ABSTRACT
Among those thinkers who subscribe to the notion that a new sort of society is emerging, deservedly the best known characterisation of the ‘information society’ is Daniel Bell’s theory of post-industrialism. Indeed, the terms are generally used synonymously: the information age is presented as expressive of postindustrial society (PIS) and post-industrialism is widely regarded as an ‘information society’. It might be added that, though Bell coined the term post-industrialism as long ago as the late 1950s, he took to substituting the words ‘information’ and ‘knowledge’ for the prefix ‘post-industrial’ round about 1980 when a resurgent interest in futurology was swelled by interest in developments in computer and communications technologies.
