Frank Webster is a British sociologist. His critical writing on the "information society" has been translated into many languages. In his book Theories of the Information Society, he examined six analytically separable conceptions of the information society, arguing that all are suspect to some degree, so much so that the idea of an information society cannot be easily sustained.

Biography

Frank Webster comes from Durham, England where he was raised and educated. He completed his studies at LSE and has worked in several universities, at home and abroad. He joined City full-time in 2003 from the University of Birmingham. He is currently Head of the Department of Sociology at City University London.http://www.city.ac.uk/sociology/staffdetails/Webster.html

Works

His research has centred on information and communications trends, and has included conceptual analysis and critique, as well as studies of higher education, the effects of advanced technologies on libraries, urban change, and new media. He has recently worked on Information War and was involved in researching Internet Activism by examining the anti-war movement and its adoption of ICTs. This work is situated in a context of interest in democratisation and information trends, an interest manifested especially in his teaching at Masters level at City University. - www.antiwarresearch.info/. A book from this project appeared in 2008 titled, Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age (Palgrave), written with Kevin Gillan and Jenny Pickerill. Frank has begun work on another book, provisionally titled Democratization and Information .http://www.city.ac.uk/sociology/staffdetails/Webster.html

Webster has published books on many aspects of contemporary social change. He has resisted the view that the Information society

Information society

The aim of the information society is to gain competitive advantage internationally through using IT in a creative and productive way. An information society is a society in which the creation, distribution, diffusion, use, integration and manipulation of information is a significant economic,...

 is radically new, insisting on the primacy of continuities and consolidations of established trendshttp://www.uk.sagepub.com/mcquail5/downloads/Handbookchaps/ch01.pdf. He conceives today’s ‘informational capitalism’ as a development from corporate capitalism

Corporate capitalism

Corporate capitalism is a term used in social science and economics to describe a capitalist marketplace characterized by the dominance of hierarchical, bureaucratic corporations, which are legally required to pursue profit....

 and, before that, laissez-faire capitalism, that advances principles of market society such as private ownership, competition, profitability, commodification, ability to pay, and the centrality of wage labour.

He wrote a Luddite

Luddite

The Luddites were a social movement of 19th-century English textile artisans who protested – often by destroying mechanised looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their way of life...

 analysis of Information Technology with Kevin Robins in the early 1980s that was one of the first book-length critiques of optimistic analyses of computer and telecommunications technologies. More recently he appears prepared to use the term Information Society, though this seems to contradict his early hostility to the idea.

He often draws attention to the dark sides of informational developments, especially the military dimensions. He has adopted the concept of Information War

Information warfare

The term Information Warfare is primarily an American concept involving the use and management of information technology in pursuit of a competitive advantage over an opponent...

to examine the changing information environment of recent wars.

Publications

• The New Photography: Responsibility in Visual Communication Calder, 1980
• Information Technology: A Luddite Analysis. (with Kevin Robins) New Jersey, 1986
• The Technical Fix: Computers, Industry and Education (with Kevin Robins) 1989
• Theories of the Information Society 1995, 3rd edition 2006
• The Postmodern University? Contested Visions of Higher Education (with A.Smith) 1997
• Times of the Technoculture: from the Information Society to the Virtual Life (with Kevin Robins) 1999
• Understanding Contemporary Society: Theories of the Present (with G.Browning and A.Halcli) 2000
• Culture and Politics in the Information Age: A New Politics? 2001
• The Virtual University: Knowledge, Markets and Management (with Kevin Robins)2002
• The Intensification of Surveillance: crime, terrorism and warfare in the information era. (with Kirstie Ball) 2003
• The Information Society Reader 2004
• Manuel Castells: Masters of Modern Social Thought, 3 volumes (with Basil Dimitriou) 2004
• Journalists under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices 2006 (with Howard Tumber)
• Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age 2008 (with Kevin Gillan and Jennifer Pickerill)
• Kevin Robins and Frank Webster (1988). "Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life," in: Vincent Mosko & Janet Wasko (eds.), The Political Economy of Information, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 45-75. Online