The information society

Abstract

An information society is one in which labour has been intellectualised; one in which the expression ‘to earn one's daily bread by the sweat of one's brow’ sounds decidedly anachronistic. Employment in the information sector of the economy is growing apace — counterpoising stagnation and decline in the traditional manufacturing industries. Soon, terms such as information worker, knowledge engineer, ideas processor, symbol manipulator will be as common as weaver, cartwright and miller once were. As if to underscore this trend, the US Bureau of Labor recently reclassified the white‐collar work‐force as ‘information workers’. The soi disant information society has come of age. What began life as a sociological construct and then became a feature of futurologists' patois before degenerating into a media cliché, has finally achieved respectability through endorsement by economic and political analysts. How has this come about and what does it portend?

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