Information Society Studies

Duff, Alistair S. Information Society Studies London, Routledge, 2000 204p. £55 ISBN 0 415 21551 X

The author is a lecturer in the Department of Print Media, Publishing and Communication at Napier University. Although this betrays its origins as a doctoral thesis, the author is to be congratulated for actually having written a book with a sustained argument and thesis, an all too rare achievement these days. Duff mounts an extended and critical analysis of the various schools of thought on the existence of the information society and seeks primarily to undertake a methodological study, while undertaking a serious review of the claims made for the arrival of the information society. His aim is to determine whether the much-heralded information society has indeed arrived and contends that this can only be agreed if a measurable definition is found. He identifies three arguments by those who have argued that the information society has indeed arrived: that based on views of the development of an information economy; a second Japanese based school on the “informationized society”, which measures communication flows and a third based on the diffusion of IT and the information revolution. This last is the one accepted by the mythical man on the Clapham omnibus.

It is a study which is wide-ranging and eclectic in its use of sources and if notably critical of Machlup’s work on knowledge production, acknowledges his standing in developing thinking on what Duff claims to be a new and emerging discipline. Ultimately he concludes that none of the three strands alone is sufficient and that a synthetic model needs to be developed to replace the dogmatism of the main protagonists. While much impressed by Bell’s work as a synthesiser, even his work has arguably failed.

Duff is a trenchant and uncompromising writer who, for example, complains of Bell’s lack of self-editing and salami slicing in his publishing and of Machlup’s “perfunctory lip-service” to the difficulties inherent in his model. In attempting to assert that a new discipline is being created at the interface of several traditional subject areas, he perhaps indulges in some special pleading, but the book is well-structured, logically argued and stout in defence of its arguments. The book as a whole is what might be described as background reading to many information science courses, but it is as good a read as any sober academic work can be and deserves a wide professional audience for its insights into what lies behind the transformation of libraries currently taking place.