William H. Dutton,
Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age.
Oxford University Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 19 877460 5
390 pp
AU$55.00 (paper)

Uploaded 1 March 2000

William Dutton has written and edited an important contribution to the literature on the relationships between media and society. Dutton was the Director of the U.K. Program on Information and Communications Technology (PICT) who was charged with the task of bringing the project to a conclusion. PICT was a government-funded collaborative research program which funded the development of focussed research centres throughout the U.K. This book is a synthesis of that program. It contains Dutton’s essays which present key ideas arising from the program and, most interestingly, shorter supporting statements from the researchers themselves. Dutton’s voice co-exists with that of the researchers whose work he describes and synthesises.

Dutton organises the book around his concept of “tele-access” which is used to map the implications of information and communications technologies for information which people access, people who people communicate with, services which are used, and access to other technologies. The use of this somewhat mechanistic model should not deter readers who are looking for an excellent presentation of what is known about the social role of information and communications technologies. Teachers will find that the book provides important source material and literature reviews for their students. This book is a fitting epitaph for the PICT program and it shows what can be done by well managed and large scale social science research projects.

Peter B. White