Information

ChapterSociety
Five

1 By: Milkesa D,2015/2023 03/25/2025

 Contents of the Chapter

 Background Information Society

 Changes in the nature of information
 Factors determining the arrival of Information Society

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 Introduction
 An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution,
manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity.
 Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which
have resulted in rapid growth of a variety of forms of information.
 The Information Society concept has been used since the 1950s, but has
come to the fore since 1990 in research, the media and policy-making.
 “The Information Society is an evolving concept that has reached different
levels across the world, reflecting the different stages of development.
 Technological and other change is rapidly transforming the environment in
which the Information Society is developed.”

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 Cont’d..
 An information society is a society where the creation,
distribution, use, integration and manipulation of information is
a noteworthy economic, political and cultural activity.
 The term “information society” is currently the most common
way to refer to the set of impacts and social consequences of
new information and communication technologies. While it is
useful as a concept that identifies a theme, it is not a theory or
an explanatory framework for the dynamics of societies in the
contemporary world.

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 Cont’d..

 Elsewhere, the “Information Society” is often linked with the idea of the
“knowledge based economy”, and has been variously defined as, for example:
 “The society currently being put into place, where low-cost information and
data storage and transmission technologies are in general use.
 This generalization of information and data use is being accompanied by
organizational, commercial, social and legal innovations that will profoundly
change life both in the world of work and in society generally”;
 “A society in which people interact with technology as an important part of life
and social organization to exchange information on a global scale”;
 A society characterized by a high level of information intensity in the everyday
life of most citizens, in most organizations 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”.
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 Cont’d..
 Information society in 21st century is otherwise referred to as the
Information Age, a historic period in the 21st century characterized by the
rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought
through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology.
 Digital information and the proliferation of networks for its delivery are
accelerating the emergence of the “Information Society”.
 Its technical development and widespread use have, however, outpaced
consideration for security, privacy, and the ethics of the production and the
dissemination of content.
 The prospects offered today by both the multimedia traffic and the
millions of users accessing and transmitting digital information have also
prompted the creation of large multinational conglomerates and
agreements to exploit the resulting market potential.

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 What is Society
 A large group of people who live together in an organized way,
making decisions about how to do things and sharing the work
that needs to be done.
 All the people in a country, or in several similar countries, can
be referred to as a society that can be considered a
classless/multicultural/capitalist/civilized society.
 A society is a group of people participating in continuous social
connection, or a broad social group occupying the same social or
spatial territory, normally exposed to the same political power
and cultural standards that are dominant.

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 Definition of Information Society
 Policy-makers for the G7 (now G8) group of countries
recognized a decade 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 organizational structures to be
more flexible, more participatory and more decentralized.”
 An information society is a society where the creation,
distribution, use, integration and manipulation of information is
a noteworthy economic, political and cultural activity.
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 Cont’d..
 "Information Society" is an overworked expression that has
been used to denote many different concepts.
 The general sense in which it is most commonly used refers to
a growing high-technology, materially affluent service society
where, information rather than raw materials or energy is the
dominant technology.
 It strives toward a society characterized by increasing
responsiveness towards individual human needs, and toward
preserving ecological balances.

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 Cont’d..
 An information society is the one that:
A. Enables most of' its members to engage in productive pursuits that,
are knowledge-intensive ,knowledge-generating arid knowledge-
based;
B. Has a communication network that freely circulates information so
that this information is consistently, effectively and efficiently acted
upon in the making of choices;
C. Manages inevitable conflict between conservative pressures and
pressures for adaptive change by reason, knowledge-based
understanding, and enlightened creative wisdom blended with
human values, rather than traditional resort to base emotions and
brute force alone.

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 Cont’d..

