Economics and Values in The Information Society
The Information Age Manifesto[1]
Written
March 1981 ---
Preface and comments update,
March 21, 2008
I wrote the Information Age Manifesto in early 1981, just
after finishing a consulting study for a Dutch Association of Publishers on how
that country could best compete in an emerging information age. I was a senior professional at the Arthur D.
Little Inc. consulting firm at the time, in charge of this study. In the course of working on that study and
another similar study for the National Science Foundation focusing on the US,
it became evident to me that emerging economic and social realities of our life
were increasingly out of step with our treasured social structures and
values. Although we were in the midst of
a lifestyle and values upheaval that continues to this day, nobody was clearly
recognizing and saying what was going on.
So, when asked to present a paper at a relatively obscure conference in
In 1982 the
information age was in a much earlier stage of emergence. There was no Internet, no personal
computers. General Motors was the Queen
of the
How the information-new
have since arisen and the industrial-mighty have fallen! But yet, how the values and policies and world
views of the industrial age have persisted until today – most often to our
detriment. Significant chunks of
industrial manufacturing that were once centered in the
Though written
from a 1981 view of a rapidly-changing economic and social scene, I stand today
by the basic hypotheses of this document.
There is a remarkable correspondence between the value frameworks of Industrialism
and those of red-state political conservatives in 2008. And there is a similar correspondence between
emerging value systems of what I call Informationism and those of blue-state
liberals. And these continue to be at
war with each other as the industrial base of the
There is much
more that I could write now that would update and validate what I had to say back
then 27 years ago, little I would want to revise. Perhaps at some point I will do such an
update. At the end of this article I
provide an additional commentary from the 2008 viewpoint based on what has
happened in the
Vince Giuliano
Part I
A. Introduction
The purpose of
this article is to discuss the technological and economic basis of an
Information Society, and to relate this basis to elements of social
"superstructure," that is, to values, ways of behavior, kinds of work
and other important aspects of social organization. To do this, I view technology, economics and
social organization from a historical perspective. This perspective is chosen to make explicit
how most contemporary social developments are arising as a result of the
information-intensive nature of work today, and how this
information-intensivity is in turn being accelerated as a result of adopting
new electronic technologies and associated work patterns. This perspective is an extension of classical
"economic determinism", i.e. it holds that the nature of current
productive activity shapes the nature of personal values, of the economic
system, and of other key aspects of social organization.
I am considering economics here in the
broadest sense - as comprising all relationships and activities through which
value is generated and/or exchanged. Included are the production and exchange of
products and services, tangible and intangible; market activities and ones
outside he marketplace; and activities that result in indirect contribution of
value as well as direct, such as through creating a more healthful environment.
To clarify the points made in this
discussion I often cite examples and data relating to the
Here are some of my basic theses:
1.
Most of the values, institutions, societal mechanisms
and ways of being that we see in rapid change today are undergoing transitions
explicable, and in fact to be expected, as a result of changes in the prevalent
means of production. Most have to do
with transition from agricultural and industrial means of production to means
that involve - and require - intensive use of information and communications.
2.
The information-related means of production have in fact
been evolving for many decades now, as a result of an ever-increasing
pace of adopting new
technologies and associated work and social
patterns.
The typewriter, introduced on a significant scale at the end of the
last century, was followed first by the word processor and now by integrated
office automation systems. The
typewriter was also the key technology leading to women working in offices. The telegraph was followed by the telephone
and telex, and then by modern data networks. These had also led to decentralization and de-synchronization
of work and to instant verbal communications across time and space zones. The mechanical calculator was followed by the
bookkeeping machine and then by the computer; these were in turn followed by
the minicomputer, the microcomputer and home computer and –now – by the
expectation of logic and memory power in toys, games, appliances and other
familiar products. The radio was
followed by TV, and then by Cable TV, and these together with home movies and
other developments were followed by video-cassettes, video-discs and view-data. These have led to continuing changes in our
patterns and expectations of literacy and entertainment, and are leading to
changes in patterns of community, housing and education. Carbon paper was followed by office copiers
which are now being followed by "intelligent" copiers which make
electronic demand-publishing possible. The postal system led to increasing
expectations for service, which are now creating a demand for electronic mail. Mechanical machine tool control systems were
followed by numerically-controlled tools, which are now being followed by
factory robots - and these developments are reducing the amount of and
transforming the nature of factory floor work. Airplanes, automobiles and office buildings
served to increase vastly the possibilities for and the amounts of human
communications, and these too drew upon information technologies, such as
computer reservation systems and production control and inventory management
systems, to make them possible on a large scale.
The point is that the technological
base and associated procedures and activities required to shift advanced
Western societies into being "information societies" are hardly new -
they have been here for some time. What
new is the rapidity with which both the technological base and associated use
patterns are currently changing.
3
Western society has thus already evolved to a stage
where information-handling and communications are the most prevalent areas of
economic activity - in terms of what people actually do This stage is relatively new - in fact less
than twenty years old - and its consequences are largely unrecognized except in
premature ways. Still, those
consequences are far more important in shaping contemporary society than were
the consequences of Industrialism at the time of Marx's writings. The Information Society is not coming - in
terms of the economic realities of our times, it is already here.
4
While the information society is already here in terms
of technologies and economics, it is just coming into being in terms of value
systems and institutional relationships. In many areas we are still getting by with the
conceptual and institutional apparatus of an industrial society now moving into
the final stage of metamorphosis. Broader
recognition of the nature of the new information society and its associated
needs is vital at this time, because the pace of "informationization"
of all work and social activities continues to accelerate. Both policy-makers and citizens alike get
confused when there is an attempt to apply the old meanings to the new context.
5
Many of the Agricultural-Society values, ways of looking
at things and institutions that were once adapted to Industrialism are
mal-adaptive in an information society. Others
of these values and institutions, ones that were downplayed or denied in Industrialism,
are arising with new force again in the transformed context. Example are respect for nature, and for
extended family relationships. And for
many of us, God, Family and Country are still very important, but these may
mean very different things to us than they did to our grandparents.
6
The conceptual and institutional baggage inherent in Industrialism
is also of mixed relevancy in an information society, with some elements, like
the importance of individual responsibility, continuing to become more
important. Many of the most important
social and economic concepts need to be reformulated, however. Many prevalent economic concepts, including
ones used to evaluate and shape the directions of national economies, find
their origins in industrial-era social organization. Many of them are beginning to function badly
or in a misleading manner in our information society.
For example, the industrial-era meanings of capital, investment and
productivity, the ones in main use, suggest that the
I use the term Informationism here to name the social, organizational, human and
other concomitants of the information society, much as Industrialism is used to
describe the general conditions associated with an industrially oriented
society. Our conscious understanding of Informationism
is just emerging.
7. At the heart of the Information Societies' economics
are the nature of work, the
nature of capital, the nature of property, and the nature of production itself.
Most work in the
Investment capital in Informationism
includes personal knowledge and skills, data bases and information collections
- as well as equipment and other traditional forms of capital. Education and training are in fact means for
creating investment capital.
Private property includes information itself, which, unlike other forms
of property can sometimes be given away or sold and still owned, can be
reproduced at marginal cost and which is intangible.
8. Most basically, understanding the information
society requires a shift in understanding of what is meant by production. The concept of "production" as we
know it arose powerfully in Industrialism, as did its complement - consumption.
