T
HE
E
XPROPRIATION
OF
C
OMMUNICATION
: I
NFORMATION
AND
THE
SOCIAL
IN
THE
INFORMATION
SOCIETY
It is a common trope of science fiction that a new future can only be imagined either
on
the basis of a radical discontinuity with the past; whether this figures as a social
revolution, political dictatorship, Armageddon, or a new ice age; or on the basis of
extrapolation from current technological trajectories. As sociologists we face similar
constraints in imagining new futures. In sociologies of the future, there are theories of
the former and theories of the latter. This paper is concerned with a set of theories
which exist at the border of both ‘genres’ for want of a better word. Information
society theses combine futuristic projection on the basis of technological development
and radical
discontinuities in their attempt to understand the ‘present past of the future’. This
paper examines some of the major contributions to theorising the role of technologies
in the creation of new societies. Beginning with a discussion of the early ‘information
society’ thesis, the paper argues that such approaches took an overly techno-centric
focus at the expense of a sufficiently sensitive account of the changing dynamics and
social role of information. The paper then goes on to examine the uptake of theories
which posit changing informational dynamics as the source of social transformation,
arguing that the chief axis of tension in relation to information is not the development
of concensus but the control of resources.
The 1950s and 60s saw the rise of instrumentalist theories which posited the
arrival of a new form of social configured around the production and dissemination of
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Convention