ASSIGNMENT

Assignment



Assignment

Introduction

What then is “information society studies”? As I understand the term, it is the field or specialism (not discipline) devoted to a critical study of the role of information flows, technologies and institutions in and among societies. At its heart is the proposition that a scientific understanding of the interactions between information and society can and should be achieved. Information society studies operates primarily at the “macro” level, the level of society as a totality and its major sectors, such as the information sector of the economy, and examines international and regional dimensions of information flows. This pitching distinguishes it from social informatics, whose main focus is information in organisations, the “meso” and “micro” levels (see Kling, 1999; Lavagnino et al., 1998). Information society studies embraces evaluation as well as description, the normative as well as the empirical. For example, it might describe the expansion of the information work force since 1945, or attempt to measure or model the sociocultural impact of a new information or communication technology such as the Internet. It might then bring ethical or political value judgements to bear on such descriptions, perhaps issuing in an information policy or an information policy critique. Information society studies is problem-oriented, typically scrutinising social problems such as the “digital divide” and freedom of information, and, while interested in historical background, its primary concern is with current and impending issues.

The Information Science Curriculum

All of this implies that the academic framework of information society studies is essentially interdisciplinary, with stakes in sociology, political philosophy, communication science, economics, and perhaps futurology, in addition to information science. Among the recognised classics of information society studies are Machlup's (1962) The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Bell's (1973) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Hayashi's (1969) Johoka Shakai (Informationised Society), and Castells's (1996, 1997, 1998) trilogy The Information Age. Recent research efforts would include Webster's (1995) Theories of the Information Society and Duff's (2000) Information Society Studies, while Feather's (1998) The Information Society and Martin's (1995) The Global Information Society are representative student primers authored by information scientists. That short breakdown of the field will be familiar to most interested parties, although other scholars might call it something else, such as “sociology of information” (Black and Muddiman, 1997).

Now that the parameters of information society studies have been drawn, the task of taking stock of its status in information science education can begin. Perhaps the most obvious indicator to look at first is the official view of the accrediting bodies, and here Caesar has given an unambiguous endorsement. As far back as the early 1960s, the study of “the library in society” became an extra strand in the official Library Association syllabus in the UK, joining the three older strands of bibliography, cataloguing and classification, and administration (Day, 1997, pp. 34-5). Today the Library Association and the Institute of Information Scientists provide joint curriculum guidelines which place not just the library in society, but information in society at the heart of information science ...