Reading 1.2

I found this reading very interesting and thought-provoking. Webster starts by looking at 5 ways to define 'information society' which lead to 5 different ways to measure whether or not a society is an 'information society' The 1st is technological and looks at the amount of ICT technology in a society. The 2nd is economic which measures the amount of GDP produced by both 'information industries' and "information sectors' within other industries. The 3rd way of defining the 'information society' is occupational which measures the number of jobs where people deal with information rather than material things. The 4th way is spatial which looks at information networks and the 5th is cultural which looks at the impact of information on culture - this, however, is very hard to measure.
The main problem with all these ways of defining an 'information society' is that all information is considered equal - the quantity is measured rather than the quality. What is really important about a piece of information is whether it is meaningful and valuable but this is not easily quantified. We can count the amount of information but that is not sufficient to convince us that society has radically changed.
Webster mentions another possibility for defining an 'information society' - one in which theoretical knowledge is more pre-eminent then formerly. This is hard to quantify but certainly theoretical knowledge is more important now. In the past, many advances were achieved by experimentation rather than application of theory.
I like Webster's reasoning - it does seem silly to count information without paying attention to its value. I'm still not sure that I believe the the 'information society' is something new and fundamentally different from previous societies but I guess that if you are in the middle of a transition to a new type of society it can be difficult to see. Distance gives perspective. Looking back we can see that both the agricultural and industrial revolutions made enormous differences in societies but maybe the people at the time didn't see that.