I love how Robin Mansell introduces her paper on "The life and times of the Information Society" with Charles Dickens' most famous quote: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...". Over 150 years have passed since Dickens left those indelible marks and yet there is no better way to embody my own ambivalence toward the development of what I like to call the society of information. It is characteristically opaque, yet easy to access. It is defiantly corrupt, yet undeniably useful. No matter how many ways you choose to categorize it, the society of information is here to stay. There are certain measures that we can take, as individuals, to best use information to benefit our education process and hopefully help others along the way.
Without doubt, the operative tenet of the post-industrial society (the age of Western service economies) is the utilization of centralized modalities to conceptualize both explicit and tacit information. Knowledge management is the name of the game, and we should all be playing it. The fundamental building material of human intellect is knowledge. As it accumulates, the world becomes increasingly rife with opportunities. We must recognize the importance of the society of information in facilitating individual knowledge management, and in turn, socioeconomic development. Later in her paper, Mansell eventually goes on to discuss early theories on the usefulness of information and communications technology. An important perspective analyzed is the idea that these technologies stimulate growth and improve productivity in the manufacturing sector, leading to the expansion of new information and service-related industries. Proliferation at work! These concepts are met with myriad rebuttals about the distortion of determinism (which I happen to agree with solely on principle) and its negative affect on already existing structural inequalities and social processes within society.
Mansell offers us a history of the debate; we must conceptualize it for our own analysis. When performing such a task for the sake of educational purposes, the important factor to absorb from the dissenting views is the Aristotelian concept of phronesis. The yearning for knowledge and omniscience may not be ubiquitous but it is certainly prevalent. Practical wisdom in the form of the appropriate procurement of knowledge management can be consistently useful in the pursuit of educational endeavors. Knowledge management refers to the process of identifying, capturing, organizing, and using knowledge assets to create and sustain both individual and cooperative competitive advantage. The society of information is and unyielding tool in this regard, and should not be neglected.
In my previous blog post I discussed the negative effects that mass-media conglomerates have on individual constituents and, in turn, public policy. In his paper, Manuel Castels posits a similar idea as I have argued thus far: all societies require knowledge and information, leading to the necessary enlightenment. However, he also suggests that technology is society; they are inseparable. My contention has been that the development of knowledge and its subsequent management are the central purposes of the society of information. Castels refuses to believe that a humanistic view of the network society can exist. The ultimate purpose of such technological advancements are to be used as a means to an end, not the end in itself.
My ambivalence with the regard to the society of information owes its worse half to the lack of ubiquity and overall inequality of those who have access to its features. I discuss the abilities granted to us by these systems and how we can procure amazing amounts of knowledge (and manage that knowledge!) but the fact remains that there is a bigger foundational flaw present. Appropriately pointed out by Katie Benedict here, we realize that as the information age rolls forward, new forms of technology will take over the central role of how consumers are able to garner and manage their knowledge. Problems of inequality and inability to access information are just another issue holding back a more humanist future that is long overdue.
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