He noted that "most definitions are concerned with quantitative measures, which fail to consider important qualitative dimensions of the criteria, although there is the widespread presumption that quantitative changes in information herald a new type of society, one qualitatively different from predecessors. Further, proponents of an information society operate with non-semantic conceptions of information. Against this, when information is approached in common sense terms, then the prospects for an approaching information society are unconvincing."
It has become commonplace to allude to the United States, Japan, and several Western European nations as information societies. The expression is now so clichéd that the Japanese have taken to designating Japan as an "advanced" information society. Despite this de facto classification by those writing about related topics, a review of the literature explicitly concerned with emerging forms of social organization reveals considerable debate over the precise nature of the information society.
Although most concede that Western industrialized nations and Japan have experienced dramatic social, economic, and technological changes, there is little consensus on the nature and direction of the change. Yet, without an adequate conception of the nature of an information society, attempts to project social problems in information societies is difficult (Charles Steinfiled, 2001).
In an article Koji Kobayashi, NEC Corporate Chief Engineer, defines the information society as ‘a society that revolves around the creation, transfer, storage, and use of information resources. Another possible definition reflects a society where intelligent information resources are as important as human, natural, and social resources such as commodities, environment and money. We are entering an era where the information society is rapidly becoming a reality’.
This ‘informatization’ experience is a manifestation of the post-industrial society. Here ‘informatization’ means the process of becoming ‘information-intensive,’ that is, intensively orientated to handle information electronically, by means of the penetration of Information Technology (IT), that is, the technology, which is relevant to the integration of computers and communications, and that is somehow changing people culture.
It is my believe that analysts of post-modern culture identify this as the information age because information flows have replaced material and spiritual worlds as the basis of preferentiality. Economists do so because information as both an intermediate and final product has come to dominate the economy, because the domain of the economy has expanded through the co-modification of information, and because information flows have replaced the market as the key coordinating mechanism. Sociologists do so because information technologies are key to the restructuring of our social and political environments. For each, quantitative change has led to qualitative change.
It is the information industry that has served as the motivating power for the transformation of society and its culture.
A fast-growing range of technologies with profound social consequences is communicating greater volumes of information. These consequences can be identified in nearly every aspect of social life.
According to Hugh Mackay (2001) three themes can be identified in information society debates.
First is the rise to the fore of the culture, reflected in the growth in the ownership and use of a range of cultural technologies. From the dawn of television broadcasting around the time of the Second World War, to the multi-channel world of cable and satellite, digital wide-screen about half century later, is a dramatic transformation.
And as well as television there is video, the cinema, music, periodicals and book. Nor is this confined to the media: through advertising, the telephone, the internet, photography, clothing, people now a days are dealing with an ever-increasing array of information and images.
I believe is easier to rich people trough the media influencing people mentality, changing and manipulating their culture. An example can be made by the use of mobile phones. About six years back no one was utilizing mobile phones because it was something, which was not necessary and expensive. Now a day old generation still might not use the mobile phones because they belong to that sort of culture, but the new generation all use this technology because are made believe is a technology, which is necessary in people life, and life without is not possible.
Second is the changing economy, the changing nature of work. It is not difficult to understand that work is changing with the decline of employment in not just coal and steel, but manufacturing in general, and of service employment, and the rise of information work.
It has been a huge growth in industrialized countries of information work changing is consequent to their social culture. Access to information and communication technologies (ICTs), and to information reflects social divisions, with growing popularisations between those with access to information and those without.
Finally, there is the special and temporal dimension: with the spread and growing significance of the ICTs people are experiencing the reconfiguration of time and space.
Increasingly, information networks mean that time and space become less significant in shaping social organisation and interaction. The electronic infrastructure allows real-time coordination across the globe in ways and with consequences, which were unthinkable until recently. Production and marketing increasingly span the world as people become integrated in a global economy, polity and culture.
An example can be made by the use of Internet and the chats. Is possible to send e-mail or chat with someone anywhere in the world in real time. But this technology as I said before reflects social divisions between those with the access to the ICTs structures and those without. In fact is not possible to communicate by mail or by chat with someone who has no computer. This is in my opinion the main reason why the number of the people using ITCs structures is increasing daily. They can’t afford to be left behind.
Society is not static. Society in the terminology of general systems theory is an open system: A dynamic set of interrelated social systems, institutions, and individuals that act upon and react to various aspects of the world around it. Open systems exist in a state of constant flux, continually reacting and adjusting to changing conditions and developments from both within and without the system. Generally, these changes and adjustments are evolutionary -- small changes and modifications in a system's structures, interrelationships, or patterns of behaviour that better permit social systems to survive in a climate of changing conditions (BENJAMIN J. BATES, 1995).
Occasionally, however, factors or influences may arise whose impact is truly revolutionary, forcing a more abrupt and drastic modification in the social system or national culture, resulting in a wholesale transformation in social institutions and relationships.
Tom Forester's (1992) "Megatrends or Megamistakes? What Ever Happened to the Information Society?" examined key social forecasts and concluded that most of them "have gone awry because forecasters have ignored the human factor. There have been a number of unanticipated problems thrown up by the IT revolution, most of which involve the human factor.
Perhaps it is time for a major reassessment of the human relationship to technology, especially the new information and communication technologies. The technological advances in computing seem to have outpaced the human ability to make use of them."
Personally I don’t agree totally with Tom Forester opinion. Is true that there have been unanticipated problems within the IT revolution, but I do believe that the development of the ITCs structures comes from a human necessity to improve life and even if the ITCs replaced human in many works it will never outpaced the human ability to make use of them.
What we mean by national culture?
Relations between information society and national culture.
Conclusions
