The Emergence of an Information Society

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"The Emergence of an Information Society"

The Emergence of an information society

Background

The emergence of the information society, especially in the last 50 years, brought the promise of an unlimited, open access to an infinite array of information that would improve the way we live, learn work and govern. People have observed this rise of technology and they imagined an information world that would migrate from the state of scarcity to a state of abundance, transcending geographic, legal, and political boundaries. This dream envisioned a utopia where people could connect with myriad ideas and individuals just by clicking a mouse, no longer constrained by location, format, cost, time of day, on-site rules and regulations, or other barriers. In essence, anyone, anytime, anyplace could receive, interpret and exchange ideas outside the limit of government controls or the marketplace.

Many of the enthusiasts assumed that this new information infrastructure would reserve public spaces for educational and research institutions, libraries, nonprofits, and government agencies charged with promoting and fulfilling the public interest, and would constitute a public sphere of free speech and open intellectual discourse that enhances democracy.

The term "information society" has been growingly in use as of the early 1980s, though earlier terms such as the "age of information" date back to the early 1970s. These terms emerged within the context of numerous attempts to coin societal transformations since the early 1950s.

Information Society

There are two major processes of an Information society:

Production

Consumption

A given national information society does not necessarily have to develop high levels in all aspects of production and consumption of information.

Production

Several things may be produced and one major production process may be the innovation and wide spread production of the hardware of information society, such as computers and telecommunications devices and...