 Society has always been an information society, it has always

been dependent on information.
 And there has always been a rudimentary infrastructure.
 The earliest written records in all cultures were inventories, laws
and histories the basic mnemonic tools to preserve society.
 Even written literature was intended to prompt memory and not
to convey meaning directly.
 When the quantity of information became too great for memory
to remember, society created approximate method for its storage.
 Information was still seen as passive, ancillary to the activity it
recorded, rather than as a dynamic resource.
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 Changes in the Nature of Information

 The phenomenon that caused the recognition was the called "Information explosion"-a

misleading phrase, because it suggest that a single event that caused simply an increase in the

amount of information available to us.

 Actually there was not only quantitative but also a

qualitative change Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries there was a

change in the nature of information and knowledge and the way in which it developed.

 Early information was almost entirely discipline-dependent in the sense that information "as

generated by practitioners, and controlled arid disseminated by them The new disciplines that

serve society are information-dependent, because they often call on selected information stores

that already exist in conventional discipline areas.

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 Cont’d..
 Further, old practices or systems are now information
independent, whether they realise it or not, because the
amount and kind of information that they, must handle is
too great or too complex for their original design; they
could have handled more of the same kind of information,
or they could have handled some of a new kind of
information, but not more of both at the same time.

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 The Historical Perspective of Information Society
 Changes is the very essence of a growing society.
 Changes can be visible in life styles of people, their living
environments, mode of production of goods and services, places
of work, education and training, culture and in many others.
 However, changes in society that are drastic in nature have been
identified with three major epochs of history, generally referred
to as:
 The pre-industrial agrarian society
 The industrial society
 The post-industrial society which is evolving currently.

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 1. Pre-industrial Society
 In the pre-industrial society, most people were engaged in the
extraction activities of agriculture fishing and mining.
 The social structure was fairly simple, Ownership of land
provided the power base.
 Life for the people centred round cultivation of land for raising
crops for food.
 Cultural and social life were confined to the environments in
which they flourished.
 In the competition tot scare resources, the mighty took
everything or a major share of every thing.

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 2. Industrial Society

 The Industrial society has been organized around energy as the

main source for tile production of goods and services on a mass
scale.
 The majority of the work force was engaged in the
manufacturing activities and the distribution of the outputs.
 There was a drastic change in the social structure.
 Power and prestige passed from the landowners to the industrial
class.
 The principle of economic production was influential in shaping
the value and ways of life.
 Many countries in the developing at present are passing through
this stage of growth and development.
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 [Link]-Industrial Society
 The post-industrial society has been emerging slowly
but surely in the last three decades.
 The most prominent representations of this type of
society are the United States countries of Western
Europe and Japan.
 The attributes of this post-industrial society are:
1. The centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation
2. Distinct change from a commodity producing to a service economy
3. The pre-eminence of a managerial, professional and technocratic
class.

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 Bell's Theory of Post-industrial Society
 In the coming of Post-Industrial Society (1971-), Bell argued that
the increased part played by science in the production process.
 The rise to prominence of professional scientific and technical
groups and the introduction of computer technology are all
evidence of a new 'axial principle' at the core of the socio-
economic system, namely the centrality of theoretical knowledge.
 The emerging social framework of Information Society builds upon
this base.
 Information increasingly becomes a source of added value -and
thus of wealth.
 A greater proportion of workers is employed in the 'Information
sphere' .

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Factors Determining the Arrival of Information Society
1) Shifts from an industrial economy to an Information Economy; that
is to say that in industrial economy capital as the strategic resource,
while in Information Economy information is the strategic resource.
2) A telecommunication based information service infrastructure.
3) A high degree of computerization, large volumes of electronic data
transmission and employment of Information Technology.
4) Characterized by the fact that the rapid and convenient delivery of
needed information is the ordinary state of affairs.

