Control and Complexity in a Connected World

Abstract

Information is the cognitive currency of the age. Diffused across the social fabric by a wide and growing range of information systems and artefacts, information is variously involved in the making and monitoring of such diverse institutions such as formal organizations, professions, markets, mass media or politics. Such a state of affairs bespeaks not simply the greater leeway information continues to command in the making of human affairs. It also suggests that technological information is not just a means, no matter how ubiquitous, in the service of pre-established ends but a major force of organizational and institutional change. Strong or trivial as it may seem, such a claim must though be restated clearly, in view of a widespread distrust against categorical statements that attribute a causal status to technology.¹