BAPRM 42691

LAIZER EDWIN N

INFORMATIONALISM: THE TECHNOLOGICAL PARADIGM OF THE NETWORK

SOCIETY. 

Technology, understood as material culture, is a fundamental dimension of social structure and social change (Fischer, 1992: 1-32).  Technology is usually defined as the use of scientific knowledge to set procedures for performance in a reproducible manner. It evolves in interaction with the other dimensions of society, but it has its own dynamics, linked to the conditions of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and application and diffusion in society at large. Technological systems evolve incrementally, but this evolution is punctuated by major discontinuities, as Stephen J. Gould convincingly argued for the history of life (Gould, 1980).

These discontinuities are marked by technological revolutions that usher in a new technological paradigm. The notion of paradigm was proposed by Thomas Kuhn (1962) to explain the transformation of knowledge by scientific revolutions, and imported into the social and economic formations of technology by Christopher Freeman (1988) and Carlota Perez (1983). A paradigm is a conceptual pattern that sets the standards for performance. It integrates discoveries into a coherent system of relationships characterized by its synergy, that is by the added value of the system Vis a Vis its individual components.

A technological paradigm organizes a series of technological discoveries around a nucleus, and a system of relationships that enhance the performance of each specific technology.  Informationalism is the technological paradigm that constitutes the material basis of early 21st century societies. Over the last quarter of the 20th century of the Common Era it replaced and subsumed industrialism as the dominant technological paradigm. Industrialism, associated with the Industrial Revolution, is a paradigm characterized by the systemic organization of technologies based on the capacity to generate and distribute energy by human-made machines without depending on the natural environment - albeit they use natural resources as an input for the generation of energy. Because energy is a primary resource for all activities, by transforming energy generation, and the ability to distribute energy to any location and to portable applications, humankind became able to increase its power over nature, taking charge of the conditions of its own existence (not necessarily a good thing, as the historical record of 20th century barbarian acts shows).  

Around this energy nucleus of the industrial revolution, clustered and converged technologies in various fields, from chemical engineering and metallurgy to transportation, telecommunications, and ultimately life sciences and their applications.   A similar structuration of scientific knowledge and technological innovation is taking place under the new paradigm of informationalism. To be sure, industrialism does not disappear. It is subsumed by industrialism. Informationalism presupposes industrialism, as energy, and its associated technologies, are still a fundamental component of all processes.   Informationalism is a technological paradigm based on the augmentation of the human capacity of information processing and communication made possible by the revolutions in microelectronics, software, and genetic engineering.

Computers and digital communications are the most direct expressions of this revolution.  Indeed, microelectronics, software, computation, telecommunications, and digital communications at large, are all components of one same and integrated system. Thus, in strict terms, the paradigm should be called “electronic informational communicationalism”. Reasons of clarity and economy advice however, to keep the concept of informationalism, as it is already widely employed, and resonates in close parallel to industrialism. Because information and communication are the most fundamental dimensions of human activity and organization, a revolutionary change in the material conditions of their performance affects the entire realm of human activity.   However, what is specific to this new system of information and communication technologies that sets them apart from the historical experience? I propose that what specifies this paradigm in relationship to previous historical developments of information and communication technologies (such as printing, the telegraph or the non-digital telephone

) are, in essence, three major, distinctive features of the technologies that are at the heart of the system  

  1) Their self-expanding processing and communicating capacity in terms of volume, complexity, and speed.

2) Their recombining ability on the basis of digitization and recurrent communication

3) Their distributing flexibility through interactive, digitized networking. 

Let me elaborate on these features. I will do it separately for the two fundamental, and originally distinct fields, digital electronics, and genetic engineering, before considering their interaction.  The digital electronics technologies allow for a historically unprecedented increase in the capacity to process information, not only in the volume of information, but in the complexity of the operations involved, and in the speed of processing, including the speed of communication. However, how much is “much more” compared with previous information processing technologies?