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@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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