Transcript Knowledge Society

Dr.P.Madhu
Some Questions
 Is 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 facts
 Knowledge 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 Ideals
 Knowledge society should not be a monocultured one
 A knowledge society must foster knowledge-sharing
 Knowledge 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 Threats
 An 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 1
 On 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 2
 are 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 4
 Life-long education for all?
 Is market alone capable of providing life long
education for all?
Thought 5
 Privatized higher education?
Thought 6
 Keeping alive the possibilities of Knowledge sharing
Thought 7
 Can science and technology democratized?
Thought 8
 Is knowledge society a ‘risk society’?
Thought 9
 Diversity of knowledge possible?
Thought 10
 From access to participation: towards knowledge
societies for all?
A Critique on Market
Fundamentalism