It primarily had to do with
manufacturing, that is producing, eventually on a mass scale for use of others,
and mainly had to do with tangible entities: automobiles, houses,
refrigerators, tanks and planes, food, guns and butter. It was seen as the main form of economic
activity; the measure of national economic health became the Gross National
Product (GNP). The level of advancement
of a nation was evaluated by the amount of its production of steel, and this
view is still important in
Manufacturing-support, distribution and service activities have come to
be regarded by economists also as contributing to GNP, including areas like
education and government. Very recently,
Yet other major areas of value-production are not included in either GNP or GDP, like volunteer work, contribution to family and child care, and various forms of self-service. A new concept of production is necessary as a prerequisite to understanding the economic basis of the information society. That concept, articulated in this article, holds as productive any and all activities that produce value for self or for others, be those activities in the market system or not. Examples of activities that are productive according to this view and either non-productive or marginally productive according to the view of Industrialism are child-care, education, social services, pollution control, recreation and entertainment, meaningful social participation as an end in itself, and forms of self-service such as cutting one's own firewood.
9. There is a class structure in our information
society: the "Information Rich", individuals who enjoy new forms of
wealth and power as well as means to preserve and transmit such power to heirs,
and the "Information Poor". The
information rich tend to live more comfortably in the newly emerging value
system of Informationism, while the information poor are often confused, caught
in the turbulence of conflict between the old value system of Industrialism and
the new one of Informationism.
10. The
meaning of wealth itself is becoming transformed in Informationism, away from
the strictly materialistic meaning associated with traditional property
concepts. One of the new meanings is
ability to enjoy a high-quality life, with all that entails; another is the
ability to realize one's highest potential.
B. Economic determinism - the perspective
Economic determinism - understanding how a society works through seeing
the means of production as being fundamental in shaping the social order - has
worked in the past. Anthropologists have
documented the nature of pre-historical hunting and fishing societies, and how
they evolved into agricultural societies. Also well-documented are the typical
accompanying changes in the social order and how these changes flow ultimately
from the logic of transition to an agricultural base of production. The natures of agricultural society and early
industrial society have been characterized amply by contemporary cultural
anthropologists as well as by earlier writers like Morgan, Engels,
and Marx. Those writers have also
characterized the details of a typical transition from traditional agricultural
organization (Feudalism) into early
industrial social organization (Industrialism/capitalism). Local and cultural circumstances have varied
tremendously, and so have the paths of cultural evolution. Yet there are clearly recognizable
similarities and patterns - feudal societies have certain common properties
whether in ancient
Also the perspective of economic determinism can assist us today to
help us understand what otherwise can be only narrowly seen as a period of
turbulence, confusion and decline of the established order. I draw on this perspective to help make clear
how many of the inherited aspects of the old agricultural social order, as well
as aspects originating from Industrialism, are being further transmogrified and
overlaid by new values, institutions and norms which are part of an
information-oriented social order.
Thus, social systems develop as has
the brain (and other body features) in the course of evolution, where systems
existing in primitive animals (e.g. the limbic system) still exist in changed
form in higher animals, and are overlaid with the newer systems (e.g. the large
cortex).
Improved information-handling and communications capabilities were essential
for the development of the advanced agricultural societies along the
C. The information workers
There is a name for purposeful economic activity - it is called work
and that is a good place to start. The
major evidence that we have developed into a new information society in the
It is possible to look at information work on the organizational or
institutional level. There exist vast
institutions, businesses and organizations whose major purpose is, or whose
ability to operate is largely dependent on, information handling, including
most government agencies, education, banking and insurance, brokerage,
publishing and broadcasting, advertising, computers, telephony and office
automation. Others, including Oettinger (2), have documented the vast scope and dynamic
nature of these industries. Some representative US information industries are:
·
Computers and related equipment. It represents a $23 billion US industry in
1980 with a sustained compound annual growth rate since 1974 of over 19 per
cent. Value-added per production worker
hour is over $51. Net export surplus is
over $5 billion, and the industry employs over a quarter of a million people.
·
Telephone and telegraph equipment. It represents a $10
billion US industry in 1980 with a sustained annual growth rate of about 10 per
cent. with value-added per production worker hour of over $30. The industry employs over 130,000 people and
runs about a half-billion dollar trade surplus for the
·
Broadcasting, radio, TV and cable TV. It presents a $14 billion industry in the
·
Telephone and telegraph services. It represents a $60 billion US industry in
1980, employing about 1.1 billion people. There are over 182 million telephones covering
virtually all businesses and 97 per cent of the homes. Year-to-year productivity increase per
employee-hour has been averaging about 8 per cent, since 1974.
·
Commercial banking. This industry employs about 1.4 million people
in 1980, with assets of about 1.6 trillion dollars representing (1979) some
14,740 banks with 84,500 branches and offices.
·
Life insurance. This
industry employs approximately 530,000 people in 1980. New life-insurance purchases have been growing
at a compound rate of about 10 per cent. since 1974. Total assets run close to a half-trillion
dollars.
·
Advertising. It
represents about a $55 billion area of expenditures in the
Additional information-intensive industries include those named
earlier, plus real estate sales, savings-and-loan institutions, credit card
organizations, schools, colleges and universities, office-equipment
manufacturers, home-electronics manufacturers, silicon chip producers, and, of
course, software producers. Looked at
from the institutional level, the pattern is high growth, high productivity, a
positive export balance, a source of new employment opportunities.
More important to the present
discussion is the transformed nature of work as it is experienced on the
personal level in the information society. It is possible to get into endless arguments
about what information work consists of or about what an information worker is,
since all purposeful human activity involves incredible amounts of biological
information processing. A mule driver in
Everyone performs physical activities
(eating, walking, holding things), and those activities of course require
internal information control functions. Everyone
also performs activities that have to do with the generation, absorption,
processing and communication of information having to do with others, namely
talking, listening, reading, writing; watching films or TV, generating or using
computer software; I call these "information activities". Work generally consists of a mixture of both
physical and information activities. Almost
every job that can be conceived of, in fact, consists of both physical
manipulation activity and information activity, regardless of industry, and has
so consisted throughout history. The two types of activity are of course
inseparable. The Universe is made of
energy and of information. Purposeful
physical manipulation requires informational control, and information
communication requires some form of physical realization. Doing information activities as part of a job
therefore does not mean that the person doing the job is an information worker.
Work activities which are basically
physical (like carpentry) and those which are basically informational (like
writing) both require the performance of both physical and informational
activities to support them:
Often, work requires a hierarchy of
activities that are alternately physical and informational in their nature. Thus a mail carrier in a chemical factory
office is performing a physical activity (carrying), which supports an
informational activity (message transmission) which ultimately supports a
physical manufacturing activity. I would
therefore like to define an information worker not by the industry that he or
she is working in, but rather by whether that worker is mostly concerned with
direct and substantial handling of information that is either transmitted by
others or for communication to others (i.e., social, not private information). An information worker is one whose main work
activities consist of information activities. Thus, a truck driver for a newspaper is not an
information worker (he handles physical information packages, not the
information itself), but an office worker or receptionist in a steel mill is. A floor supervisor in the steel mill, who
spends most of his time talking to employees and completing production reports,
is also an information worker according to this definition. Thus, information workers have been with us
throughout history.
The evidence of the existence of an
information society lies in what the work forces in the
There have, by
definition, always been information workers. The main points are that there are more and
more information workers, that the information content of all jobs is
increasing, and that the need to communicate information is increasing.
