The Demise of Meaning-Making and Social Agency as Critical Concepts in the Rhetoric of an Information Age

Regardless of whether you agree with the appropriateness of such labels as the Information Age or the Information Society, their ubiquitous use signals and frames the collective experience of who we are and what we should do in this particular time and place in history. From information acquisition and anxiety to information warfare and weapons, there are few areas of social life that are left untouched by the mechanistic and instrumental rhetoric of computational nformation processing and the associated ways we humans traffic and trade in it. Most scholarly debates have centered on ontological and economic questions: Are we really in an Information Age and, if so, what is the extent and meaning of an economic break with our industrial past? But, within the scope of intellectual history, especially in the social sciences, it has meant a break with meaning-making and social agency as core theoretical components in the structuring and maintenance of social organization (Bruner, 1990).