Информационното общество: quot capita, tot sensus, или за разума и свободата на волята
The Information Society: quot capita, tot sensus, or About Reason and the Freedom of the Will.

Summary/Abstract: The article overviews five major branches of the theories of the Information society. The first one is called „pro-American“ and its partisans tend to claim that the USA and their historical and social development are to be taken as exemplum by anyone who would like to reach the same level of life standard and human organization. The second group is described as „neo-marxist“ and its representatives stand that the information society as it may be seen nowadays consists of two major parts. The first and the smaller one possesses the control over the information and the mechanisms to create, transmit, manipulate, and deliberately pervert it. The second, much larger part, is a mute and speechless society, forever bound to the spell of the code which is written and implied by the symbol-creators and the information owners. The third branch is a „one man group“, namely Manuel Castels, the author of a vast and profound study called „The Information Age“ which deals with all aspects of the Information society: people, institutions, culture, time, space, etc. The fourth party is named „technographs“ and has two sub-parties: the technographs-bureaucrats and the technographs-scholars. The first sub-party insists on the implementation of some inner theories and schemes concerning the economic, institutional and sometimes even cultural development of a technograph’s own country. The second sub-party is interested in technical details and measurement analysis of already existing or of coming-to-be information society(societies). The fifth and the last group is called (ironically?) „other theories about the information society“ and it represents some partly in the main stream, partly „around“ the main stream theories of the future/present society and the meaning of the adjective „information“. The article aims at presenting not only competing and rival, but also coexisting or offspring theories about the information society, its adepts and its enemies, and the version of both sides of the future development of the human world and societies. The main conclusions are that there is no one single reality which could be univocally named „Information society“ and that this is the reason why it is so important to be able to precisely articulate the various groups of theories in order to delineate there main ideas and subject matters. The author’s overall conclusion may be summarized in the saying that it seems that all dreams of mankind about a happy and sound society brought us out of the frying pan into the fire.

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