[Air-L] Informatization?

Alex Halavais alex at halavais.net
Sun Jul 8 21:09:07 PDT 2012


Perhaps multiple beginnings? Real life Japanese speakers please
correct me, but I think 情報化 translates pretty neatly into
"informatization" (though perhaps not as neatly as does
"informatisation"!), and was used in the title of a book by Yujiro
Hayashi in 1969.

And a little searching finds this--not Wikipedia, but someone else had
the same idea:

Alistair S. Duff, Information Society Studies, London: Routledge, 2000, p. 3:

"""
The alternative theory claims that 'the term "information society" was
itself coined in Japan' (Morris-Suzuki 1988: 3). Two cognates are
involved. 'Joho Shakai' is normally translated into English as
'information society', but has also been rendered as
'information-oriented society', 'information-conscious society', and
'information-centered society'. 'Johoka Shakai', which uses a verbal
form of 'joho', has a sense analogous to 'industrialised society', and
is translated variously as 'informised society, 'informatised
society', 'informationised society' or sometimes simply (again)
'information society'.
"""

Elsewhere, Duff attributes the pick up and use of the term
"informatization" in English to Ian Miles (he apparently calls it "an
ugly but apt neologism"), who had pulled directly from the Nora-Minc
report...

In any case, in response to the original question, I suspect tracking
down a copy of the Duff book might be useful...

- Alex

On Sun, Jul 8, 2012 at 3:31 PM, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'm fairly sure it is an anglicization of the French "informatisation"...
> Which if I'm not mistaken was first used in the Nora/Minc Report
>
> L'informatisation de la société: rapport à M. le Président de la République
>
> http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapport_Nora-Minc and wikipedia even seems to
> have had the same thought :)
>
> Informatization - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatization -
>
> Origin of the term. The term informatisation was coined by Simon Nora and
> Alain Minc in their publication L'Informatisation de la société: Rapport à
> M. le ...
>
> M
>

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