To SAY that the advanced industrial world is rapidly becoming an Information Society may already be a cliché. In the United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan, the bulk of the labor force now works primarily at informational tasks such as systems analysis and computer programming, while wealth comes increasingly from informational goods such as microprocessors and from informational services such as data processing. For the economies of at least a half-dozen countries, the processing of information has begun to overshadow the processing of matter and energy.
But why? Among the multitude of things that human beings value, why should it be information, embracing both goods and services, that has come to dominate the world’s largest and most advanced economies? Despite scores of books and articles proclaiming the advent of the Information Society, no one seems to have even raised—much less answered—this important question.
My own desire to understand the new centrality of information began in the summer of 1963, before my junior year in high school, when the National Science Foundation sponsored my participation in an eight-week program in mathematics and computer science at Oregon State University. At a time when no teenage hacker culture had yet emerged, living with thirty students from around the country while learning to program proved to be the next best thing, my personal windfall from Sputnik (I still delight in being one of the youngest people to have run a program on vacuum tubes). Why have computers become so central to modem society, I wondered that summer, when all they can do is to transform information from one form to another? How could our entire era, popularly described even in the early 1960s as the “Computer Age,” be evoked by so modest an activity as information processing?
Even if we could explain the growing importance of information and its processing in modern economies, I realized, we would immediately confront a second question: Why now? Because information plays an important role in all human societies, we would also have to explain why it has only recently emerged as a distinct and critical commodity. Material culture has also been crucial throughout human history, after all, and yet capital did not displace land as the major economic base until the Industrial Revolution. To what comparable technological and economic “revolution” might we attribute the emergence of the Information Society?
My answer, as the title of this book indicates, is what I call the Control Revolution, a complex of rapid changes in the technological and economic arrangements by which information is collected, stored, processed, and communicated, and through which formal or programmed decisions might effect societal control. From its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Control Revolution has continued unabated, and recently it has been accelerated by the development of microprocessing technologies. In terms of the magnitude and pervasiveness of its impact upon society, intellectual and cultural no less than material, the Control Revolution already appears to be as important to the history of this century as the Industrial Revolution was to the last.
But history alone cannot explain why it is information that increasingly plays the crucial role in economy and society. The answer must be sought in the nature of all living systems—ultimately in the relationship between information and control. Life itself implies control, after all, in individual cells and organisms no less than in national economies or any other purposive system.
My interest in such systems developed from the first course I attended as a Harvard freshman, Soc Sei 8, taught in the fall of 1965 by the cognitive scientist George A. Miller. Although I had the great pleasure, fifteen years later, of being George Miller’s colleague at Princeton, I doubt that he can ever know how much his early teaching on information processing and communication inspired at least one undergraduate to view things social as interacting processing systems—and to appreciate the importance of communication and control in all such systems.
Once we view national economies as concrete processing systems engaged in the continuous extraction, reorganization, and distribution of environmental inputs to final consumption, the impact of industrialization takes on new meaning. Until the Industrial Revolution, even the largest and most developed economies ran literally at a human pace, with processing speeds enhanced only slightly by draft animals and by wind and water power, and with system control increased correspondingly by modest bureaucratic structures. By far the greatest effect of industrialization, from this perspective, was to speed up a society’s entire material processing system, thereby precipitating what I call a crisis of control, a period in which innovations in information-processing and communication technologies lagged behind those of energy and its application to manufacturing and transportation.
Identifying the crisis of control and the resulting Control Revolution has helped me to answer another question that has nagged me since my days as an American history major, namely, why the period 1870-1910 is so interesting to modem students and seems so decisive for society as we know it today. Here my thinking has been most influenced by Alfred Chandler of the Harvard Business School, one of the few historians to exploit the view of societies as material processing systems. Chandler’s 1977 book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, first suggested to me the possibility that the American economy had become a distinctively more purposive system during those decades.
The Information Society, I have concluded, is not so much the result of any recent social change as of increases begun more than a century ago in the speed of material processing. Microprocessor and computer technologies, contrary to currently fashionable opinion, are not new forces only recently unleashed upon an unprepared society, but merely the latest installment in the continuing development of the Control Revolution. This explains why so many of the computer’s major contributions were anticipated along with the first signs of a control crisis in the mid-nineteenth century.
Although some readers may see this as a “multidisciplinary” approach to history, my goal has been to understand not multiple subjects but only one: the origin of the Information Society. If the world economy uses information for the same general purpose as does a single organism, if economic changes influence theoretical work on information processing, and if the resulting technological breakthroughs increase our material control, as I will argue in the following chapters, then it seems a shame to leave this interesting phenomenon of information processing and control divided up—like a secret treasure map among conspirators—among biologists, economists, historians, and engineers. We segment experience only to make it easier to understand, after all, and although the various academic disciplines have beyond question proved themselves good means toward that end, they are surely not ends in themselves.
I am not advocating that social scientists regularly try to elucidate the subject matter of many specialties. Indeed, this book could never have been written had not generations of scholars devoted themselves to narrower and more manageable topics. But their contributions will not be complete unless we occasionally attempt to bring their separate truths together into a larger one. From this perspective, my goal might seem to be narrow: to understand the expanding economy of information as a means of control.