In his impressive Doctoral Thesis, Marc
Porat arrives at a figure of 46 per cent, of the
Since then the rate of migration from
farm and manufacturing occupations into information and human service ones has
accelerated. I estimate that about 60
per cent. of the
We have an information society.
(Comment from
the 2008 viewpoint: These statistics
seem so quaint and superfluous now.
Obviously the trends have gone way beyond those shown. Agriculture is now something like .3% of the
workforce. Everybody knows our
manufacturing jobs have been going away.
Of course we have some other kind of society, so what’s new? Right.
Things weren’t so clear back in ’82.
And even in 2008 it’s not so clear to most people what the basic issues
related to success and prosperity are.)
D. The means of production
What then are the "means of production" in an information
society; how do they differ from those in Agricultural Society or Industrial
Society? This question is tantamount to
inquiring as to the nature of capital in Informationism. On the national level, an important current
question in the
There are three radically different
kinds of capita: today, agricultural, industrial and informational, each having
current meaning grounded on evolution of earlier meaning as a result of
changing circumstances. Thus, each of
these forms of capital have had different significance depending on the stage
of evolution of the society. All three
forms of capital have existed in some less-important precursor form at all
times of history of our civilization - e.g.. there were knowledgeable and
privileged information workers in the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Persian
pre-civilizations i.e. the priests. They,
in fact, were dominant in
Agricultural capital consists of the
major means of production underlying an agricultural or feudalistic society,
mainly consisting of land, secondarily consisting of slaves, animals, and in
some societies serfs or women. Value was
added to these natural capital resources through land clearing, animal
husbandry, use of primitive farm implements, and through building
infrastructure components including villages, roads, irrigation systems,
castles, forts, temples and churches.
Industrial capital consists of the major means of production underlying
an industrial society, including factories and manufacturing facilities,
shipping and transportation resources for goods and materials, machinery and
industrial capital goods in general, mining and mineral extraction resources,
and energy resources. Information
capital - the major means of production in the information age - consists of
information itself, and of information processing and information
communications resources, including:
1. Human resources
·
Knowledge resident in individuals
·
Professional skills;
·
Judgment, wisdom, integrity, decisiveness
·
Problem-solving capabilities
·
Personal communications skills
2. Systematic bodies of information
3. Information technology
·
Printing presses, typesetting equipment, typewriters,
postal service equipment, copying machines, filing cabinets, library
facilities, and other means for paper-based information communications
·
Television and radio broadcasting and receiving
equipment
·
Equipment for making, distributing and viewing films,
tapes, records and videotapes
·
Computers, major, mini and micro, and "intelligent
electronics" in general
·
Office automation equipment
·
Telecommunication facilities
4. Information institutions
·
Publishing and information distribution organizations of
all kinds: newspapers; data base publishers; on-line service companies
·
Airlines; other transportation systems
·
Restaurants and meeting clubs.
·
Broadcasting, TV, moving picture and recording companies
·
Telephone and telecommunications companies
·
Computer network and service companies
·
Government agencies; bureaucracies in general
·
Financial organizations of all kinds; banks; insurance
companies
·
Educational, research, consulting and other
"knowledge" institutions
·
Brokerage, advertising, marketing and public relations
firms; - Courts, law firms, regulatory organizations
·
Trade and professional associations; churches and
volunteer groups; unions
5.
Institutions and facilities which support information transfer
.
The basic nature of information
capital is such that capital resources (the means of production) can lie not
only in the physical domain (land, buildings and animals in Agricutluralism
; factories and machinery in Industrialism),
but also in individuals and in institutional structures. Capital resources can be intangible entities
like software, data bases, and public image. Well-paid executives, scientists and other
professionals possess personal information capital, built up in the course of
their education, training and career development.
In the personal dimension, by
information capital I mean the same thing that contemporary labor economists
call "human capital". This
consists of more than just the facts one knows; it has more to do with one's
abilities to find facts, analyze them, fit them into an existing framework, and
to create new frameworks when needed. It
consists of personal qualities such as management skill, ability to judge
relevancy of information, ability to communicate well in person, ability to
read non-verbal cues of others, openness to forming bonds of trust, honesty and
integrity. In the economy, the value of
one's human capital depends of course on the job one is applying it to. To the extent that the job market is
"perfect", salary and compensation levels measure human capital, but
it is far from perfect. A rough measure
in common use in hiring is of course education, background, training and work
experience; one's record of success. One
could calculate that at an 8 per cent, return-on-investment rate, the human
capital present in an executive or professional, who earns about $80, 000
annual gross income, would be worth about a million dollars. The market value of a publishing, consulting or
other information company has little to do with the value of its tangible
assets: its office buildings and office furniture. The market value is based on earning power
which is typically based on staff resources and "goodwill" in the
market-place. The value of a publishing, consulting or high-technology company
can rapidly decline to zero if the key people decide to leave - as many
organizations that have acquired such companies and have tried to run them by
standards appropriate to industrial manufacturing have learned to their sorrow.
Thus, there are three rather different
types of capital resources (means of production) of importance today, each very
different in the way it works, each interacting with the other two kinds, and
each exercising its own kinds of social influence. Moreover, in the present information society
the meanings of agricultural and information capital have themselves changed
significantly. Ownership of land, once absolute, now is subject to many kinds
of constraints related to environmental preservation and the general public
welfare. Robber Baron capitalism and
the-hell-with-the-public industrial expansionism is giving way to more and more
comprehensive concepts of social responsibility. Our prevalent economic frameworks, those
forming the basis for public policies as well as those forming the basis for
business and personal investments, only partially or dimly acknowledge the
nature of information capital or its significance - and then as an add-on to
industrial-type capital. This can lead
the people in an advanced nation to feeling poor when they are rich, to seeking
economic survival when the issue is wisely using existing wealth and sharing it
with the rest of the world, to investing in dying or unproductive industries,
and to failing to see real opportunities. Perhaps most disquieting, individuals may
sense a deep dissonance between the prevalent value systems and social
frameworks of agreement on the one hand, and their own direct experience on the
other hand.
E. Capital and Labor
In the classical economics of Industrialism,
capital and labor are two very different things, and never the twain shall meet
except in natural conflict, say over the bargaining table. The dichotomy goes back to Marx. Capital was seen as something outside of and
separate from the individual worker, as being vested in land or ownership of
tangible productive assets. Skills and
knowledge were not considered to be capital resources, and labor was largely
regarded to be a more or less homogeneous resource or commodity, not under
control of those who labored in an industrial environment as long as the
capital resources belong to someone else. Laborers did the work and capitalists had the
capital, and the two groups were separate and basically antagonistic to one
another. This view still holds powerful
sway: much of
F. Production
Earlier, I described production as
that which produces value, for the self or for others. This certainly includes
classical agricultural and industrial-type production. The key question is what else does it include,
characteristic of Informationism?
In early Industrialism, production meant growing food, mining minerals
and manufacturing products; in later Industrialism, production has been
interpreted to include also activities related to the physical distribution of
foods and physical goods, activities like shipping, retailing and advertising. From the narrow and traditional view-point of
industrial social organization, activities like government, social services,
education, entertainment, environmental protection, recreation and volunteer
work are regarded to be non-productive to be either in the domain of social
overhead or in the domain of "consumption" which is the opposite of
production. Housing, according to this
industrial-society view, is also a form of consumption once it is built. This view holds that information and
communication are important to facilitate production, but are themselves
basically non-productive in nature. Only
production that flows through the market economy is measured or regarded to be
real and significant.
