ABSTRACT
If we are to appreciate different approaches to understanding informational trends and issues nowadays, we need to pay attention to the definitions that are brought into play by participants in the debates. It is especially helpful to examine at the outset what those who refer to an information society mean when they evoke this term. The insistence of those who subscribe to this concept, and their assertion that our time is one marked by its novelty, cries out for analysis, more urgently perhaps than those scenarios which contend that the status quo remains. Hence the primary aim of this chapter is to ask: what do people mean when they refer to an ‘information society’? Later I comment on the different ways in which contributors perceive ‘information’ itself. As we shall see – here, in the very conception of the phenomenon which underlies all discussion – there are distinctions which echo the divide between information society theorists who announce the novelty of the present and informatisation thinkers who recognise the force of the past weighing on today’s developments.
