It has been one of the notable features of the idea of the information society that, just as with the idea of post-industrial society, its exposition and explication in the scholarly literature and at academic conferences have been accompanied by extensive popularization in the mass media and through journalistic best-sellers.

Alvin Toffler, who popularized the post-industrial idea in Future Shock, has had an even greater success with his popularization of the idea of the information society in The Third Wave (1981). Almost equally successful has been John Naisbitt's bite-size rendering of the idea in Megatrends (1984).

The computer by itself has transformed many of the operations of industrial society. But what has brought the information society into being, argues Bell, is the explosive convergence of the computer with telecommunications. This has broken down the long-standing distinction between the processing of knowledge and its communication. Marshall McLuhan had looked to television to bring into being the global village; the new media of communication allow narrowcasting as well as broadcasting.