The view of production that is
appropriate to our information society is both broader and more natural:
productive activities are those that produce or add value, for the self or for
others. Value, in turn, is measured by
contribution to quality of life. In this
view government activities that improve the social climate, police, fire,
recreational and educational activities are productive. Pollution control and environmental health
activities are likewise productive. High-quality
housing contributes directly to the quality of life to those who inhabit it and
is productive. Information services,
such as one that reduces customer waiting time in line at a bank as a simple
example, can be directly productive to their users. More and more, we find examples where new
information and communications technologies are producing and delivering new
forms of value directly to users - in ways that transcend the old industrial
concept of production.
The distinctions being made here are far from academic. A great deal of
current debate and discussion has the form of trying to fit industrial age
concepts to our information age realities. There has been much discussion recently, for
example, about how much "unproductive" capital is tied up in housing.
This view holds that having good
housing, complete with modern appliances, is unproductive - essentially
ignoring the labor-saving and life-quality contributions the housing and the
appliances make to child-care, and to personal and family lives. It simultaneously holds that manufacturing
more housing and making more appliances is productive, putting the emphasis on
what is not instead of on what is.
Part II
Declining the paradigm
Many of the transitions we see today in values, ways of being, social
institutions, etc. are explicable by the changes in the means of production
leading to Informationism. The purpose
of this Second Part of the "Information Age Manifesto" is to develop
this point through examining some selected aspects of economic and social
organization. My intent is to illustrate
further that there are a small number of facts which, taken together, are
sufficient to explain many if not most of the value system and other superstructure
changes being experienced in advanced Western nations. These facts are:
The various aspects of social organization are very different in the
three 'isms'. In the remainder of this paper, I shall discuss only a
representative sample of these aspects, namely those that have most centrally
to do with the economic underpinnings of the information society. (Most of the
others not discussed in this paper are described at length in Alvin Toffler's
book: 'The Third Wave). In discussing
them I talk about what goes on in Agricutluralism, Industrialism
and Informationism as if these systems existed in pure form. In fact they do not, and elements of all three
value systems are operative in the
1. The meaning of personal wealth
Wealth in each
"ism" derives directly from ownership or control of the corresponding
type of capital. I use the word "wealth" here in the broader sense,
to mean "that which is valued, sought and conserved".
·
In Agricutluralism , personal wealth means land, property,
animals, slaves; it means sons to carry on with the land; in later stages it
means gold, money as surrogates for the above.
·
In Industrialism wealth can mean ownership of
businesses, industrial properties and industrial securities as well as
agricultural wealth.
·
In Informationism wealth can mean having an established
capability to earn a good living, be this through a good education,
professional capability or reputation, or through holding a good job. It can mean control of information resources
or communications flow through holding hierarchical position in an
organization. Of course, it can still
mean agricultural or industrial wealth.
On a more profound level, the very meaning of wealth is evolving in our
information society. After basic
survival needs are met and then belonging needs, new needs emerge in a Maslovian type of hierarchy: a need for experiencing
participation in society, a need for fully expressing the self as an
individual, a need for experiencing oneself as contributing to the world. The condition of wealthy evolves from one
meaning "owning money and possessions" into meaning "leads a
rich, full and meaningful life." Being
wealthy used to mean possessing material things: houses, cars, boats, good
clothing etc. It still means having free
and ready access to such things, but it no longer necessarily means owning
them. There is recognition of growing
inconvenience of owning excess items in a crowded affluent society. Perfectly
serviceable household items can be purchased at a very small fraction of their
replacement value at dozens of garage sales in Hometown
In the emerging meaning of wealth (again in the sense of that which is
valued, sought and conserved) whether one has a lot of money is not necessarily
important. Instead, wealth has to do with the overall quality of life, how one
spends one's life, how one experiences one's life, what one does in the world,
how much one contributes to others. Real
wealth is seen as quality of life in process. Of course, money still has a lot to do with
these things, but in a changing way.
In our transitional society, where
there are many vestiges of earlier value systems, many holders of information
wealth are interested in the tangible symbols of wealth of earlier times, such
as having significant savings, owning stock or displaying symbols of wealth
such as large houses, yachts, expensive cars, jewelry. That is, the rich in information wealth -
managers and professionals - utilize their personal human capital (their
training) through the medium of their information work to generate property and
industrial wealth through the medium of the money system.
The so-called "debt economy"
present in the US today is a situation in which large numbers of people enjoy
very rich life styles while, at the same time, many of these same people have
little or even negative net worth using conventional (agricultural or
industrial) measures of economic value. These
are people with cars, vacation homes, boats and who take European vacations,
and who at the same time owe more in mortgage and other debts than they have in
savings or investments.
The situation may seem ridiculous according to classical industrial-era
economics - that so many individuals with essentially no net capital resources
can live so well so consistently for so long a period with such comfort and
security. The explanation is simply that
such individuals have a great deal of human capital which produces ample
earning power. Therefore they can get
along very comfortably with little or negative net agricultural or industrial
capital, as reflected by monetary net worth. As mentioned previously, the money system
cannot directly put a value on an individual's human capital. It does so
indirectly, through a salary or earning level.
2. Means for-the-acquisition of-wealth
In Agricutluralism
the means for acquisition of wealth are
slow: the build-up of farming and property holdings, marriage or favor of
nobility, the use of slavery or dominance of serfs, or conquest and plunder.
In Industrialism the means are
entrepreneurial success: good investments, successful financial speculations,
clever articulation of the market system, exploitation of workers.
In Informationism the means, in
addition to the above-mentioned ones, are usually education followed by
training (i.e. the build-up of personal information capital) obtained in the
course of better and better jobs; the pyramiding of experience. It can also come about through special access
to or control of key information resources or through exercise of bureaucratic
power - which is essentially control of information flow in an organization. Likewise, another means for acquisition of wealth
is through the public exposure attainable through the use of public
communications media: this is the case for rock singers, moving picture stars
and baseball players.
Although all
mechanisms still continue to work, the original agricultural era ones are of
less and less importance. While the
industrial era ones are still important, their importance is slowly declining
as the number of “managers” declines and as professionalism is valued more and
more.
Professionalism is a major means of organizing and channeling personal
capital development in Informationism. Professionalism
defines a new type of "class" structure. Members of a profession
(medical doctors, lawyers, etc.) enjoy a monopoly on the practice of an
activity and can exclude all others. Trade
and professional societies provide hundreds of forms of specialized
accreditation, and often exercise strong influence on the formal educational
system. As they succeed, the situation
can tend to be so limiting that other parallel professions arise, as has been
the case for psychiatry. More and more
small business-people like real estate and insurance agents, beautician and
morticians, are also choosing to view themselves as professionals and are
striving for professional identities. Small
wonder, the information elite enjoy the very high pay of corporate top
managers, the power of top government officials, the mobility and intellectual
freedom of top university people and consultants.
The accumulation of personal or organizational informational capital is
in most cases exempt from capital gains taxation. As a consultant I continue to acquire more and
more knowledge which increases my market value, i,e.
