ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 examined the views of those who concede that we have undergone an information explosion, even that we now inhabit an Information Society, but who are sceptical about what it all amounts to. This bountiful information, they believe, is frequently misleading, is advanced for ulterior motives and can be propagandistic. Such accounts connect information to the health of democracy, the singularly acceptable form of governance today. As we have seen, the core argument is that the informational needs of a democratic society are not being met by the market system and, this being so, states must intervene to make up the shortfall. During the latter part of the twentieth century this way of seeing took up Jürgen Habermas’s conception of the public sphere to justify government involvement and expenditure, arguing that public service principles — at odds with market arrangements — were integral to the formation of a public sphere and thus to democracy itself. I have discussed reasons why this fusion of public service, public sphere and democracy has been less than wholly successful (these have ranged from changing conceptions of democracy that lay emphasis on diversity, to evidence that established elites tended to dominate public service institutions).
