The document discusses different characterizations of an information society: 1. Technological - An information society is driven by advances in information and communication technologies that influence business, politics, and personal lives. These technologies facilitate the exchange of information. 2. Economic - Information plays a defining role in the economy, with information industries making up a major proportion of the Gross National Product. 3. Occupational - Most jobs involve information production, analysis, and communication rather than physical labor or products. 4. Spatial - Information networks connect locations and have profound effects on how time and space are organized through real-time global communication. 5. Cultural - An information society is characterized by pervasive symbols and signs like television,

1. Information
Society
(STS Finals)
Group 1
Bianca G. Abarca
Justin Phey Agustin
Charity Anastacio
Jemimah Beltran
Angelou Carreon

2. What is
Information?
A semantic definition of information
highlights three aspects of information:
1. Information is meaningful data (about
something or someone) that may result
from a systematic investigation.
2. Communication and reception are
integral parts of information.
3. Information has effects.
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3. Information Society
A concept that responds to the expansion and ubiquity of
information. The term has been in use since the 1970s, but has
gained in popularity and is now widely used in social and political
policy. Sustained and accelerated growth of media, of education
provision and participation, as well as computer communications
technologies has led many to posit that the attendant information
explosion distinguishes a new epoch.
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4. Information Society
The information society is one in which information is the
defining feature, unlike the industrial society where steam power
and fossil fuels were distinguishing elements.
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5. Five Underlying
Characterizations
of an Information
Society

6. Technological
Advances in information and
communication technologies (ICT) herald the
third wave of technological innovation, the
information revolution. These technologies,
sometimes referred to as general-purpose
technologies, have already had widespread
impact on businesses, politics, and even
personal lives, much beyond what was
expected.
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7. Technological
In personal life, keeping contact with
family and friends, making friends, even
finding matrimonial matches have been
greatly influenced by these innovations. The
exchanges of information in these instances
through an ICT infrastructure, or a more
radical idea of information super highways,
largely facilitated by technology, have been
the basic tenet of an information society.
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8. Technological
Technological advances and
innovations, more often than not, are the
results of conscious decisions of a society
that focuses on achieving certain goals.
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9. Economic The structure of the economy and its
recent changes, in which information has
come to play a defining role, has been
described to constitute the information
economy.
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10. Economic
This suggests that the information
society is one in which the contribution of
information businesses and trades (e.g.
publishing, entertainment, consultancies) has
expanded over time to now outweigh
manufacture and agriculture in terms of
contribution to Gross National Product.
Generally such analysts adopt the term
information economy to describe a situation
in which information industries command the
major proportion of GNP
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11. Occupational
This approach is most closely
associated with Daniel Bell's theory of post-
industrialism. Bell's book The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society (1973) delineates an
information society as one in which most jobs
are informational. Thus occupations such as
researchers, lawyers, counsellors, and
teachers are information intensive, involving
information production, analysis, and
communication, and the outcome is a
changed condition rather than an object.
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12. Occupational
This is in contrast with industrial society jobs
such as machine operation and mining where
the product is a physical good and the labour
is largely manual.
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13. Spatial The stress is on networks along which
information flows. Information networks
have profound effects on the organization of
time and space, as well as on other relations,
allowing real-time communication on a
planetary scale.
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14. Spatial
The spatial conception of the information
society, while it draws on sociology and
economics, has at its core the geographer’s
distinctive stress on space. Here the major
emphasis is on the information networks that
connect locations and, in consequence, have
dramatic effects on the organization of time
and space.
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15. Cultural
This approach is one which stresses the
growth of symbols and signs over recent
decades, an information society being one in
which there is pervasive television,
advertising, a plethora of lifestyles, multiple
ethnicities, many hybridized musical
expressions, the world wide web, and so on. It
is associated closely with Cultural Studies
and interest in post-modernism.
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