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A knowledge society is a formal association of people with similar interests, who try to make effective use of their combined knowledge about their area of interest, and in the process contribute to this knowledge. In this sense, knowledge is the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning
Characteristics
Knowledge societies have the characteristic that knowledge forms major component of any activity, particularly economic activities. Economic, social, cultural, and all other human activities become dependent on a huge volume knowledge and information. A knowledge society/economy is one in which knowledge becomes major product and raw material.
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.
Increasing relevance
Knowledge and information are vital components of the formation of any society because every society is formed around some shared concepts. One of the contributions of Globalisation and new ICT is creation of a global society with a shared knowledge of issues and possibilities.
'Material resources and their processing' - henceforth E - have been the basis of economic growth. Music, art, path-breaking thought streams, mixing of cultural attributes of different societies bringing in new cultural attributes, etc. - henceforth C - result in cultural development and act as a catalyst in entire social development. Now that the many societies have so matured that almost all the activities involved in E and C rely on existing knowledge base very much. This knowledge is available in written documents, written laws, unwritten laws, people's convictions, people's words in different languages etc. In the same way as the unequal distribution of materials (wealth in generalized term) caused unbalanced and inappropriate development of society to date, imbalances in the knowledge distribution, knowledge availability, knowledge sharing, etc. hinder the economic/cultural/social devlopment of human societies. The knowledge societies first realize the importance of knowledge and also the importance of proper knowledge distribution, sharing and building for social development.
Freedom
- Knowledge by nature is free
- Knowledge should be free for better benefit of society
- Knowledge should be free for better development and crystallization of knowledge
- The argument that freeing knowledge kills motivation for creating knowledge should be addressed.
Examples of societies that can blossom to knowledge societies
People 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
- Mystic talking to scientists
Infrastructure
A knowledge society needs infrastructure like
- Physical: meeting places, notice boards ...
- Technological: local language content sharing, mailing lists, web portals, wikis, chat rooms, video conferencing, virtual meetings, collaborative development environments, distance education ...
free software movement is a success story of knowledge society
The term is frequently used by politicians, policy-makers, journalists and by scientists in the Foresight social studies.
See also
External links (examples)
- Knowledge Society - European Commission Homepage
- EU CORDIS page
- Economic Fundamentals of the Knowledge Society- Stanford Univ. Economics faculty.
"Knowledge society"