightenment's search for the rationalities underlying social development or personal behaviour
Hostility to totalising explanations or 'grand narratives' (Lyotard)
Such explanations are seen to be the construct of theorists which reveal there partialities
Suspicious of attempts to identify 'truth'. "Each society has its regime of truth...the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as truth" (Foucault). See for example, Foucault's notion of the Panopticon, here as part of an article, Cyberspace and the Way to the Inverse Panopticon by Thomas Barth
Emphasise the liberating implications of differences of analysis, explanation and interpretation
Social Characteristics
We all inhabit and experience PM culture
Hostility to modernist principles & practices (e.g.: 'authority', planners, politicians, 'good taste')
Democratic impudence - "each to his own taste"
Penchant for parody, pastiche, irony
Abandon search for the authentic or the real
Take pleasure in the experience of being. Fragmentation can be enjoyed, rather than being fussed by search for 'common culture'
Abandon search for the 'essential' self - stress creativity and playfulness
Delight in the superficial
Postmodernism and Information
PM view is that we can only know the world through language ('discourse'). We do not see reality through language, rather language is the reality we see. "Reality does not exist....language is all there is" (Foucault). Language is never innocent (Barthes). The aim is to analyse and deconstruct the 'phrase regime' of any discipline (Lyotard). The conclusion is that we live in a world which is information, not about which we have information. Lyotard argues that knowledge and information have been profoundly changed in two ways:
Utility criteria: knowledge and information are produced only where they can be justified on grounds of efficiency and effectiveness ("performativity")
Knowledge and information is more and more a tradable commodity
Conclusion
PM has had a profound effect on much of recent Western thinking. Whilst it is primarily a critique of culture its attack has spread to all areas of thought. It has questioned the validity of grand theories of the Information Society from both the right (Post Industrial Society) and from the left (Fordism and post Fordism). It is also central to the whole developing area of Cyberculture including its manifestations of cyberpunk literature and cyber-feminism (more of this later).
PM itself is open to critique:

How are we to believe PM's claims if all claims are untrustworthy
Most people would still take it as given that there is a real world beyond one's imaginings
Danger of collapse into total relativism and apolitical hedonism (e.g.: the Gulf War 'never happened' but was just a media simulation)
Some would say it is still worthwhile to uphold the Enlightenment idea of pursuing the search for an alternative and better way of life
PM fits too neatly with consumer capitalism and has an affinity with that section of society (the new 'service class') which is educated, individualistic and mobile

University of Notre Dame - Sociology - 503 The Information Society
Professor Hachen

Seminar Objectives: In this seminar we will explore the social, political, economic, cultural and organizational impacts of the information technology revolution. Among the topics we will examine are: globalization, networked enterprises, transformation of work and employment, mass communication, conceptions of time and space, new social movements, the role of the nation state, and the crisis of democracy. Attention will also be given to assessing the adequacy of existing sociological theories for understanding the changes that are occurring as the result of the information technology revolution.

Seminar Organization: This seminar will involve a great deal of reading and discussing. Over the last few years I have come across a number of books that have struck me as very important in understanding the information technology revolution and its impacts. I have designed this seminar in order to give me the opportunity to reread this material, this time with others. Seminar sessions are intended to be conversations in which, together, we critically examine the issues raised in these books.

Readings: The pivotal work that we will be reading is Manuel Castells’ three volume work The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. The three books in this trilogy are:

The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd Edition. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000 [ISBN: 0631221409]

The Power of Identity. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997 [ISBN: 1557868743]

End of Millennium. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998 [ISBN: 1557868727]

The first half of the semester will be devoted to carefully reading these three books. During the second half we will further explore some of the issues Castells raises by reading and discussing four other books:

Kelly, Kevin. 1994. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley [ISBN: 0201483408]

Lash, Scott and John Urry. 1994. Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. [ISBN: 0803984723]

Rifkin, Jeremy. 2000. The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All Life Is a Paid-for Experience. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam. [ISBN: 1585420182]

Sennett, Richard. 1998. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: W.W. Norton. [ISBN: 039331987]

Course Requirements: Besides reading the books, attending seminar sessions and participating in discussions, seminar participants are required to write one relatively long research paper that is due at the end of the semester. The purpose of this paper is to have you explore in-depth one issue or sub-area having to do with the information society. Participants will choose an area based on their interests, conduct a thorough search for literature on their topics, read as much of the found material as is possible, put together an annotated bibliography of the material, and then write a research paper in which they critically discusses the material and formulate research questions that could be addressed in a subsequent research project.

Seminar Schedule

1/19 The Rise of the Network Society, Prologue and Chapter 1, pp. 1-76

1/26 The Rise of the Network Society, Chapters 2-4, pp. 77-354

2/9 The Rise of the Network Society, Chapter 5-7 and Conclusion, pp. 355-509.

2/16 The Power of Identity, Introduction and Chapters 1-3, pp. 1-133.

2/23 The Power of Identity, Chapters 4-6 and Conclusion, pp. 134-362.

3/2 End of Millennium, Introduction and Chapters 1-3, pp. 1-205.

3/9 End of Millennium, Chapters 4-5 and Conclusion, pp. 206-360

BREAK

3/23 Out of Control, Chapters 1-13, pp. 1-257.

3/30 Out of Control, Chapters 14-24, pp. 258-472.

4/6 Economies of Signs & Space, Chapters 1-7, pp. 1-192.

4/13 Economies of Signs & Space, Chapters 8-12, pp. 193-326.

