Információ és az információs társadalom fogalma
Information and the idea of an information society

Summary/Abstract: This paper is the second chapter of the author’s book Theories of the Information Society, published in 1997 by Routledge, London. Here, the author’s main message is that theorists, eager to make sense of changes in information, rush to interpret these changes in terms of different forms of economic production, new forms of social interaction, or innovative processes of production. However, they very often fail to set out clearly in what ways and why information is becoming more central today, so critical indeed that it is ushering in a new type of society. It is possible to distinguish analytically five definitions of an information society, each of which presents criteria for identifying the new. These are technological, economic, occupational, spatial, and cultural. In the second part of the chapter,Webster argues that for any genuine appreciation of what an information society is like, and how different or similar it is to other social systems, we must surely examine the meaning and quality of the information: What sort of information has increased? Who has generated what kind of information, and for what purposes and with what consequences has it been generated?

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