Communication of Knowledge in an Information Society

Abstract

Though no society can yet be termed a digital society, the United States may serve as a model of what can be expected in this direction in the time ahead. In the United States, the capability of the new information technologies have been directed primarily to commercial and military objectives. These have contributed to the creation of a new and highly inequitable international division of labor. In this general context, it is recognized that knowledge and communication are affected more by the basic imperatives of the underlying economy and the objectives and values it generates, than by the features of the new instrumentation. Computerization and telecommunications, by themselves, are unable to push the social order to a higher level of human fulfillment and social improvement. At the same time, they are also unlikely, by themselves, to reduce human relationships to the state of robotics. Genuine communication require equality in social relationships. Knowledge presupposes an objective of human welfare. In the “information societies” now being constructed, neither condition is strongly represented.