I am accumulating information capital. I
do not have to pay capital gains taxes on that capital. Similarly, a
Universities and schools are the
institutions devoted to the building of information capital in younger
individuals. The old fashioned economics of Agricutluralism
/industralism
views educational institutions as important but peripheral to the productive
mainstream, as producing a service, the real value of which cannot be
established in the market system. In
countries moving into Industrialism, classroom discipline and literacy are
often seen as necessary means for preparing people for the work ethic of a
manufacturing society. Education thus
relates to labor, which is seen as something very different from capital. The economic perspective I am suggesting as
appropriate for Informationism views education as related to capital formation;
a school is a facility for the production of capital resources.
Another kind of facility that enables
an individual to augment his or her capital resource is a library. It is another information capital resource,
also one that feeds the building of personal information capital.
3. Means for the preservation and transmission
of wealth to children
In Agricutluralism , the major means for preservation of wealth are conservation of family property for inheritance to sons, dowries for daughters. Also inherited were titles of nobility which went along with land and which conferred supposedly absolute and everlasting rights over it. Loss of property (agricultural capital) meant ruin. In Industrialism, inheritances, through the media of wills and trusts, can involve securities, portfolios, family businesses. They can also involve giving a son or son-in-law an inside role in managing the business, so he eventually ends up in charge. Ruin means he runs the business down, squanders the wealth, i.e. loss of industrial capital.
In Informationism, the major means are
transmission of middle-class values through good upbringing (a rich family
environment), providing good schooling, providing a college education followed
by graduate school. The child must
demonstrate an existing accumulation of information capital (e.g, through high college admissions testing score just to
get admitted. to a good college; it is not
possible to buy one's way into a good school anymore with just money. Ruin is seen as dropping out of school
prematurely, not seeking better and better jobs, i.e. the failure to acquire
sufficient human capital.
The tax structure has been making the
bequeathing of agricultural or industrial wealth along family lines (in the
form of inherited property or money) less and less possible. Transmission of
information wealth to children - providing them with good upbringing and
education that leads to high earning power - is of very great importance to
parent having a lot to do in the
The money system and earlier forms continue to be used, as means for
converting from one form of capital to another. For example, home ownership is an important
means for building up equity to enable providing for college education for
children. Various insurance policies are
purchased with the same intent. Managers
and professionals are often given stock options, which provide them with
partial ownership of the companies they work in.
4. The role of education
In Agricutluralism , formal education, to the
extent it existed, was reserved for the clergy and for the nobility. Its purpose was to see that existing values
are preserved in the society, particularly values having to do with work,
loyalty and religion that were vital to keep things going as they were. There was little practical content, this being
mainly taught by on-the-job, family and life training, by apprenticeship from
an early age. Theories - religious, mathematical and scientific - were the
properties of the cloistered few, be they in the palace or in the monastery. Participation was more widespread in the great
agricultural "democracies" -
In Industrialism, formal education expanded enormously, serving both to transmit specific skills necessary in an increasingly complex society, and to act as a carrier-wave for the industrial society itself. At first the curriculum was standardized and focused on the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic; later it became more differentiated. Skills that were taught included those of engineering and science; later of marketing, advertising and market research. As part of their carrier wave-function, schools helped children break out of the closed-system pattern of the agricultural family, prepared them for fragmentation between home and work lives. Literacy and punctuality helped break young people out of the verbal and natural time rhythms of the farm. Schools served as reservoirs to hold large numbers of young people on their way into the job market. While large scale schooling was born of Industrialism, the inherent process of it is one of the main driving forces leading forward into Informationism. With the wide-spread acquisition of technical skills and skills for dealing with specific aspects of the society came growth in the amount and importance of personal information capital.
In Informationism, we are experiencing
not only shifts in how education is viewed and experienced, but also its
relationships to economics. The main
business in developing higher education in the 1960s and 1970s in the
In the past few years there has
been a rapid and powerful shift away from parent and scholarship financing of
college costs, and towards loan financing, at least in the
5. The role of work
In Agricutluralism
, work is just part of life: there is little separation between
"work" and "leisure"; there is hardly such a thing as a
vacation, and the attention-requiring needs of animals and, in some cases, the
fields go on even on the Lord's day. Work life and family life flow in and out of
one another. The goals of work are
intrinsic to life, passed on and enforced by Church, State and Family. Rewards are survival, honor, acknowledgement
of higher authorities. Day-to-day work
consists largely of pursuing specific, tangible and repeated activities, holistic
with the life imperatives of animals and crops. Since roles are mostly given by birth there is
nowhere further to go and little competition. "Being better" or "doing
more" may be expressed through religion or knighthood or acts of loyalty
to the local nobility, but not through work which is defined from childhood,
seasonal but unchanging from year to year.
In Industrialism, work becomes a separate and different part of life,
away from family and among strangers. Most industrial work is dull, repetitive with
the human used as extension of a machine. Variations due to seasonality are diminished
or gone. Social interaction on the
assembly line is minimal. The purpose of
work becomes to get money to buy the good and rewarding things of life. The concept is to have more and therefore be
better. The ultimate is to attain wealth and escape work. The idiom is individualism, each person for
himself, competition. Salvation is
becoming rich. The process is striving.
Personal loyalty between worker and owner diminishes, may become negative. Work takes place in a well-defined context,
the factory, where efforts of all workers are mechanically synchronized. Goals are promotion or entrepreneurial
success, i.e. escape from one set of roles into another set, or accumulating
enough money to escape from fixed roles into leisure which comes only with
wealth.
In Informationism the separation of work from the rest of life is
increasingly breaking down. Information
work inherently involves communication, and offices are usually places with
more social interaction than the typical factory floor. Attempts to industrialize offices (such as
with rows and columns of keypunch or word processing operators) tend to fail,
giving way to more personal and informal formats. Important communications
among swelling numbers of managers and professionals take place in conference
rooms, restaurants, bars, hotels, clubs, airplanes and resorts. Business and the highly personal are mixed.
The fixed time and place co-ordinates of work characteristic of Industrialism
are slowly but certainly fading with the expansion of air travel and electronic
communications. The electronic
information machines are becoming connected in global communications network
that do not require synchronism. Human
pacing is taking over again, at least for managers and professionals. There is more and more teleworking.
For the information elite, the tine and
place of work is increasingly at their option, day or night, at the office or
away from it, weekdays or weekends, at a good restaurant or resort hotel:
wherever there is a telephone to talk on or connect a computer terminal to.
With "flextime", job sharing, job re-design and other new working
patterns, increasing choice is also coming to secretarial and clerical
information workers, and eventually to blue collar workers in automated
industrial plants. Life's activities
begin to take on a 24-hour day, 7-day week character. The purpose of work continues to comprise the
survival goals of before (to make money) but, for more and more of the
information rich, goes beyond survival to include personal growth and learning,
and to include contributing to something greater, to making a difference in the
world.
For those tuned to the rhythms of Informationism, the process of
working often becomes a major source of reward in itself. For many employees who are confident that
survival is not at stake for themselves, the doing is more important than the having
resulting from the pay. There is immense
contribution of effort going into voluntary associations where there is no
direct pay. There are some 13,600
national-level professional societies and trade associations in the
Television speeded the transition to
self-service in homes, through the constant marketing of new products that
offer slight labor savings advantages. Thus, over the last twenty years refrigerators
have become larger; their freezer compartments have become larger; they have
become frost-free; automatic ice-makers have been introduced; and they have
become more energy-efficient. The latest
development is that they have finishes that do not show children's
fingerprints. The value of each
improvement is dramatically portrayed to the consuming public via inescapable TV
advertising. Hundreds of different types
of products are thus continuing to increase the productivity of households -
and those productivity gains are not reflected in the GNP or GDP measures used
to evaluate the economy.
