Yuan zhu's Blog

Common on the first lecture of what are information societies

In the developed world the increasingly ubiquitous diffusion of the new information and communications technologies into almost every aspect of cultural, economic, political and social life has led to an assertion that we are entering a new epoch in human development: the information society.

The information society is usually characterized by the following features:

1. Information becomes increasingly important as the economic, cultural and political resources upon which the emerging global information economy and information societies are organized, with the majority of occupations based upon information or knowledge work.
2. The dynamic innovation of ICTs is seen to be transforming the potential for processing, storing and transmitting of information in ways previously unimaginable and ICTs are thereby becoming more pervasive in our life.
3. Electronically networked economies and societies fundamentally transform our conceptions of time and space, enabling information flows to transcend temporal and physical boundaries and thereby facilitate processes of globalization and networking enterprise.
4. Information becomes culturally more prevalent through multi-media applications, but also more contested and less meaningful, in a world of competing, contradictory and constantly changing images, signs and messages.

 What the information societies takes to us?

The change of production and economic structure.

On the one hand, information technique advances unceasingly. which is applied in every aspect of production.And the advancement of the economical informationization and the production informationization, the information industries of GNP proportion is more higher. On the other hand,the existing production method will have the tremendous changes, then one batch of network factory will be presented.

 Work and life style changed

The multimedia information networks are joining the whole social – the government, the school, the store, the hospital, the bank, the transportation, the family…Causes the official business, the trade, the shopping, the medical service, the teaching, the cultural entertainment and so on to be carried on the network(or network auxiliary) possibly.

 The change in ways of interpersonal communication and communication media

Along with the information technology and network extremely development，the combination of television, telephone and the data transmission, and three-in-one installment of the computer, the television and the telephone are used universally, they will change the existing interpersonal exchange and the mass media dissemination way enormously. The people can carry on communicating and gaining information on the Internet: To Chat, watch TV, see a movie, read the news

 The change of social structure

The world is shrinking, the society had become wired, to assume a certain of network, At present, a high degree of freedom and open of Internet, it is emergent to have a manager mode in network society, The entire society maintains the information network, it causes the society frailer. All of this will cause to form the new social structure certainly.

However, there are a lot of problems in the information societies, such as information pollution, information overload, information crime, information syndrome and so on are becoming a cause for concern.

There are two interesting videos enclosed,  Let’s see and what can we learned from that.