Information society

Since the 1960s the theory of information society has begun to develop (Machlup, 1962, 1984; Machlup and Mansfield, 1983; Porat and Rubin, 1978; Masuda, 1981; Stonier, 1983; Katz, 1988; Sakaiya, 1991). It has been a reaction to the growing role of computers and communication technologies in the life of society. This theory maintained that information and knowledge have become governing factors determining the process of social change and that they have replaced labour in the new social order to denote which such terms as 'information society, ' 'knowledge society, ' 'knowledgeable society, ' 'network society' and so forth have been used. The theory of an information society is sometimes critically assessed as a part of the theory of post-industrial society that concentrates on particular aspects of the new social order such as the role of information technologies and tends to abstract from others aspects of modern society (Inozemtsev, 2000). However, the concept of an information society (and its analogues) remains an influential theoretical model for understanding modern society (Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998; Castells and Himanen, 2002; Webster, 2002, 2003).