[Week1_2] "Fine. Now, where's the other half?"

Judging from the introduction, The Information Society reader is a vast ambitous project to cover the various social aspects of the so-called information society. Indeed, the editors are doing a good job in laying out the pros and cons, changes with existing social structures, and also manage to bring up issues that are specific to the information-oriented society such as surveillance. If the individual chapters are as good as introduced, this book will be an invaluable read.
However, it should be noted that it looks already a little outdated. The problem sets leave out some of the prominent aspects such as flexible social networks (enter Myspace), collective knowledge (enter Wikipedia), social discourse production (enter citizen journalism and blogs) and over-reliance to information (or information addiction, as some call it), among many others. In short, the book focuses on the macro level where the society is read as a whole, but leaves out insights to the meso and micro level where the lives of actual people are. I hope that this area can be discussed via the other readings and possibly the group presentations...