Information Society, Knowledge Society

Information Society

Information Society is a term for a society in which the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information has become the most significant economic and cultural activity. An Information Society may be contrasted with societies in which the economic activities are primarily Industrial or Agrarian. The machine tools of the Information Society are computers and telecommunications, rather than lathes or ploughs.

Policy makers for the G7 (now G8) group of nations recognised, only a few years ago, that:

Progress in information technologies and communication is changing the way we live: how we work and do business, how we educate our children, study and do research, train ourselves, and how we are entertained. The information society is not only affecting the way people interact but it is also requiring the traditional organisational structures to be more flexible, more participatory and more decentralised. (Chair's conclusions from the G-7 Ministerial Conference on the Information Society, February 1995.)

The idea of a global Information Society can be viewed in relation to Marshall McLuhan's prediction that the communications media would transform the world into a "global village."

Here is a succinct definition from the IBM Community Development Foundation in a 1997 report, "The Net Result - Report of the National Working Party for Social Inclusion."

Information Society: A society characterised by a high level of information intensity in the everyday life of most citizens, in most organisations and workplaces; by the use of common or compatible technology for a wide range of personal, social, educational and business activities, and by the ability to transmit, receive and exchange digital data rapidly between places irrespective of distance.

Knowledge society

Broadly speaking, the term Knowledge Society refers to any society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. It may also refer to the use a certain society gives to information. A Knowledge society "creates, shares and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people".

Knowledge societies have the characteristic that knowledge forms a major component of any human activity. Economic, social, cultural, and all other human activities become dependent on a huge volume of knowledge and information. A knowledge society is one in which knowledge becomes a major creative force.

Knowledge societies are not a new occurrence. For example, fishermen have long shared the knowledge of predicting the weather to their community and this knowledge gets added to the social capital of the community.

What is new is that

• With current technologies, knowledge societies need not be constrained by geographic proximity

• Current technology offers much more possibilities for sharing, archiving and retrieving knowledge

• Knowledge has become the most important capital in the present age, and hence the success of any society lies in harnessing it.

A knowledge society needs infrastructure like

1. Physical: meeting places, notice boards ...

2. Technological: local language content sharing, mailing lists, web portals, wikis, chat rooms, video conferencing, virtual meetings, collaborative development environments, distance education ...

The Free software movement is a success story of knowledge society.

Information in social and economic activities

The main feature of the information revolution is the growing economic, social and technological role of information. Information-related activities did not come up with the Information Revolution. They existed, in one form or the other, in all human societies, and eventually developed into institutions, such as the Platonic Academy, Aristotle's Peripatetic school in the Lyceum, the Museum and the Library of Alexandria, or the schools of Babylonian astronomy. The Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution came up when new informational inputs were produced by individual innovators, or by scientific and technical institutions. During the Information Revolution all these activities are experiencing continuous growth, while other information-oriented activities are emerging.

Information is the central theme of several new sciences, which emerged in the 1940s, including Shannon's (1949) Information Theory and Wiener's (1948) Cybernetics. Wiener (1948, p. 155) stated also: "information is information not matter or energy". This aphorism suggests that information should be considered along with matter and energy as the third constituent part of the Universe; information is carried by matter or by energy.

We can distinguish between information, data and knowledge. Data comes through research and collection. Information is organized data. Knowledge is built upon information. Data and information are easily transferable; knowledge built by a person is not certain that it can be transferred to another. Following this, the notion of a "knowledge society" cannot be defined cogently.

Information is then further considered as an economic activity, since firms and institutions are involved in its production, collection, exchange, distribution, circulation, processing, transmission, and control. Labor is also divided into physical labor (use of muscle power) and informational labor (use of intellectual power). A new economic sector is thereby identified, the Information Sector, which amalgamates information-related labor activities.

Information Age

The Information Age, also commonly known as the Computer Age or Information Era, is an idea that the current age will be characterized by the ability of individuals to transfer information freely, and to have instant access to knowledge that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. The idea is linked to the concept of a Digital Age or Digital Revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based around the manipulation of information. Commonly seen as an outflow from the Space Age, capitalizing on the computer microminiaturization advances of that effort, with a fuzzy transition spanning from the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s to the emergence of the internet in the early 1990s, and the adaption of such technology by the public in the two decades after 1990. Since the invention of social media in the 2000s, the Information Age has evolved into the Attention Age according to some publications.