Los seis procesos de la administración de recursos humanos.

3.0 MAIN CONTENT

3.1 The Surveillance (Information) Society Perspective

The Surveillance (Information) Society, according to the proponents, arose from an imperative condition for the survival and success of the modern nation state. That condition was the nation state’s need for accurate, codified and systematised information on its citizens, both nationals and aliens, for planning, administration and control. That need/condition propels the Surveillance Information Society to strive for a high level of ICT.

3.2 Key Features and Values of the Surveillance Information Society

The Surveillance Information Society is closely linked to the modern nation state, which is central to people’s sense of personal identity.

i. It constantly monitors its members in order to ensure that they have their citizenship rights and that they live an orderly, peaceful and prosperous life.

ii. It also constantly monitors its members in order to ensure that they fulfil their citizenship responsibilities to the nation state.

iii. It furthermore engages in constant monitoring of aliens, especially those that are considered to be “security risks”, in order to preserve a reliable security system.

iv. It engages in exhaustive surveillance of corporate business interests, in order to preserve the material well-being of the nation state.

All these conditions, features and activities oblige the surveillance information society to go after relevant technologies, especially ICT. In the past, surveillance by the nation state involved considerable labour and obvious powers. In the modern Surveillance Information Society, surveillance is more virtual and involves minimal labour, even while still exercising equal power.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2.1

“The modern nation state is central to the citizens’ sense of personal identity”. Discuss.

3.3 Introducing the Informational Capitalist Society Perspective

Several other names have also been concocted for this perspective on the Information Society: Techno-capitalist Information Society,

Informatising Society, etc. Its major exponents have been well known left-wing communication scholars like Herbert Schiller, Castells, and so on. According to them, this facet of Information Society arose from the need of corporate capitalists to operate with maximum profit — a need that has varied in strength as capitalism has gone through different phases. Later day capitalists have adopted, mainly and intensively, information (and) communication technological innovativeness as their new modus operandi, after the failure of earlier phases of capitalism. As Schiller sums up this perspective:

What is called the ‘information society’ is, in fact, the production, processing and transmission of a very large amount of data about all sorts of matters … to meet the very specific needs of super-corporations, national government bureaucracies, and the military establishments of the advanced industrial state. (Schiller 1981: 25).

3.4 Key Features and Values of the Informational Capitalist Society

In it, information is regarded as a commodity. As Webster (1995) puts it,

“As a rule, information is produced and made available only where there is the prospect of its being sold at a profit.”

In it, access to, and ability to generate information is greatly influenced by socio-economic class; and The gap widens inexorably between those who have the ability to pay for information and those who don’t. (See Folarin: 1998, 2002 and 2006 on Knowledge Gaps Theory).

In this society, public funding for information institutions such as museums, libraries, etc. is steadily replaced by private, profit-making finance.

SELF-ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2.2

Take a close look at the ongoing privatisation syndrome in Nigeria, and reflect in particular on the ways in which it affects the information institutions in the country.

4.0 CONCLUSION

· The Surveillance Society has always been around with us. What marks out the Surveillance Information Society is its intensive predilection for and heavy dependence on high level information (and) communication technology. In the traditional surveillance society, the surveillance is/was largely overt and

surveillance is largely subtle and largely dependent on virtual information and communication.

· The Informational Capitalist Society is with us here and now.

While many of the elite in particular see it as certain to ultimately lift the nation state to the rank of advanced, industrialised nations, its largely anti-welfarist posture makes it at once threatening and annoying to the majority of ordinary citizens.

5.0 SUMMARY

In this unit, we have taken a look at two perspectives on Information Society Theory, namely the Surveillance and the Informational Capitalist perspectives. We saw that in the former, society has taken advantage of bludgeoning information (and) communication technology which it uses as its indispensable prop; while in the latter society actually adopts information (and) communication technology as its occupation and as a commodity.

6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT

What, in your view, has been the impact of Globalisation on the advent and progress of the Informational Capitalist Society? (Maximum 2 pages).

7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING

Ayedun–Aluma, Victor (2004). “A Critique of Information Society Theory as a Development Communication Paradigm,” a research report in the Department of Communication and Language Arts, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Webster, Frank (1995). Theories of the Information Society. London:

Routledge.

UNIT 3 THE DECLINING PUBLIC SPHERE