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 Properties Of The Information
 It is now an accepted fact that information is a vital resource in
development activities of any society/nation.
 Hence it is necessary, to understand the concept, its nature, scope and
purpose.
 The last century, has seen the emergence of technology as the dominating
factor in the times of all mankind, and its vital element "information" is of
great importance for the world.
 All our economic and social progress depends very significantly in the
transfer of scientific and technical information.
 People in different situation require information on a subject in different
forms and with different emphasis and different depths of explanation.
 Even the same person seeks information in different ways and forms on
different occasions, depending on his knowledge of the subject and the
reasons for wanting the information.
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 Disciplines Centred Around Information
 There are a number of disciplines that claim to be dealing with the
phenomenon of information as the: central core. Some of these disciplines
are:
1)Electrical Engineering e. g signal transmission over channels as propounded
in the information theory of Shannon;
2) Computer Technology e. g., information processing , storage and retrieval;
3) Physical Sciences e. g. Information considered as an abstraction similar to
matter and energy; also analogous of the phenomenon of movement and
diffusion structure communications and entropy;
4) Biological Sciences e. g., information processing in living, beings;
5) Behavioral Sciences e.g., cognitive processes of information
6) Social Sciences e.g., Sociology and economics of information and
knowledge. Here information is viewed as a resource and an economic
commodity
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 Cont’d..
7. Philosophical studies e.g., conventional and modern studies
on epistemology;
8) Linguistic studies e.g., expressing, structuring, coding and
communicating ideas and information;
9) Library and Information Science, e.g., application of
Information Technology for conventional practice of librarianship
and the new dimensions that are evolving. Including the newly
emerging information system and services.
10) Information Science and Technology e.g., studies involving
the intersection of the disciplines mentioned above

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 Theory Of Information And Approaches
 This theory pertains more accurately to the communication process
of signal transmission and has an extremely sophisticated
mathematical base for examining the effects of transmission of
messages.
 When the communication engineers use the word "information",
they are not concerned with contents but with signal transmission.
 They, do not deal with the contents that are to be communicated but
the instructions that the sender, by signals, conveys to the receiver
to select a particular message from the given ensemble of' possible
messages.
 Therefore, in this narrow technical sense of the term, information is
the statistical probability of a sign or signal being selected from a
given set of signs or signals.
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 Cont’d..
 The model has been simplified into a flow model viz.,
Source Message Channel Receiver
 This mode recurs implicitly or explicitly in many of the
information transfer systems that have been evolved dealing
with contents of information as well.
 Wersig and Nenling consider information much more
comprehensively, adopting six different
approaches
1) The Structural Approach ( matter oriented) in which information
is seen as structure of the world or static relations between physical
objects which may be perceived or not.

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 Cont’d..
2) The knowledge Approach which records knowledge that is built up on the basis of
perception
of the structure of the world. This approach is not recommended because knowledge and
information are used as synonyms.
3) The Message Approach in which information is recorded as symbols oriented in a physical
carriers. This approach is used only by those concerned with the mathematical theory of
communications.
4) The Meaning Approach where the semantic content of a message is accepted as
information.
5) The Effect Approach or the Recipient Oriented Approach which states that information
occurs only as a specific effect of a process.

6) The process Approach where information is seen as a process which for example occurs in
the human mind when a problem and useful data are brought together.
 In short, according to these approaches, information is considered to be a process and can be
understood only if it is defined in relationship to needs either as reduction of uncertainty
caused by a communication of data or as data used for reducing uncertainty.

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 Features of Information Society

 Economic (economic value);

 Occupational (occupational change | knowledge worker);
 Spatial (space | information flows);
 A shift from industrial to knowledge-based economies;
 A n increase in the importance of services over manufacturing;
 The growth of creative industries;
 The rise of the information worker;
 The spread of ICT throughout society;
 Increasing importance of knowledge and information;
 Blurring of the distinction between work and leisure;
 The development of new forms of social interaction; and
 The transformation of traditional institutions.
26 By: Milkesa D,2015/2023 03/25/2025
THANK YOU SO
MUCH

27 By: Milkesa D,2015/2023 03/25/2025