Abstract
What is the nature of information? What is its role in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Civil Society? What is the basis for the widespread current belief that we live in an ‘information society’? The present article will examine these questions through an examination of the historical origins of established ‘scientized’ views of information in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. It describes how postmodern and poststructuralist critique of such positivist approaches led to profound paradigmatic and methodological shifts in the social and information studies fields in recent decades. It consider how the emergence of social constructivist approaches to information research drawing on discourse analysis, practice theory and ethnographic theories and methodologies has led to a have led researchers to a radically different understanding of central concepts such as: the influence of emergent information and communication technologies on contemporary society; the relationship between knowledge and power, the nature of expertise and authoritative information; a re-thinking of community and consensus; a re-interpretation of notions of space and place in information dissemination, sharing and use and a reconsideration of the role of the researcher. The article illustrates this changing research landscape through reference to the work of scholars in the Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney, published in the Centre’s journal.
Highlights
What is the nature of information? What is its role in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Civil Society? What is the basis for the widespread current belief that we live in an ‘information society’? That we live in an information society is a truism so generally accepted as to have become a cliché
Having explored the historical context of the rise of mainstream, modernist approaches to understanding the nature of information and its role in society, the article will go on to examine how the very different social, economic and technological environment of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have given rise to radically different theories and research approaches. It describes how postmodern and poststructuralist critique of prevailing positivist approaches led to profound paradigmatic and methodological shifts in the social and information studies fields in recent decades. It considers how the emergence of social constructivist approaches to information research drawing on discourse analysis, practice theory and ethnographic theories and methodologies has led researchers to a radically different understanding of central concepts such as: the influence of emergent information and communication technologies on contemporary society; the relationship between knowledge and power, the nature of expertise and authoritative information; a re-thinking of community and consensus; a re-interpretation of notions of space and place in information dissemination, sharing and use and a reconsideration of the role of the researcher
Michel Foucault (1980) extended this view to argue that meaning is being constantly negotiated, contested and reaffirmed through discourse, a complex network of relationships between people, texts, ideas, institutions and established social practices. This paradigmatic shift to seeking to understand information as a social construct underpins the work of a range of writers on the information society, including Manuel Castells (1996) and postmodernists Jean-François Lyotard (1984) and Jean Baudrillard (1988). While earlier writers such as Fritz Machlup (1962) and Daniel Bell (1973) sought to find a quantitative measure to demonstrate through rigorously collected data that the developed world has become an information society, Castells, Lyotard and Baudrillard aimed instead to gain a qualitative understanding of how emergent information and communication technologies (ICTs) have transformed the cultural, political and economic landscapes
Summary
What is the nature of information? What is its role in Contemporary Cosmopolitan Civil Society? What is the basis for the widespread current belief that we live in an ‘information society’? That we live in an information society is a truism so generally accepted as to have become a cliché. The present article will explore the question of the nature of information practices in contemporary cosmopolitan civil society in a number of ways.
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