Chapter 2: Life in the Information Age

1997

This anthology is the product of the ideas and work of many individuals. Lt.Gen. Ervin J. Rokke first suggested the need for this anthology and organized a series of meetings to discuss potential topics for inclusion in such a volume. David Johnson helped sort and make sense of the many suggestions received. Alissa Tuyahov and W. Thomas Kemp, III spared no effort in searching out the "pearls" from various fields for this volume. Among the many individuals who contributed helpful suggestions were

In a world where data/information/factoids/lies and bullshit drowns humanity, this essay considers experienced changes that took place during the last quarter century. The author proposes no solutions to the flood but does enumerate experiences and, important (for him), encounters with cogent influences. This essay also will serve as a pre-amble to a larger study, in progress, wherein the author uses his own history and nature to attempt to understand his own reality, implying that perceived realities amongst fellow humans importantly differ. While obvious to any thoughtful person the causality warrants study.

Futures, 1998

Information theory, while claiming universality, ignores civilisation and spiritual perspectives of knowledge. Moreover, the information society heralded by many as the victory of humanity over darkness is merely capitalism disguised but now commodifying selves as well. This essay argues for a more communicative approach wherein futures can be created through authentic global conversations-a gaia of civilisations. Current trends, however, do not lie in that direction. Instead, we are moving towards temporal and cultural impoverishment. Is the Web then the iron cage or can a global ohana (family, civil society) be created through cybertechnologies? Answering these and other questions are possible only when we move to layers of analysis outside conventional understandings of information and the information era and to a paradigm where communication and culture are central.

Australian Journal of Social Issues, 1984

Theory and Society, 2008

In the late twentieth century, many social scientists and other social commentators came to characterize the world as evolving into an "information society." Central to these claims was the notion that new social uses of information, and particularly application of scientific knowledge, are transforming social life in fundamental ways. Among the supposed transformations are the rise of intellectuals in social importance, growing productivity and prosperity stemming from increasingly knowledge-based economic activity, and replacement of political conflict by authoritative, knowledge-based decision-making. We trace these ideas to their origins in the Enlightenment doctrines of Saint Simon and Comte, show that empirical support for them has never been strong, and consider the durability of their social appeal. Intellectuals love to vie in the effort to name their own ageto define the essential and salient qualities that distinguish the times in which they live from every other. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, the upper hand in this struggle often seemed to go those insisting that we were entering an "Information Society." Beginning in the 1960s the idea took hold among many social scientists that information had assumed a new and decisive role in human affairs. For exponents of this idea, social processes based on innovative information uses, and particularly the transformation of information into authoritative knowledge, manifestly represented the distinguishing feature of the age. Characterizing the world's "advanced" societies as "information societies" became as axiomatic as bracketing other eras as "Neolithic societies" or "feudal societies."

Choice Reviews Online, 2015

Where are we now historically? Who are we becoming? Where are we going? These are the main questions of Floridi's book. The answer to the third question is wrapped in the answers to the other two questions. Floridi overtly answers: we are now in hyperhistory; we are becoming predominately inforgs; we are at the doorway of a no-return path towards a total onlife existence surrounded by the envelope of the infosphere. I will explain Floridi's answers and his technical terminology later. Before I do so, I have a few background comments. Floridi admittedly uses neologisms as a technique for solving what he calls in his Preface "a huge conceptual deficit" (ix) for understanding the increasing control by the technology of ICT (information and communication technology). Though not mentioned by Floridi, Neil Postman called the current development of technology, the Technopoly, and Marshal McLuhan coined the phrase "looking at the world through a rear-view mirror" to describe our failure to comprehend the current envelopment of humanity by electronic media. So, I suppose we can expect a plethora of new linguistic coinage to help us understand the rapidly changing cybersphere, and cyborgs, a linguistic coinage that Floridi finds below par. Before going further, I state what I think amounts to the covert and even repressed message of the book-of the answers to the three questions of the condition of humanity in our current and development historical situation. The repressed message is one of biophobia: life is messy, mortal, and murky; whereas, modern informatics systems are neat, on the verge of providing a form of immortality, and pure or at least clean-all unobtainable in the biosphere. Moreover, the biosphere included and especially humanity will become the silent servants of the infosphere and of ICTs. The skeptical and cynical reader may wonder whether all this new linguistic coinage does no more than cloak the real issues, cover the real message, and attempt to promote a new

This paper examines scholars' discourses on the coming of the Information Age. It starts by discussing scholars who measured the emergence of the Information Age in the early 1960s. Machlup and Galbraith used economic indicators, followed by the exploration of network and knowledge sharing, which is a crucial process in the formation of the Information Age. Ellul (1964) paralleled humanity with technology as a "system," and Mumford (1966) coined the term "megamachine." These early arguments were pessimistic that humans were considered as inevitably confined by uncontrolled structures due to information and its byproducts-technology. However, in the 1980s, Nora and Minc considered the Information Age optimistically by introducing the concept of "Decentralization" to indicate the freedom of "choices" for modern people.

With all the hype these days about social media and the internet providing us with "information" and "false news", it is important that we understand a few basic concepts about human knowledge and our learning process, to put today's overwhelming flood of "information" into a context that we can deal with in our daily lives. In a presentation to the International Federation for Alternative Trade (IFAT) in Kilkenny Ireland in April 1991, Irish engineer Michael Cooley presented a graph showing the process whereby we sort the raw data which comes into our lives through our eyes, ears and other senses, over time and with experience, and how each of us continuously turns this data into information, knowledge and eventually, wisdom. This is the learning process and we all use it every day. 1 The left axis of the graph below shows "noise" or a measure of unintelligibility at the high end and "signal", or clarity of understandable patterns, at the low end. The greater the signal, the potentially more "useful" the information. The graph shows how we use our own individual and highly personal filters to discern patterns in a mass of unsorted data. These filters are many and varied, for example: gender, race, language, religious and political beliefs, scientific methodology and previous sets of patterns that we may have stored for future reference. The patterns discerned in this filtered data in our memory "banks" thus becomes information, which when subjected to further broader filters and patterns, becomes knowledge, then wisdom. This Cooley calls the learning process.