Knowledge society

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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 and useful result of perception, learning and reasoning.

1 Characteristics
2 Increasing relevance
3 Freedom
4 Examples of societies that can blossom to knowledge societies
5 Infrastructure
6 See also
7 External links
- 7.1 Wikibooks

[edit] 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 of 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.

[edit] 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 development 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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

[edit] 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.