Information Society and Global Science

In many advanced industrial countries, much of the labor force works at informational tasks, while wealth comes increasingly from informational goods and services. But why? Answers can be found in the Control Revolution, an abrupt change in the technological and economic arrangements by which information is collected, stored, processed, and communicated that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. The early history of computers in science can be understood from this perspective, as can telematics, the recent convergence—through digitalization—of information-processing and communication technologies. Telematics does not necessarily follow from advanced industrialization because new control technologies present societal choices subject to political control. Problems of control in an interorganizational system like science are considered, with special attention to the role of generalized symbolic media in distributing system status and exchange authority across organizational boundaries. Potential control problems are foreseen in a telematic basis for the system of science, in which computerization has tended to minimize exchange authority, thereby threatening both interorganizational incentives and macro-level control.