Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
BOX 2.1
'THE INFORMATION AGE'
These two terms have been used frequently over the past 20 years in
order to describe what's distinctive about the early twenty-first cen-
tury, especially in advanced capitalist countries. At a global level, the
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report
The
knowledge-based economy
(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development, 1996) and the World Bank report
Knowledge for develop-
ment
(World Bank, 1998) were key publications. Together they helped
to popularise an emerging idea among policymakers that education
(especially further and higher education) was an undervalued form of
knowledge capital - undervalued in the sense that withholding it from
people constitutes 'lost wealth' that would otherwise be created. The
argument was that equipping more people with knowledge and skills
would bring its own rewards in a hyper-competitive global economy.
This has underpinned a global attempt to produce more graduates by
expanding university and college enrolments. But more broadly, the
term 'knowledge society' refers to two other things: first, the increased
importance of various forms of knowledge as lucrative commodities
(e.g. the reports of management consultants) along with the increased
number of 'symbolic workers' (e.g. software designers); and second, the
increased volume and availability of knowledge, notably because of the
Internet.
The term 'the information age' is associated with the writings of
sociologist Manuel Castells (1996). It describes an epochal increase in
the volume of information available and the speed at which it moves
between producers and users. Though there's no real consensus on the
definitional niceties, we might think of 'information' as akin to
pieces
of knowledge (e.g. facts or instructions), and 'knowledge' as statements
(e.g. narratives or theories) in which those pieces are
connected
logically
or plausibly, and
contextualised
so that their meaning or significance is
apparent. For information to be formative, it must usually be processed
into knowledge. Equally, we might say that 'information' predomi-
nantly addresses 'what?' questions, while 'knowledge' tends to speak
more 'why?', 'how?' and 'what should be done?' questions. It's been
suggested that in mature democratic societies the production of knowl-
edge has been extended and democratised in the past 30 years - notably
because non-governmental organisations (NGOs), foundations, think
tanks and charities now routinely produce and disseminate their own
research (breaking the previous quasi-monopoly of universities).
