Finally, many industrial societies now appear to be entering yet another phase of technological development. In the early 1970s, Daniel Bell (1976) invented the term post-industrialism to refer to computer-linked technology supporting an information-based economy. While production in industrial societies focuses on factories and machinery that generate material goods, post-industrial production focuses on computers and other electronics that create, process, store and apply information.
It is the information society, the network society, the cyber-society, the postmodern society. At the individual level, industrial societies members concentrate on learning mechanical skills. People in post-industrial societies, however, work on gaining information-based skills for work involving computers, facsimile machines, satellites, and other communication forms technology.
Post-industrialism’s emergence dramatically changes a society’s occupational structure. Post-industrial societies utilises less and less of its labour force for industrial production. Simultaneously, the ranks of clerical worker, managers and other people who process information (in fields ranging from academia and advertising to marketing and public relations) swell rapidly. New skills – often less physical and more mental – are needed to handle fragmented work, multi-tasking and non-linear patterns of work. We are facing the new challenges as well – the cognitive pressure for us and our brain is higher than ever before in the sociocultural development of our societies.
The Information Revolution is, of course, most pronounced in industrial, high-income societies, yet the reach of this new technology is so great that it is affecting the entire world. The unprecedented worldwide flow of information originating in wealthy nations has the predictable effect of tying far-flung societies together and fostering common global culture patterns.
This extends the process of globalisation and brings a society that some peak of postmodernism (postmodernism is the ways of thinking that stress a plurality of perspectives as opposed to a unified, single-core). It is a world where change is significantly speeding up, where classical boundaries across societies break down, and a new sense of society is in the making.
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