ABSTRACT
WHAT role should be accorded to information in society? Theorists of postindustrialism were early and prominent advocates of the view that information constituted a distinctively contemporary salient. The chief criteria of postindustrialism were two. First, the technical options associated with information technology (electronics, miniaturization, digitization, software control) were said to occasion dramatically new social choices (Bell, 1989). Second, knowledge was held to be intrinsically different from other resources; consequently, an economy centered on it was said to signal a radical departure from its predecessors (Bell, 1979).
