The first edition of this book was written and published in 1994, and a second revised edition appeared in 1998. Two years later, there was a third edition at the beginning of a new century, once again taking account of new developments and rapid change. The revision of the fourth edition took this process further. When a revised edition was needed in 2008, it was necessary to make changes that were significant, and in some instances extensive. The five years that have elapsed since then have seen further innovations, against a background of economic and social uncertainty that has not been seen in industrialized countries for many decades. This edition therefore includes a number of further changes of emphasis as well as updating of factual matters.

The Information Society was not, in the conventional sense, a textbook, I know that it has been widely used by students, especially those on courses in information studies, librarianship and communications studies in which a broad understanding of the nature of the information society is an essential underpinning of more advanced work. That was its intended audience, although I always hoped that it would be of wider interest as well. The original aim of the book remains unchanged. The fundamental argument and structure remain intact. They grew out of the belief that we cannot understand the so-called ‘information society’, which has brought us into the 21st century, unless we have some understanding of how information has been accumulated, analysed and disseminated in the past. We have to distinguish between comparatively superficial changes, which are merely technical, and the great shifts in the paradigm of human communications that have taken place three times in the history of mankind. The third of those shifts has been argued to have created – and still to be creating – the information society. The pace of change is unprecedented; the world wide web, which is central to much of what is discussed here, was barely mentioned in the first edition, but was the dominant format of the internet by the time that the second edition was prepared. It is now already the subject of historical studies, autobiographical reminiscence and indeed a new mythology.