The Broad Field of the Information Society

Abstract

The new technologies will have their greatest impact, it is generally assumed, in the large, growing area of services. Some people seem to equate the terms “information society” and “service society” as being one and the same thing. They are extrapolating a development which has already been verified, in fact, by the steady growth for the last thirty years in activities belonging to the “tertiary sector.” According to a study by the OECD, in 1954 26.7 per cent of the working population in the industrial nations of the West were employed in agriculture, 34 per cent in manufacturing industries, and 39.3 per cent in the service sector. By 1977 there was a shift in the correlations: 11 per cent (agriculture), 34.5 per cent (manufacturing), and 54.5 per cent (services).