Emergence to an information society: A case study of the European Community

"EC 1992" has become the flagship campaign for creating the long sought after European Community, integrating the twelve Member States economically, politically, and culturally. With newly emerging technologies, the EC will be confronted with changes in its societal structure as faced by many societies entering into the information age. This study is an inquiry on the theory of "Information Society" and by means of a case study on the European Community, it discusses some of the changing international and domestic relationships of societies due to current technological innovations. Public opinion polls taken in 1977 and 1990 in Member States of the Community are compared to examine the extent of structural change of technological acceptance as encountered by the societies of the individual countries. In a second step, these structural changes are compared to communication expenditures of the Member States as a means of studying communication's contribution to the changing components of an Information Society.