Informatization and Power: Communist and Post-communist Experience

Abstract

The information revolution is not the only technological innovation in the past few years, but it is the universal factor that determines and accelerates all others; it has been changing the nervous system of organizations and the whole of society. This is one of the leading ideas of Nora and Minc in their famous book L’informatisation de la société (1978). In this book they coin the term ‘informatization’ and thus fit into the stream of literature (Toffler, 1980; Naisbitt 1984, 1985; Servan-Schreiber, 1980) that views the information revolution as one of the most radical changes in the late 20th century. It is characterized by the emergence of considerable manpower devoted to the production, processing, storing and dissemination of information and related to the mass advent of information technologies, the swell of information flows and the growth of information industry (Katz, 1988).