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Characteristics of the Information Society
Some characteristics of the modern Information Society would include:
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the development of information as a central strategic resource in
industrial and economic development (hence the centrality of Drucker's
'knowledge workers') on the management and application of which individual
units (companies, nations, geographical regions) are increasingly dependent
for their competitiveness; of course, all technological changes have always
been dependent on information, but 'what differentiates the current process of
technological change is that its raw material itself is information, and so
is its outcome' (Castells (1989)) or, again, 'what is specific to the
informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge
itself as the main source of productivity' (1996 )
-
the very rapid growth in informatization of the economy which
allows closer links between regional, national and international economies, as
well as breaking down the conventional barriers between financial sectors as
all work, including manufacturing, becomes increasingly a matter of the
transmission of information
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the development of global information networks on which what
Castells refers to as the 'network society' is based (1996) and without which
the rapid rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) would have been
impossible; there are now only around a couple of dozen national economies
bigger than the economies of the major TNCs
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the globalization of capitalism which is facilitated by and is dependent
upon those networks, permitting economic decision-making on a world scale in
real time; the term globalization does not refer simply to improved ease of
communication and interaction between nation states, nor is it purely limited
to the economic and business spheres; certainly, globalization does refer to
such developments, but refers also to significant cultural changes, including
for example greater migration, more international tourism, the development of
'world music', greater international co-operation in political, economic and
ecological matters; a minor, but none the less telling, example of this
cultural change can be found in the international advertising of certain
consumer goods such as jeans, where advertisers often no longer see any
necessity to provide different ads for different national markets; it is
important, too, to consider the detachment from local constraints, which is
afforded by internationalization of the economy, leading to 'a trend that we
would call "bureaucratrization" in the Weberian sense, that is the
predominance of the rationality of means over the rationality of goals ....
the interests of a local business élite, or of a local resident working class,
or of a local market, will be constantly subordinated to the need for the
organization to be connected simultaneously with the financial markets, the
pool of professional labor, the necessary technology...' (Castells (1989))
-
the reduction in the constraints of space, whereby Silicon Valley,
for example, becomes just another node in the network society, its actual
geographical location being largely irrelevant in an economy which has passed,
in Negroponte's terms, from shifting around atoms to shifting around bits:
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