No matter where we turn, whether in the news media, popular culture, or simple conversation, we seem increasingly preoccupied with the notion that computers and communication technology are dramatically transforming society and culture. Advocates typically claim we’re going through a period as significant as the development of agriculture—which transformed us from a nomadic hunting and gathering way of life about ten thousand years ago. Or they claim it’s as significant as the development of industry—which made manufacturing rather than farming central to modern economic and social life beginning about three hundred years ago.
This view argues that computer communication has created an Information Revolution that links people and places around the world in instantaneous communication. The production of information and entertainment has thereby become a central economic and political force. Advocates acknowledge that societies differ significantly in their level of informational development—the revolution is already well entrenched in the richest and only beginning in the poorest. Nevertheless, it’s argued, no society can resist the computer’s powerful impact, particularly when linked to advanced telecommunications and video systems.
In fact, information technology has been posited as central to economic and social development. The computer, telephone, television, radio, and associated devices such as the facsimile, photocopier, printer and video camera have been making the production, distribution and consumption of information and entertainment the defining characteristics of life at the dawn of the millennium.
Myths along the information highway
by Vincent Mosco
Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice
Volume 8, Issue 1, 1996
Special Issue: Media and Social Change