Information society (Session 3)

This week's reading was about information society and cyberspace. I already read about information society in many articles, and actually we are in the middle of 'information society' now. However, it was a good change to grasp concrete idea of information society to me.

In the article 'The information society revisited' the author explains about a difinition of information and information society. He suggests six ways to distinguish information society from other societies;
-Technological innovation(using cable, satellite television, computer-to-computer communication,etc)
-Occupational change(manufacturing employment to service sector employment, and importance of capacity to manipulate information and creating, using information)
-Economy change(Half of US's GNP is combined with information sectors.)
-Space(All cyber spaces connected to networks)
-Culture(TV, computer games, radio, movies... all information environment form&change culture)

The process of transforming from industrial society to information society is quite smooth, and it is hard to define 'what is information society" well, because of the definition is based on qualititive assessment rather than quantititive assessment, but I could understand what changes we have experienced now in information society.

Another article 'Cyberspace and the American Dream' also mentions about information society, but it concentrates more on the nature of cyberspace.

Cyberspace is bioelectronic environment. It is inhabited by knowledge, and it is a kind of warehouse of digital form(disc, tape, CD...) Adding, creating, defining, and expanding is getting much faster than the past. The nature and ownership of property also changes, and market place also changes from one-time monopolies to competitive battleground. It is a dynamic competitoin which challenge the old one and replace them. Community in cyberspace is loose and heterogeneous. it glue holding together an increasingly free & diverse society. and this gives an answer to my question not clearly, but to a certain degree. My question was about a relationship in cyberspace, and I was not sure about talking to webcam, and making friend thought that could be a 'relationship.' According to this article, it is a nature of cyberspace. We connect to each other in cyberspace(it is really huge, so we hardly imagine its size :)), and people communicate and interact each other in this diverse society, but it certainly holds tighly.

So, How about education? How can we define education in information society? Education environment is also affected by technology. Different form industrial society, media(such as computer, video) are used frequently, and the interaction between students takes place in cyberspace(blog-we are doing now :) and facebook) rather than face-to-face. In cyberspace, students present different points of view, and it makes dynamic discussion. Students, as a active lerners, creat, add and expand educational materials, Teacher also act as a coach, supporter, and peer-lerner, from lecturer in industrial society.