Measuring the future: Statistics and the information age

If the information age is to be more than a slogan, we need to address the issue of how to measure its emergence, and how to assess developments within it. This may well pose challenges to our existing statistics-,since structural change can render established definitions and frameworks inadequate. So far, most discussion of this issue has been conducted within a tradition of counting up the 'information workforce'. This article argues for a different approach, focusing on the generation, diffusion and application of new information technology (IT). It considers how far available statistics can be used to throw light on IT-related developments, provides some examples of what these data tell us about possible future developments, and examines the implications for the future of statistical frameworks and statistical analysis itself.