A new value orientation to work is emerging, noisily championed by the
"youth generation" of the 1960s and now quietly part of how many
young and not-so-young adults see the world. The shift in emphasis is away from working to
survive, away from separation of work and the rest of one's life, away from
emphasis on having, on having more, and then more yet. The shift is towards working as an expression
of contribution and participation, towards seeing work as an organic part of
one's whole life. It is towards seeking
quality, both quality of experience and quality of goods. Emphasis is on experiencing, on aliveness.
6. Market economics
Agricultural societies come in a variety of shapes and forms, ranging
from the early
Industrialism stresses resource
exploitation, growth, expansion of markets, first to national levels and then
to international ones. Land holdings get
divided, but farming is on a larger scale aided by machines. More and more goods flow through the market system.
Relatively free markets are mediated by
monopolies and cartels. Economies become
unstable. Consumption is viewed as important. Industrial growth is limited by
the availability of natural and energy resources, by limitations of investment
capital and by limitations of labor supply. Money and natural resources are viewed as the
controlling scarcities. Wars are fought over mineral and labor resources and
over control of markets.
In Informationism,
information-handling supports and transforms agricultural and industrial
activities and also develops a major life of its own. The economics of information-handling are
radically different from those of earlier eras (e.g.. information is duplicable
at negligible cost; you can give information away or, better yet, sell it and
still have it; the more effectively you communicate the information you have,
the more you get, etc. On the other hand
knowledge or wisdom, which are about how to handle information, are not easily
duplicable). Information itself becomes
a valuable economic good. Production in Informationism
is not consumptive of land, natural or energy resources, although sizable
amounts of industrial capital may be required to realize a major information
technology (e.g. communication satellites, computer networks, etc.). Markets tend to become international; the
largest publisher of English-language scientific journals is in the
As a result of the above, an
increasingly stronger warp is being applied to traditional economic
relationships, and the economic rules-of-the-game require constant revision. At first, changes are made in the old system
of rules in order to accommodate them to the new informational realities (e. g.
original copyright laws were an attempt to extend property concepts to writings
and performances). In stages, the old
system becomes basically transformed in the face of the new productive
realities (e.g. copyright laws simply cannot stop people from using copying
machines). We are no longer sure why we
fight wars and recently we have been avoiding them.
(Comment,
March 2008: It’s pretty clear we are
more than willing to fight wars continuing a long tradition of the
7. The character of market transactions
In Agricutluralism
the market system was not the major
system in operation for economic exchange of goods, and services; it was only
an auxiliary supporting system. The
major systems in operation were personal service provided because of loyalty or
allegiance (for the king, the duke, the Church or the family, sometimes in the
form of indenture, serfdom or slavery), tribute or taxation. Market transactions for more common items was
characterized by haggling, cheating. Trust
was low. "Caveat emptor" and horse trading are agricultural-era
concepts. For the major market
transactions that did take place, building a special relationship of personal
trust, was the important first business. Barter or exchange of tangible money (e. g.
gold and silver coins) was the mode. Information
that was apart or separate from personal experience was not valued or trusted
per se unless vested with well--defined authority of Church or Nobility.
Shopping in a mid-eastern bazaar can
provide a contemporary recreation of the earlier system. There is no such thing as objective market
value; prices for each sale are arrived at through bargaining processes. The larger the transaction, the more intense
is the interpersonal interaction required for bargaining. A shopkeeper will invite you to tea, engage in
personal conversation, assert that he is your friend before proceeding with the
business of trying to sell an oriental rug. From our cultural perspective, this can be
seen as manipulative; we assume there is such a thing as a "fair"
value for the rug. From the deeper
cultural perspective of the bazaar shopkeeper, however, the real value is what
trusted friends can agree to. Western
businessmen in
In Industrialism the market-system is the main one for economic exchange. Some market transactions are still personal, but most transactions are significantly less so. Information about the property being purchased or sold becomes important, independently of trust. Some objective information (e. g, stock-market prices) begins to emerge as having intrinsic value. Intermediary brokers, (for industrial stock, insurance, real estate, ships, furniture, etc.) begin to be relied on, because they offer a combination of personal trust, relationships and access to information about what is being sold.
In Informationism the nature of market
transactions can shift significantly further away from the personal and
here-and-now as distantly created "objective" information is
increasingly used and trusted. Markets
increasingly deal with rather abstract entities, such as secondary
mortgage-market certificates, shares of mutual funds which hold portfolios of
tax exempt bonds, shares in a real estate limited partnership. Many of the newer forms of
"packaging" securities of various kinds are only possible because of
the availability of computer systems that can keep running track of the complex
relationships involved. Money itself is
increasingly an abstract entity: electronic signals that represent information
in a data base that represents a credit or debit balance that represents a
payment, credit or debit sum of money in a demand deposit account, that
represents paper money that in turn represents units of exchangeable value. Some intermediaries (e.g. stockbrokers) find
themselves less necessary or down-graded in importance because of the existence
of new electronic information networks that define market-places. There is decline of trust of the intermediary
as a deal-maker, or perhaps a decline in the sensed importance of such trust.
Information technology serves to make markets broader, more standard,
more national or international in character. Examples are: the great recent increases in
the
As buying and selling becomes easier and safer in the information
society, the role of the broker or salesperson as an intermediary - who his
traditionally served as both authoritative information source and person in
whom some trust can be placed - can be expected to evolve and, in the overall,
decline. For major transactions (e.g, the purchase of one company by another, the purchase
of industrial real estate, or ships or factories) a new role of fee-consultant
emerges. The role is that of a professional dedicated to serving the interests
of the client, not necessarily that of a deal-maker.
8. The international division of work
The world today consists of societies
in all stages of transition: ones emerging from nomadism
and/or Agricutluralism into
early Industrialism, ones evolving from Industrialism into Informationism, and
developing ones, like
(Comment,
March 2008: In the early document I did
not talk about the dominant mode of social organization that preceded Agricutluralism , namely Tribalism. Tribalism was how
humans organized themselves for millions of years. Agricutluralism is
very recent, having been around for only 3,500 years or so. Before that, most of the millions of years of our
history were spent in tribalism. The
basic economic activities of tribal societies were originally hunting, fishing
and berry-gathering for food; later animal herding beame
predominant. Tribal societies were (and
are)basically nomadic and did not recognize private property. Natural gods were worshipped and there was
little communications between tribes.
The tribe was the entire social system.
Members of other tribes were to betaken as concubines, enslaved or killed.
