Chapter6

=The Long History of the Information Revolution= By Kevin Robins and Frank Webster


 * Main argument is that the Information Revolution is misunderstood.
 * The Information Revolution can be defined as “a united host of industrialists, politicians, and academics engaged in making sure that we know that recent developments in information and communications technologies (ICTs) are laying the foundation for a new era of wealth and abundance.”
 * Three assumptions made about the Information Revolution:
 * It is assumed that the shift has brought about by recent technological innovations.
 * It is assumed that this technological revolution marks the opening of a new era.
 * It is assumed that the Information Revolution and the idea of an information society are new ideas.
 * The purpose of this chapter is to challenge these assumptions

Planning and Control

 * Planning/administration and power/control go hand in hand, but rely heavily on information gathering and management.
 * Societies have always had a central government or leader which had at least some power to control its society. In order to maintain control, there must be surveillance, which is information gathering. This information is then used for administration and planning purposes.
 * Thus, information has been important long before information technologies.

Taylorism and Fordism

 * It is argued that the Information Revolution started at the beginning of the 20th century, the era of Taylorism and Fordism
 * In this era, factory production became much more organized and systematic to maximize efficiency.
 * Labour was divided into small simple tasks. Each task was performed to work toward the final product.
 * This system was all planned, controlled, and monitored by the administration
 * Therefore, surveillance and information management was important.
 * Information gathering and management were both performed without information technologies
 * Thus, it is argued that this era was the true beginning of the Information Revolution. Recent technological innovations are simply extensions of the processes that were started at the beginning of the century.

**The State and Politics**

 * The state (and nation-state) has always been in the business of surveillance and information gathering.
 * Thus, information and communications have always been important to the state
 * It is needed to maintain the complex social structure
 * It is needed for policing and surveillance of external threats (possible enemies)
 * It is central to the democratic process of political debate
 * It is argued that this is an important role in the Information Revolution because planning and control depended on the use of information resources.

Conclusion

 * Developments in communications technologies have been closely associated with social management and control.
 * The Information Revolution is not simply a matter of technological progress or of a new technological revolution.
 * It is early in the twentieth century, when surveillance and control played an important role in factory production, that the Information Revolution was “unleashed”