Are We Turning Into the Industrial Information Society?

In Frank Webster’s book Theories of The Information Society, he notes that Daniel Bell has famously declared that we have entered The Post-Industrial Society, that we have moved from a production to an information society and the indicator of this change is that we are now a service-based economy.

Bell declares that,

In pre-industrial society life is ‘a game against nature’ where ‘one works with raw muscle power’…in the industrial era where the ‘machine predominates’ in a ‘technical and rationalised’ existence, life ‘is a game against fabricated nature’… in contrast to both, life in a ‘post-industrial society [which] is based on services…is a game between persons’. ‘What counts is not raw muscle power, or energy, but information’ (39).

While this statement is mostly true what Bell has not taken into account is the industrial power needed to run the “Information Society.”  Information is a person-to-person transaction, but how does this information travel? It is transmitted over the Internet, by telephone, television, and radio just to name a few. These devices rely on electricity to not only move but also to store the information. The Internet has created a glut of data disguised as information as well as myriad amounts of old information being stored in large data warehouses full of energy burning servers. The result is that information storage is straining the power capabilities, most notably in the United Sates, like never before. According to a nytimes.com article The Cloud Factories Power, Pollution and the Internet by James Glanz,

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show…It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.

Information is only information if it travels from one person to the next. If the human is taken out of the equation then it ceases to become information and falls to the level of simply being data. Why then do we need to protect insignificant personal data in the same manner as national security secrets? We have effectively become data hoarders by saving old emails, photos and videos with arguably minimal value. It is possible that the amount of energy needed stockpile this data, if left unchecked, could create pollution and industrial waste issues that harken back to the days of the industrial revolution. Perhaps it might be time to amend the age-old maxim that “you can never have enough information” to “how much information do you really need?”

Works Cited:

The Cloud Factories Power, Pollution and the Internet by James Glanz,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/technology/data-centers-waste-vast-amounts-of-energy-belying-industry-image.html?pagewanted=all

Webster, Frank. Theories of the Information Society. New York: Routledge. 2002. Print.