Suchergebnisse

The discourse on "the information society" developed until the 70's as one of the prevailing discourse in our society; with promises to link information technology and free market with economic growth and human progress. This eventually became something like the official ideology of the European Union as demonstrated by the famous Lisbon strategy to become "the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world" placing "emphasis on the need to adapt constantly to changes in the information society". This discourse about "information society" raised its share of criticism based on technological determinism or the new informational prophecies, Here I think about the works of French authors, like Armand Mattelart, David Forest, Philippe Breton, and so on. This discussion is not intended to review the criticisms, but to go back in time and analyse what can be considered as the first concept of information and society in the wake of the cybernetic movement, in the United States, at the end of the 1940's.Now, briefly, what is cybernetics and how can it claim to be the first discourse about information society?

This article briefly discusses various definitions and concepts of the so-called information society. The term information society has been proposed to refer to the post-industrial society in which information plays a pivotal role. The definitions that have been proposed over the years highlight five underlying characterisations of an information society: technological, economic, sociological, spatial, and cultural. This article discusses those characteristics. While the emergence of an information society may be just a figment of one's imagination, the concept could be a good organising principle to describe and analyse the changes of the past 50 years and of the future in the 21st century.

A common international information space has been created through new technology processes, especially the Internet, impacting the politics, economics, and cultures of States. The global information sphere offers many opportunities, but also contains threats like the digital divide, privacy violations, and pornography. In the face of these threats, the US has chosen to keep legal regulation of the Internet to a minimum, while Western European countries favor a combination of legal and self-regulation. Global standards for e-commerce and information security do not exist, but need to be addressed through international relations.