The main challenge for readers of this book is to think carefully about change and its effect on their profession. Rather paradoxically, this textbook is promoted as a core text covering the often ill‐defined term “information society” from a range of theoretical, social, political and professional viewpoints. It highlights changing ideas about the term itself by presenting contrasting opinions and research. Its main purpose is to help information practitioners, academics and students engage with these perspectives by including contributions from some 15 leading experts and specialists. Each chapter aims to provide both an introduction to the perspective chosen by its author and more detailed discussion and analysis.
Four broad‐themed parts of the book cover “The information society: fact or fiction?” on theoretical perspectives; impacts and scenarios on daily life; impacts from governmental and policy perspectives; and finally the consequences of the information society for information professionals.
The introduction gives a clear summary of the book’s approach, demonstrating that readers need to be open‐minded and not expect a common thread of argument to be developed throughout. Indeed, some may be put off by the opening emphasis of the main body of the book on theories addressing economic, social and historical “models”. These cover everything from ideas about capitalism and information as a commodity, to social effects such as surveillance and social exclusion. The problem of defining the information society is shown to lie in the huge number of ways individuals relate to others to create society, and the importance of understanding the contexts of change that appear increasingly diverse as our knowledge increases. There is more than one productive way to approach an understanding of change, even allowing for the fact that many fundamental human causes and effects of change that we face now have been around for centuries. The information society can either be viewed as an evolutionary or a revolutionary phenomenon and as a driver or outcome of social development, or both.
Several authors refer to utopian visions of the information society, and in part two, Batt, for example, presents very specific ideas about a “Content society” where social transformation is enabled through improvements in learning and engagement. The user context affects how users respond to any information service, and Town reviews information literacy, arguing that we need, especially in the UK, explicitly to recognise that information literacy development must be encouraged in the whole population, enabling everyone to “seek wisdom”. IT access and skills provision, and dispensing of “welfare” information are not in themselves sufficient to create this literacy. All kinds of existing programmes must embed information literacy education and implementation issues need to be highlighted. Some implications then become clear from Beeson’s chapter on imaginative communities, which explores how electronic communities contrast with real communities and how they may enhance them.
Making sense of complexity is perhaps a most compelling requirement for those needing to interpret and create information policy. Rowlands flies through a brief introduction to recent attempts to develop a framework for considering and developing information policy, suggesting a model based on a system of underlying values rather than one relying on specific laws and regulations. The idea is not explicitly developed by Haines and Dunn in their overview of knowledge management activities and influences in public sector, but good examples from central government and the UK national health service are presented nonetheless. The potential threat to information sharing from placing distributed services nearer to clients is one that many readers will already have identified.
Having shown that the information society affects and needs to involve everyone, the book focuses on how it affects information professionals in particular. Cornish describes how freedom of expression, freedom of access to information and freedom to protect what we create raise ethical, technical, and professional issues that must be carefully balanced, if not resolved, in an information society. These issues, and the weight of cultural change required to shift society significantly towards electronic publishing, as highlighted by Warwick here, will tend to slow progress. The definition of how the roles, activities and skills of information professionals will change to meet society’s needs will provide “a rich and engaging agenda as the twenty‐first century progresses”, concludes Brophy in the final chapter. His discussion of the nature of rules for, and consequences of, actions and their ethical relationship is particularly relevant to this agenda.
As a whole, this work certainly outlines many of the societal challenges information professionals face, both in the UK and elsewhere. It is more about social governance and the changing role of the information professions than about what the future will hold or how to achieve any specific vision. The role of the individual is subservient to social effects here, and some of the discussion suggests readers might take from it an attitude of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, whether considering management practice, new technologies or national policies. One or two of the chapters are written in a style that is more academic or tutorial than others. Davies on data protection, for example, is less discursive than informative. Beeson’s piece on imaginative communities verges on the highly philosophical in places. Most of the chapters, however, are accessible analyses of practical experience from a UK perspective.
This book is a guide to the challenges posed by change and the information society. But as Haines and Dunn remind us, “it is one thing to have a do‐it‐yourself manual and another to make use of it”. Are the information professions sufficiently information literate to cope?
