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Society and economy are in a transition to the knowledge and information society. At the same time the thrusts of technological innovation are making crucial changes to our media environments in leisure activities and our jobs.

There are various concepts in scientific literature that have been used for discussing information society. This section introduces some of them. Concepts such as knowledge/information economy, post-industrial society, post-modern society, information society, network society, informational capitalism, network capitalism, etc. show that it is an important sociological question in which society we live and which role technologies and information play in contemporary society. Both aspects are central issues of information society and information revolution theory. Fritz Machlup (1962) has introduced the concept of the knowledge industry. He has distinguished five sectors of the knowledge sector: education, research and development, mass media, information technologies, information services. Based on this categorization he calculated that in 1959 29% per cent of the GNP in the USA had been produced in knowledge industries. Peter Drucker has argued that there is a transition from an economy based on material goods to one based on knowledge. Marc Porat distinguishes a primary (information goods and services that are directly used in the production, distribution or processing of information) and a secondary sector (information services produced for internal consumption by government and non-information firms) of the information economy. Porat uses the total value added by the primary and secondary information sector to the GNP as an indicator for the information economy. The OECD has employed Porat’s definition for calculating the share of the information economy in the total economy (e.g. OECD 1981, 1986). Based on such indicators the information society has been defined as a society where more than half of the GNP is produced and more than half of the employees are active in the information economy. information society