For those looking for an historical overview of “how information has been accumulated, analysed and disseminated in the past”, the fifth edition of John Feather's book provides an excellent resource. Its first part is dedicated to the “historical dimension” and gives a necessarily high‐altitude view, beginning with the origins of writing and finishing with the still‐developing computer‐driven revolution. It is “necessarily high‐altitude” because the scope adopted for the term “information” is so broad as to encompass a lot of what we have done as humans for a lot of the time we have been human. This historical sweep is useful and instructive however, and does serve to illustrate points of continuity as well as points of change – the social repercussions of the spread of printing were at least the equal of our post‐industrial computer revolution, and printing retained its dominance as an information transfer medium for at least 400 years.
Feather next examines the “economic dimension”, using the publishing industry as his “paradigm of information transfer”. This perhaps leads to some uneven coverage of the role of non‐print information transfer, and particularly broadcasting, since the beginning of the twentieth century. The chapter addressing access to information presents some of the economic issues related to libraries and public access well, and is particularly good on the need for new business models for electronic publishing.
The section on the “political dimension” is perhaps the weakest – the problem here is that there is at least another book in this topic alone, and the political issues raised do not have as strong a foundation in the previous historical account, focussed as it is on technological developments. The concept of “information wealth and poverty” maybe requires more exploration than Feather's “homely example” of a farmer wanting to change traditional farming methods.
The role of the information profession is examined in Part 4. This section is probably of most immediate interest to many of those who will read this book, as current or prospective participants in that profession, and the discussion is interesting and well reasoned. Any difficulties here are the difficulties of the profession, not the presentation – definitions of information professionals which provide some historical continuity with the traditional roles of librarian, archivist, editor or publisher but also make sense in the new computer‐centred reality are hard to come by.
As Feather points out in his preface, the need for a fifth edition in only fourteen years, which is created by the pace and scope of change in the areas he describes, reinforces one side of his argument. That things are changing significantly will come as no news to most of us working in the information professions. The real value in The Information Society is in the persuasive case it puts forward for some continuity in the issues faced, and, by extension, the suggestion that some of the historical responses to those issues may retain some validity.
