Dr.P.Madhu

Some QuestionsIs n’t since ancient times, all societies have

probably been, each in its own way, knowledge societies?

Does the control of knowledge can go hand in hand with serious inequality, exclusion and social conflict?

Will knowledge societies be societies based on knowledge-sharing for all or on the partition of knowledge?

Can Knowledge be considered an ordinary saleable commodity?

The very compulsion to be compatible with the techsavy world is a kind of monoculturation!

The term “Knowledge society” is first used by Peter Druker in 1969 as a fancy neologism.

The word later acquired significant meanings.

The term “information society” is derived from Manuell Castell’s usage of “information age” in 1990

Technological & Knowledge Society• The idea of the information society is based

on technological breakthroughs.• The concept of knowledge societies

encompasses much broader social, ethical and political dimensions

• The growth of networks alone will not be able to lay the groundwork for the knowledge society.

• While information is a knowledge-generating tool, it is not knowledge itself

information is in many cases a commodity, in which case it is bought or sold, whereas knowledge, despite certain restrictions (defence secrets, intellectual property, traditional forms of esoteric knowledge, for example), belongs of right to any reasonable mind.

Today, as we are witnessing the advent of a global information society where technology has increased the amount of information available and the speed of its transmission beyond all expectations, there is still a long way to go before we achieve genuine knowledge societies

• Knowledge societies are about capabilities to identify, produce, process, transform, disseminate and use information to build and apply knowledge for human development.

• In other words, the global information society is meaningful only if it favours the development of knowledge societies and sets itself the goal of “tending towards human development based on human rights”

Some factsKnowledge was long the exclusive domain of

tight circles of wise men and the initiated few.

Secrecy was the organizing principle behind these exclusive knowledge societies

With much effort of the freethinkers knowledge was liberated to the free domain

countries of the North, and North America in particular, enjoy overwhelming supremacy in the information and communication technologies market

Various forms of knowledge and culture always enter into the building of any society, including those strongly influenced by scientific progress and modern technology

‘Knowledge’ is being commodifed

• The new technology revolution marks the entrance of information and knowledge in a cumulative logic, which Manuel Castells describes as:

“the application of such knowledge to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation”

Some IdealsKnowledge society should not be a

monocultured oneA knowledge society must foster knowledge-

sharingKnowledge should be “public good”Knowledge should be a road to wisdom

The rise of a global information society spawned by the new technology revolution must not overshadow the fact that it is valuable only as a means to achieve genuine knowledge societies

Some ThreatsAn excessive appropriation or

Commoditization of knowledge in the global information society

would be a serious threat to the diversity of cognitive cultures

Some Thoughts: Thought 1On what foundations could a global

knowledge society that would be a source of development for all and, in particular, for the least advanced countries, be built?

Can the ‘digital divide’ be reduced if not the economic inequality of north & south not reduced?

Thought 2are we in the midst of a transition from

(traditional) memory societies to knowledge societies?

Are we witnessing a new industrial revolution?

Economy dematerialized?Sharing and restrictions grow side by side?

in any social organization there is a set of networks within which individuals maintain special relationships, whether family, ethnic, economic, professional, social, religious, political, or all of these simultaneously

But in the context of the information revolution, forms of organization have been created that no longer conform to the logic of spatial centrality and the poles of conventional decision-making.

Traditional vertical hierarchies are giving way to burgeoning horizontal relationships, often transcending social and national frontiers.

Are not emerging knowledge societies – which are definitely societies of the intangible and network societies – deeply different from historical knowledge societies that came before?

The magnitude of technological change, which over recent decades has affected the means of knowledge creation, transmission and processing, have brought a number of experts to hypothesize that we stand on the threshold of a new era of knowledge.

Following on from knowledge regimes based on oral tradition, written expression and then the printed word, the rise of digital media has fostered an unprecedented expansion of networks, along two axes: the horizontal axis of the acceleration of transmissions, and the vertical axis of the densification of connections

In knowledge societies, knowledge will surely feel the impact of the densification of trade. Yet it will never be considered as any other commodity.

Paradoxically, it seems that the more we master knowledge, the more ignorant we become.

With the apparition of new knowledge media, the limitless rise of the machine world seems to herald the atrophy of human capabilities

Nevertheless, despite their sophistication, machines will never replace the human being when it comes to the reflection necessary to transform information into knowledge

The use of electronic word-processing or of search engines are recent habits, yet they are already so deeply rooted in our everyday language and practices that cognitive activities are beginning to look more and more like computer- assisted processes

• Communication technologies interact with, rather than precede, the elaboration and construction of knowledge.

• The social dividing line that once clearly separated cultural producers from cultural consumers is becoming blurred, just as the boundary between the producers and recipients of scientific knowledge tends to disappear

Thought 3• Knowledge society as learning society• The term learning society, given currency by

Robert Hutchins (1968) and Torsten Husén (1974), indicates a new kind of society in which the old limits on where and when organized knowledge could be acquired (inside educational institutions or immediately after initial training) no longer apply

Culture itself is no longer built with blueprints of permanence and repeat production, but with those of creativity and renewal.

The general spread of “learnership” to all levels of society should prove the logical counterpart of this permanent instability engendered by such a culture of innovation

• How, though, is such a culture to be reconciled with the handing on of values, or with any real economic, social or political planning?

• How, in other words, is the never-ending search for novelty ever to found anything lasting?

• How can it avoid disregarding the longer term for the sake of the immediate gratifications of profitability and fashion?

Paradoxically, is learning society an anti-wisdom society?

Sociologists, economists and philosophers who concern themselves with technological innovation now recognize that innovations and their diffusion make progress in patterns that are less one-directional than had been supposed

In the knowledge society the role of the public is bound to grow, for the public is in its own right an element of the innovation process, which brings out the social aspect of creativity and presupposes a real knowledge-sharing among contributors who come from the most heterogeneous of positions

• EG. • Ordinary patients have not hesitated to stand

up against the power of the medical establishment: as those with personal experience of the disease, they have set about influencing the therapeutic protocols even if it means forcing a reconsideration of some of the principles that have traditionally governed clinical trials, such as the use of placebos.

“anthropopoetic” innovations leading to the evolution of post-human cyborg.

Thought 4Life-long education for all?Is market alone capable of providing life long

education for all?

Thought 5Privatized higher education?

Thought 6Keeping alive the possibilities of Knowledge

sharing

Thought 7Can science and technology democratized?

Thought 8Is knowledge society a ‘risk society’?

Thought 9Diversity of knowledge possible?

Thought 10From access to participation: towards

knowledge societies for all?

A Critique on Market Fundamentalism