4/20 The Age of Access

4/27 The Corrosion of Character

INFORMATION AND SOCIETY - SYLLABUS
Dr. Sal Restivo
Hixon/Riggs Professor of Science, Technology and Society
Humanities and Social Sciences- Harvey Mudd College

We are not witnessing the flow of information so much as pure spectacle, or information made sacred, ritually unreadable. The small monitors of the office, home and car become a kind of idolatry here, where crowds might gather in astonishment.
Don DeLillo(2003), Cosmopolis, 80
The general focus in this course will be on “the information society,” but more specifically it will focus on the very idea of information. While information technologies seem to be ready targets for social criticism and critical analysis in terms of ethics and values, information itself has not been so readily accessible to such tools. The course will deal with information and information technologies as social constructions, and develop this with respect to problems and principles in IT design. The theoretical focus will be on a sociocultural theory of information; the substantive focus will be on social robotics and affective computing.

Information and information technologies are social constructions. Debates about what ITs can and cannot do, whether computer ITs can or can ever think, and the assumed limitations imposed on computer ITs because they cannot be conscious or demonstrate inner affect have proceeded with hardly any attention given to what we know anthropologically and sociologically about consciousness, emotions, and thinking in human beings. If, for example, consciousness, emotions, and thinking are phenomena of social networks, socially constructed, and fundamentally relational, various philosophical and (physical) scientific obstacles to human-like AI and robots become moot. This makes current efforts in social robotics (e.g., Brooks and Breazeal) and affective computing (Picard) especially important for sociologists of mind, brain, thinking, emotions and consciousness.

The principles of design and visual communication are principles of information and communication design. The aesthetics of information technology(ies) has become enmeshed in the discourses of multiculturalism, gender, and alterity. There are four all-encompassing principles of design that need to be incorporated into the visual configuration of any IT's graphic user interface (GUI). They are hierarchy, organization, balance and consistency. These are basic design principles. They are traditional. They are historical. They are aesthetic principles for good design. When they are applied to the design of information and information technologies, they can yield socially compelling visual configurations determined by heightened audience response (read, predicted social response(s) to and gratification with information technologies). The design process is changing into a participatory and user-centered design process partly because there has been acknowledgement and unprecedented recognition of the shift in society to more multicultural representations. The visual design of products is being derived collaboratively with users. In order to establish a common vocabulary for discourse between the user and the interface, a pedagogical infrastructure will have to be implemented as a component of the GUI that will teach users the basic design theories and how they can be practically applied to yield meaningful visual configurations (Sal Restivo and Audrey Bennett, IEEE Proceedings, Rome 2000).

Everywhere, the local is contaminated by the global. In the laboratory, people, resources, and symbols flow in and out along network tracks that reach into every corner of the world [circulation]. The social robots laboratories are crucibles within which we are (through our SRE[social robotics engineering] agents) constructing the new world social order’s image of life, it’s new image of knowledge and science based on a networking logic (cf. Castells, 1998III: 345-378), and its new creation myth. The construction of socially intelligent machines is a mode of reproductive technology. The control and distribution of reproductive knowledges and practices are “contested in every society” (Ginsburg and Rapp, 1995: 5). SIRs[socially intelligent robots] research, developments, and applications are already spreading across the information networks of the world, and so globalizing the contestations over modes of reproduction. This SIR information flow thus becomes an important vector for moving science and technology around the world in a multilinear, multicultural dance of dialectical firework[complex circulation]s. The new narrative, the creation myth for the new world order, begins: “In the beginning was INFORMATION…” Sal Restivo, Collegium Helveticum of the ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, 2002.

This course will cover information and information technologies as social constructions, information and design, the global and local circulation of information and information technologies, and ethical and value issues in the information society.

REQUIRED TEXTS.
Carl J. Couch, Information Technologies and Social Order (Aldine de Gruyter, 1996).
Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society (Routledge, 1995).
Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information, 2nd ed. (California, 1994).

James Beniger, The Control Revolution (Harvard, 1998).
M. Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Blackwell: 1996).
K. Ducatel, J. Webster, & W. Herrmann (eds.), The Information Society in Europe (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
Paul Levinson, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Routledge, 1997) Scott Lash, Critique of Information (Sage, 2002).
Brian Martin, Information Liberation (Freedom Press, 1998).
Christopher May, The Information Society: A Skeptical View (Polity, 2002)
R.W. McChesney, E.M. Wood, & J.B. Foster (eds.), Capitalism and the Information Age (Monthly Review Press, 1998)
J. Rudinow & A. Graybosch, Ethics and Values in the Information Age (Wadsworth, 2002).
Cristine Borgman, From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World (MIT, 2000).
Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko (eds.), The Political Economy of Information (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
James W. Corada (eds.), Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the :Present (Oxford University Press, 2000).
Oscar Gandy, The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Westview Press, 1993).
Joel Rudinow and Anthony Graybosch, Ethics and Values in the Information Age (Wadsworth, 2002).
Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Blackwell, 2002).

GLOBALIZATION AND THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
Information, Communication and Development
Draft Seminar Syllabus – Version 1.0
Copyright © 1999 – 2006 Derrick L. Cogburn (dcogburn@hotmail.com)
Prof. Derrick L. Cogburn, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Information, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
The seminar is held on Tuesdays in the virtual seminar room: cave.cotelco.net
Seminar Overview
Illustrated by a wide range of empirical indicators, the world is experiencing a fundamental social, political, economic, and cultural transformation. The underlying processes leading to this transformation are sometimes characterized as globalization with the end result being the development of an information or knowledge society. Within such a dynamic global environment, it is important for students interested in the interdisciplinary fields of information, communication, public policy, international development, and more to have exciting opportunities to engage in cutting-edge learning opportunities that prepare them for these new global realities. This global graduate seminar on Globalization and the Information Society: Information, Communication and Development (Globalization Seminar) is designed to provide such a learning opportunity.

Books, E-Books Great Discounts