Information, Communication & Society

Society's shifting human-computer interface: a sociology of knowledge for the Information Age
Steve Fuller

Abstract: In the first age of information technology - that of the printed word - state-licensed expert communities helped restore some sense of authoritative knowledge to the relatively free and chaotic world of published opinion. However, in the relatively free market that dominates the second age of information technology - that of computers - knowledge engineers have forced human experts to compete with expert systems to satisfy consumer needs. In several fields, this has reduced the social role of expertise from standard or agent to mere tool - and a relatively inefficient one at that, which has led to expert redundancies. But there is also a reverse tendency, as knowledge engineering becomes subsumed by larger trends in transnational capitalism. In that case, entire domains of knowledge may be effectively owned by companies whose intellectual property rights are so strong that they are the sole providers of the systems capable of satisfying consumer needs in those domains. Should we reach such a state of information feudalism, we would have come full circle to the idea of information technology as a standard of human performance, except that it would be a standard that would remain a mystery to all but the most elite corporate computer programmers. It may then be time to regard human expertise as a scarce natural resource.