The Making of the Information Society

Abstract

Unlike the decisive occupations which facilitated the unambiguous naming of the agricultural and industrial societies, the present one which is tagged with an array of groupings—Post-Industrial, Service, Knowledge, Post-modern, Wired/Networked, Artificial, so on and so forth—can hardly ever be viewed from the perspective of a single occupation. With technology in the forefront working as the driver of information and knowledge, it supports and causes the rampant changes in the provinces of economy, occupation, spatial relations, and culture. And, together they signify the arrival of the ‘Information Society'. The obvious shift of a considerable population from the landed labour to industrial labour to knowledge workers marks the transitional phase of the society from agriculture to manufacturing to knowledge society. Hence, this chapter proposes that the dominant phase of a society is not to be visualised as an independent system that is divorced from the other two, but to be understood as an extension of its past.