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One of the first people to develop the concept of the information society was the economist Fritz Machlup. In 1933 Machlup began studying the effect of patents on research. His work culminated in the breakthrough study "The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States" in 1962. This book was widely regarded and was eventually translated into Russian and Japanese. The Japanese have also studied the information society Johoka Shakai (Umesao), which means the highest stage of societal evolution seen in analogy to biological evolution. This concept was discussed already in the 1950s and 1960s. Fritz Machlup (1962) has introduced the concept of the knowledge industry. He has distinguished five sectors of the knowledge sector: education, research and development, mass media, information technologies, information services. Based on this categorization he calculated that in 1959 29% per cent of the GNP in the USA had been produced in knowledge industries.
The major critique of concepts such as information society, knowledge society, network society, postmodern society, postindustrial society, etc. that has mainly been voiced by critical scholars is that they create the impression that we have entered a completely new type of society. “If there is just more information then it is hard to understand why anyone should suggest that we have before us something radically new” (Webster 2002a: 259). There is currently no universally accepted concept of what exactly can be termed information society and what shall rather not so be termed. Most theoreticians agree that we see a transformation which started somewhere between the 1970s and today and is changing the way societies work fundamentally. Information technology is not only internet, and there are discussions how big the influence of specific media or specific modes of production really is. |