Information society in the context of "Content creation"

In sociology, an industrial society is a society driven by the use of technology and machinery to enable mass production, supporting a large population with a high capacity for division of labour. Such a structure developed in the Western world in the period of time following the Industrial Revolution, and replaced the agrarian societies of the pre-modern, pre-industrial age. Industrial societies are generally mass societies, and may be succeeded by an information society. They are often contrasted with traditional societies.

Industrial societies use external energy sources, such as fossil fuels, to increase the rate and scale of production. The production of food is shifted to large commercial farms where the products of industry, such as combine harvesters and fossil fuel–based fertilizers, are used to decrease required human labor while increasing production. No longer needed for the production of food, excess labor is moved into these factories where mechanization is utilized to further increase efficiency. As populations grow, and mechanization is further refined, often to the level of automation, many workers shift to expanding service industries.

In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy.

The term was originated by Alain Touraine and is closely related to similar sociological theoretical concepts such as post-Fordism, information society, knowledge economy, post-industrial economy, liquid modernity, and network society. They all can be used in economics or social science disciplines as a general theoretical backdrop in research design.

The telecommunications industry within the sector of information and communication technology comprises all telecommunication/telephone companies and Internet service providers, and plays a crucial role in the evolution of mobile communications and the information society.

Telephone calls continue to be the industry's largest revenue generator, but due to advances in network technology, telecom today is less about voice and increasingly about text (messaging, email) and images (e.g. video streaming).High-speed Internet access for computer-based data applications such as broadband information services and interactive entertainment is pervasive. Digital subscriber line (DSL) is the main broadband telecom technology. The fastest growth comes from (value-added) services delivered over mobile networks.

Information economy is an economy with an increased emphasis on informational activities and information industry, where information is valued as a capital good. The term was coined by Marc Porat, a graduate student at Stanford University, who would later co-found General Magic.

Manuel Castells states that information economy is not mutually exclusive with manufacturing economy. He finds that some countries such as Germany and Japan exhibit the informatization of manufacturing processes. In a typical conceptualization, however, information economy is considered a "stage" or "phase" of an economy, coming after stages of hunting, agriculture, and manufacturing. This conceptualization can be widely observed regarding information society, a closely related but wider concept.

"As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in The Atlantic in July 1945 and republished in an abridged version in September 1945—before and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bush expresses his concern for the direction of scientific efforts toward destruction, rather than understanding, and explicates a desire for a sort of collective memory machine with his concept of the memex that would make knowledge more accessible, believing that it would help fix these problems. Through this machine, Bush hoped to transform an information explosion into a knowledge explosion.

Manuel Castells Oliván (Catalan: [kəsˈteʎs]; born 9 February 1942) is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.

Castells is a full professor of sociology at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), in Barcelona. He is also a university professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Additionally, he is a professor emeritus of sociology and professor emeritus of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for 24 years. He is also a fellow of St. John's College at the University of Cambridge and holds the chair of network society at Collège d’Études Mondiales, Paris.