Tribalism is still alive in isolated parts of the world. More importantly, many cultures have only
recently emerged from tribalism and retain many attitudes, values and ways of
behavior that originate in tribalism. These
are in much evidence in the
The processes of Informationism facilitate the co-ordination and division
of labor across international lines. Multinational corporations and
international trading companies, for example, absolutely depend on the
telephone, the telex and air travel for their current highly efficient forms of
operation. Production scheduling,
inventory control, shipping, ordering and billing, quality control, packaging,
order fulfillment, even shop management - these are all things becoming
realistically possible on an international scale as communications costs
decline and become ever more distance-independent. Except where transportation costs are high,
economics strongly favor the export of industrial-type, repetitive, low-skill,
labor-intensive processes to the developing countries in the
The result is that any repetitive manufacturing process where there is
significant content of unskilled labor is most sensibly exported out of the
advanced information-intensive nations, whether it concern is wigs, garments,
toys, shoes or automotive equipment. The
information era itself has created a need for a substantial amount of such
manufacturing, particularly the aspects of electronic component assembly for
consumer goods that are not yet automated. The division of labor typically keeps the high
value-added steps, the ones involving management or professional skills, in the
advanced countries and exports the repetitive low value-added part. Semiconductor chips produced in
9. Locus and style of leadership
In classical Agricutluralism, leadership is
typically vested in nobility and/or religious leaders who work together in a
tight hierarchical system where there is complete linkage between Church and
State. Decisions are autocratic, with
power flowing from God to King, to Duke, to lesser noblemen, eventually down to
male serf or slave, then down to his women and children. The role of a decision is to interpret or
enforce a religious or moral principle or the will of a higher authority. Typically "courts" of elite
developed, who to some extent shared leadership, usually through a process of
politics and favoritism. Even where
agricultural "democracies" arose, such as in ancient
Industrialism saw the gradual
break-down of the more rigid leadership roles of Agricutluralism
and the gradual expansion of parliamentary forms of governance. Heroic
industrial leaders arose, using the power of capital and incentive: men like
Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller and Henry Ford. Such individuals in early Industrialism often
made important decisions personally. Later,
their children took over the businesses and the transition to professional
management started. Industrialists begin to exercise their own influence on
government, often at cross-purposes with powerful agricultural interests. Elitist coalitions of business leaders,
politicians and land-owning interests formed and usually functioned powerfully
out of the public view. The "power
elite" owned the press and corruption was either taken for granted or
little noticed. The tendency was to try
and address social needs with fixed rules, laws and codes administered by
bureaucracies, and these bureaucracies built up their own power bases. The free market ethic and the bureaucratic
ethic began to be in some conflict. "The less government the better"
was (and still is) the slogan of businessmen, but these same businessmen were
willing to run to government for favorite treatment or subsidy, often feeding
the bureaucratic growth they claimed to abhor.
Unions came into existence in response to excesses of the incentive
system, and developed their own administrative bureaucracies. Both government and union bureaucracies are,
of course, information-handling empires, and thus the needs of Industrialism
again led to the growth of Informationism.
In Informationism, leadership becomes
far more diffuse, tending to move into the hands of specialized professionals:
professional managers, staff planners, legal advisors, consultants, etc. The
effective structure of a large corporation is more often that of a loosely, but
effectively co-ordinated federation of businesses
than a tight hierarchy. Communication requirements are complex, leading to the
creation of extensive support structures. Decision-making in the large
corporation is based on extensive staff studies. Task force and committee
processes draw on multiple parts of the organization and involve consultants,
accountants, economists, engineers, marketing specialists, attorneys,
regulatory experts - in fact those who have personal information capital.
Strategic assessment and market studies, technological forecasts, long-range
plans, management information systems, world-wide communications networks, data
bases - all are part of the informational underpinnings of the large
corporation. A great deal of personal interaction, voice and written
communication, meetings, retreats at resorts, electronic communication and air
travel are involved. The large corporation develops an international identity,
usually with English as the common language and with the national identities of
individual managers fading in importance.
Government, slower to change, tends
recently to favor decentralization of responsibility to state and local levels,
a broader base of participation in decision-making, a tendency for break-up of
the operating elitist coalitions, as they become effectively exposed in the
public media. It is harder and harder to hide corruption. More and more
important decisions get handled in front of courts and regulatory bodies, in
adversary proceedings that are extremely information-intensive. Citizen and
consumer groups get into the act, as do the public media. Billion-dollar
lawsuits arise, ones that can determine the fate of corporations, public
projects or principles of environment. Tens of millions of dollars are often
spent on databases and information retrieval systems, and on carefully-documented
studies by the litigants to support their positions. The information
"haves" participate in a thousand different ways in governing the
society.
10. Objects
of commitments
In Agricutluralism . commitments are to God, the local Duke and
Lords, Country, Family and Land. Fealty and loyalty are assumed, given from
birth. Commitments are not matters to be thought out consciously. Commitments
are to identities that are inherited, to being a serf, a tinker, a member of
the court.
With the rise of Industrialism both
the objects of commitments and the nature of the commitments themselves moved
into transition. They started out as in Agricutluralism
, but ties were increasingly weaker. New
commitments developed, to company, to a type of work or to profession.
Commitments could be to hard work (Protestant Ethic), to getting rich (Horatio
Alger) and for some, to social objectives (the wealthy's
support or the arts, for example). For some, commitments were in the type of
industrial work and accompanying lifestyle "My daddy was a coal miner and
I am a miner too", or "My father was a union organizer in this steel
mill, and I am carrying on his work for the union". In most cases, though,
commitments to roles ceased to be inherited. A farmer's son would go to the
city and work in a factory. The son of a tailor could study to be a doctor.
In Informationism
commitments are increasingly broader, less rigidly shaped by long term role
expectations. For some, the main commitments are to the self, to personal
growth and greater self-expression. For many others, there is a basic
commitment to further the general good of society, not abstractly but directly
through job, lifestyle or volunteer work. Also becoming broader are the avenues
through which those commitments can be expressed. Expression might be through
occupation, hobby, sub-cultural interest, professional groups, temporary mates;
or it might be in the more traditional terms of home, family, Church. The,
increased choice and diversity is made possible through expanded communications
means that make connection with others easy, even at a distance. The
long-distance telephone can enable loved ones to stay in touch. Other important
means include specialized magazines, computer-generated mail and Citizen's Band
radio. Also contributing to choice is TV which portrays alternative life-styles
and illustrates their legitimacy. At the same time, there appear to be
increasing levels of commitment to the greater society and the general good, as
expressed in environmentalism, consumerism, and emphasis on social
responsibility of businesses. The world of electronic information, TV in
particular, serves to connect the individual with the whole society around him,
helps to relate the individual's interests to those of society in general. Objects of commitment in Informationism
tend to be more changeable in the course of one's lifetime. There is increasing
willingness to move through a whole succession of commitments, to both
individuals and to properties, as one moves through the life cycle from youth
to old age. The tendency is for less attachment to property for self-image
purposes, more for immediate pragmatic use value. Emphasis is towards new forms
of ownership which play down old absolute concepts of possession and tend to
stress use-access instead. An example is in the rapid spread of time-shared,
condominium ownership, where an individual can affordably buy "ownership"
of a ski-apartment in 11. The nature of commitments In Agricutluralism
commitments were, for most, few and long
lasting, measurable in lifetimes and multiple generations. They were mainly
derived from a limited set of rigid roles. These roles, in turn, followed
directly from a small set of generating religious and social organizing
principles. There was little option for leading what we now consider to be a
unique personal lifestyle, if one was a father and head of a family with six
children in colonial In Industrialism commitments became
more changeable, but still usually of major duration. Tenure of religious
involvement, jobs, mates and residency in a single home were typically
measurable in decades. Commitments were still seen largely to be shaped by a
limited number of role stereotypes, thus limiting behavioral change; e.g. ,
being a good religious family person meant no divorce and living with the same
mate no matter what the personal feelings might be. The "protestant
ethic" usually required staying in a family-oriented or religion-oriented
role through thick or thin, even when staying in that role entailed personal
unhappiness or suffering. Sufferance, in fact, became a mark of goodness.
