Broadly speaking, the term Knowledge Society refers to any society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. It may also refer to the use a certain society gives to information. A Knowledge society "creates, shares and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people".
Characteristics
Knowledge societies have the characteristic that knowledge forms a major component of any human activity. Economic, social, cultural, and all other human activities become dependent on a huge volume of knowledge and information. A knowledge society is one in which knowledge becomes a major creative force.
Knowledge societies are not a new occurrence. For example, fishermen have long shared the knowledge of predicting the weather to their community and this knowledge gets added to the social capital of the community.
What is new is that
With current technologies, knowledge societies need not be constrained by geographic proximity.
Current technology offers much more possibilities for sharing, archiving and retrieving knowledge.
Knowledge has become the most important capital in the present age, and hence the success of any society lies in harnessing it.
Examples of societies that can blossom to knowledge societiesPeople from the same field:
Teachers teaching the same subject.
Fans of the same musical group.
Artists with similar interests
People from different fields.
Engineers talking to scientists about a scientific issue related to their engineering project.
Researchers of different fields discussing a common research problem.
Artists interested in fractals getting in touch with programmers.
Mystics talking to scientists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_society
Broadly speaking, the term Knowledge Society refers to any society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. It may also refer to the use a certain society gives to information. A Knowledge society "creates, shares and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people".
Characteristics
Knowledge societies have the characteristic that knowledge forms a major component of any human activity. Economic, social, cultural, and all other human activities become dependent on a huge volume of knowledge and information. A knowledge society is one in which knowledge becomes a major creative force.
Knowledge societies are not a new occurrence. For example, fishermen have long shared the knowledge of predicting the weather to their community and this knowledge gets added to the social capital of the community.
What is new is that
- With current technologies, knowledge societies need not be constrained by geographic proximity
- Current technology offers much more possibilities for sharing, archiving and retrieving knowledge
- Knowledge has become the most important capital in the present age, and hence the success of any society lies in harnessing it.
Information which is very important in human life makes us aware of what happens in our environment and more importantly this information provides us with knowledge .
This knowledge in turn enables us relate meaningfully with other people which helps us make informed decisions and take advantage of opportunities that come our way.
However, it is very obvious that this information like material wealth is not distributed equally the society we find ourselves.
The reason being that the poor in the society or let me use the word "less privileged do not get access to information and knowledge whereas the rich of the "aristocrats" easily get access to information.
This we can classify them as the "haves" and have nots".
