Post-Industrial Society

Post-Industrial Society - Daniel Bell

The most important thing to note about the selection from Bell's work included in the Reader certainly has to be the fact that it was written over two decades before the two accompanying selections on the same topic that followed. I think that it can indeed be a challenge to contextualize, especially in a course with as modern of a topic as this, so while reading, I had to constantly remind myself of the setting in which these theories on a new kind of society were written.

Given this context, Bell was fairly accurate in many of his predictions, most notably the growing importance of the service industry, with a particular emphasis on the areas of health and education (p. 88). Getting beyond these somewhat broad trajectories, however, Bell missed the boat on a few other huge ideas, particularly in how he foresaw the market economy's evolution over time. He conjures up images of Old Man Smithers in the 'Scooby Doo' cartoons when he seems to point to college students and young professionals as simply elitists who were too busy causing trouble to be responsible for any change seen in our society with the emergence of a post-industrial age.

Rather, I would argue, that the 20-somethings have greatly changed the way that business is conducted, particularly in areas such as marketing and promotions, which have, in many ways, become the very same "personality market" (p. 101) that Bell seemed to thing was ridiculous. I will agree with aspects of the other two authors' thoughts by saying that it doesn't so much matter what knowledge you possess these days as how you are able to communicate it, which basically amounts to 'selling' yourself.

From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society - Krishan Kumar

As I began reading through Kumar's addition to this section of the Reader, I found myself not finding too much to criticize, but about halfway in, I wondered who peed in his Frosted Flakes. Kumar is certainly accurate in his assessment of much of what the information society comprises, particularly in his argument against Bell's "disjunction of realms" (p. 107), which coincidentally, greatly resembled Lessig's pivotal outline that permeated Code. Kumar was on target with his assessment of the information society as often a product of a narrow view of history and the "crisis of control" that the ever-growing processing brings with it.

Then Kumar lost me with sexist arguments about the 'feminization' of computer work. I think it was absolutely ridiculous to point to a gendered argument that looked at the good old days of computer work as "a man's job" with nostalgia while lamenting the femmey, unskilled workers of today. Isn't the entire idea of computer programming to make it easier to get work done? It seems as though programmers (who probably were not all male) have succeeded in accomplishing that, so why is this sort of drivel necessary?

I would go into more detail about the rest of this article, but I got myself all upset about the blatent sexism, so I will leave it at this: Kumar's view of the post-industrial society as a whole seems overly pessimistic socially, although his concern for the level of governmental and economic control is certainly warranted and channeled Lessig.

Is Britain the First Post-Industrial Society? - John Urry

Immediately from reading the first sentence, it was evident that Urry is virtually the anti-Kumar. In supporting his argument that Britain is the place where post-industrial dreams come true, Urry pointed to six main points as evidence, and in explaining those points through the excerpt, I'm not entirely sure that he convincingly answered his own question.

I did like seeing that Urry acknowledged the point brought up by Bell that service industries were not as productive in saying that this, while true, is an indicator of a great shift in the essence of our economy, rather than simply a sign that we're not growing at as quick of a rate. He also acknowledged that service workers sometimes are of the less-skilled variety, while the consumers are usually those with more income, perhaps the only major damper evident from his theory of a PI society. I think that this divide is a somewhat inevitable byproduct of our current society, and is not a sign that we are hitting a roadblock in our society's evolution, or however Kumar would have phrased it.

The bottom line is that we go about our lives very differently today than we did even a decade ago due to the changing landscape of information in our society. Whether this is the sign of a truly revolutionary society is a completely different argument, in my opinion, but this change (socially and culturally, in addition to economically and politically) is certainly significant and should be acknowledged.