expertise, information technology – the collection, storage, retrieval,
analysis, presentation and communication of information using the
microchip – is increasingly central to such operations. Virtually every
kind of scientist and professional worker now has computing facilities
on their desk. Information technology through the use of automated
machinery and electronic networks can also be seen as rapidly
replacing the need for the concentration of large numbers of factory
production workers in urban centres (thus undermining working-
class strength).
Already in the most technologically advanced economies (e.g. the
USA) white-collar occupations (roughly equal to ‘knowledge
workers’) outnumber traditional ‘blue-collar’ workers, whilst the
information sector of Western economies appears to be the major
growth sector. Some economists have gone so far as to suggest that
information is a fourth major factor of production alongside the
traditional trio of land, labour and capital.
Information technology can be seen to be at the core of social and
economic developments in the twenty-first century because it is
already transforming business, society and government. It is a per-
vasive technology because computers are general-purpose machines
that can be used to carry out any operation that can be reduced to a
series of logical steps (an ‘algorithm’). These include navigating an
airliner, building a car, diagnosing diseases and reading human
handwriting. Computers are already doing all of these tasks. Infor-
mation technology can also be predicted fairly confidently to be likely
to be increasingly applied in this century given its historical tendency
to reduce in price and increase in memory power and speed at ever-
faster rates.
But does this mean that a post-industrial society and an infor-
mation economy are likely to bring forth an ‘information polity’ – a
society in which power rests with the group who control knowledge
and its technology? This seems a much more debatable proposition
than the idea that scientific ideas and information technology will be
central to the development of society. If ‘those who control’ is
interpreted to mean scientists, professionals and technologists and
that these are to become the nucleus of a new dominant class, this
seems a doubtful proposition for which there is, as yet, little evidence.
There is no sign of such groups developing what Marx would term
‘class consciousness’, or, as we have earlier described it, a sense of
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