Gradually, though, the rigidity of these stereotypes began to break down. In Informationism, the commitments
tend to be ever-more changeable, multiple and overlapping in nature. People
have more and more options, and are increasingly well informed of them. Time
between major changes may be measurable in weeks, months or a few years. There
is more mobility in jobs, changes in households, cohabitation, marriages,
divorces, re-marriages, changes in careers, new hobbies, vacation trips, new
friends. The role stereotypes that hold people in places where they are unhappy
are not gone yet, but they are melting away. The public media expose moral
reality in vivid detail and endless variety, and it becomes difficult for a
society to maintain Victorian dualism - a rigid official moral code along with
a practical situation that fosters prostitution and debauchery. Rigid moral and
legal codes governing personal behavior are becoming more flexible. Victimless
crime is becoming decriminalized. Staying in marriages or jobs that are not
rewarding, just for the sake of role continuation, is seen less and less to
make sense. The shift to Informationism, like all major shifts in social paradigm,
leaves behind many who want to remain with their older value system, or who
think they cannot adapt, or who do not want to adapt. As the value system and other superstructure
elements evolve, many people are angry, confused that things are not as they
once learned they "should" be. Among these are many of the
'Information-Poor', those who do not know how to obtain and utilize the
information necessary for effective participation in our society - and those who
do not even want to try. Even among the better informed, there
are some people who want to go back to the simpler situation of yesterday - one
with less choices. Informationism provides
a wide range of personal choices for those who want - and know how - to take
advantage of these choices. And there
are those who want to respond by reducing choice for everyone. These are mostly lifestyle-conservatives who
want to enforce a more finite and closed value system derivative from Industrialism,
one that has capital punishment and that turns off for once and for all the
personal choices associated with sexual equality and permissiveness,
availability of abortion, availability of pornography, etc. While the thrust of the moral conservatives is
to reduce diversity they consider to be deviant, they themselves contribute to
the diversity. Perhaps nowhere is the clash of value
options more clear today than in 12.
Personal motivation Faith, incentive and egalitarianism
have been around as social organizing principles throughout human history and,
no doubt, before. A tendency can be
observed that there is a progression in the emphasis devoted to these
imperatives in the three social orders under discussion. The major imperative is faith in Agricutluralism; it shifts to incentive in Industrialism,
and then in the direction of a new form of participative egalitarianism in Informationism
. The original hunting and fishing societies had as
their major underlying imperative survival of the tribe. Co-operation and belonging were essential. To
the extent that essential roles had to be interchangeable for survival, there
was often a kind of egalitarianism of participation exercised. With the coming
of Agricutluralism the social order became more
complex and stratified; even more so in Industrialism. In typical agricultural
societies with strong religious belief systems, emphasis was on simple survival
in this world, with salvation and transcendence to come in the next world.
Surrender to the social order was the only choice. Matters in this world could
not be changed, and surrender was the only path to salvation in the next world. The impact of Industrialism was to
fragment the old social organization; members of a family no longer worked
together as they did previously; they were cast into new singular work roles in
factories, mines, etc., and where one worked and where one lived became more
separate. With this fragmentation came
more emphasis on the individual, the notion that a person could make a
difference in this life through incentive. The old and new systems of faith and incentive
sometimes accommodated to each other in ways that now seem strange: as an early
capitalist it was all right to exploit child labor or poor immigrants and at
the same time exhibit faith in God through religion, or faith in the country
through supporting orphanages. Throughout history there were always a very few who felt they could
make a major difference in the world in which they lived - usually they were
among the nobility, the very rich, the politically powerful; also, the utopians
and social reformers. The international
socialist movement rising at the start of this century and the trade union
movement in the 1930s in the With the rise of Informationism, a rather new thing seems to be
happening, the realization of large numbers of people that they are capable,
right now, of making this society better. Because of the new electronic communications,
we are far more familiar with the rest of the world and what is going on in it
than ever was possible before in the past. We are used to seeing space photographs of the
Earth or major parts of it; we are used to seeing movies like "Star
Wars" - it is easy now to think of the Earth as a whole which is part of a
larger whole. As planetary consciousness
develops, there is an increasing willingness on the part of many individuals to
do what they can to take responsibility for developments in the world. This consciousness holds individuals as
potentially capable of making real differences. It holds forth the possibility of a realistic
set of steps that individuals can pursue to end war (that's what Vietnam was
all about), expose and end corruption (that's what the Watergate matter was all
about), adequately house the population (in 1950 some 3E per cent. of the US
population lived in substandard housing; now its down to less than 4 per
cent.), give employment to all who want to work (4 million new jobs created in
the U: in 1978), equalize the rights of women (two out of three entering the
labor force in the US are now women and 43 million women are now earners), and
more and more. There is still war, corruption, unemployment, substandard housing and
abrogation of personal rights. There are still frightening challenges in the
world associated with most serious matters like the proliferation of nuclear
weapons, genocide against tribal peoples, hunger, and destruction of the
natural environment. But the point is
that tens of millions in the Additional comments from a Given what has happened in the
27 years since this was written, I am afraid that the article expressed too
much optimism. I thought that there
would be inevitable and steady social evolution to bring the While we have had great success
in developing our software, electronic, financial services, entertainment,
health care and biotechnology industries, our society has not adequately
adjusted to the realities of the new international information society. Each year our education system ranks lower by
international standards and our comparative level of health by most levels is
dropping equally fast. When I wrote this
article, our country ranked first in the world in terms of the proportion of
the population where adults between 25 and 34 have at least a high school
degree and also for the proportion who are college graduates. By 2005 we had slipped to ranking ninth and
seventh in the world by the same measures.
And we are dropping fast. Education
is critical to generating human capital which is critical in an information
economy, and we are simply not investing in it adequately. The World Health organization ranks our I think part of the answer has
been a major social and political backlash in the ·
Government priorities, laws, regulations, tax
breaks and subsidies favoring big industrial corporation and industrial-era interests. These policies are often anti-science and
anti new-technology. As examples:
Subsidies and tax breaks are provided to big oil companies. Petroleum exploration is favored over
building windmill energy farms and geothermal power plants. New-technology approaches to alternative
energy sources and energy conservation are not supported. Regulations favor power companies and coal
producers and funding for environmental research is cut back. A ban is enacted against government funding
of stem cell research causing the ·
Numerous policies favoring financial and industrial
capital over human capital. Examples are: Tax breaks for the rich coupled
with less-visible taxes on the poor including greatly expanding State Lotteries
and legalized gambling. The At this moment, during the 2008
presidential campaign, it looks like a major shift in the value system of
politics may finally be taking place to allow our society to prosper by
embracing Informationism. At least that
is a hope. Copyright 1982, 2008 by Vincent E. Giuliano, all rights reserved. I have
written a number of other works which touch on themes in this paper from
various viewpoints, both serious treatises and fiction stories. I encourage you to look over the items I have
online by going to my Writings Index Web Page.
[1] Paper
presented at the 14th International TNO Conference: Information
Society: Changes, Chances, Challenges,
[2] The Science of Culture, a Study of Man and
Civilization Leslie A. White, Grove Press,