What is Information Society for You?

[TmP]

Hi!

I've been preparing for some time to write a thesis about the information society and how it is supported by the financial instruments of the EU.

I've been a ubuntu linux enthusiast since Hoary (previous experiments with Slackware almost put me off). I believe that the process of creating a distribution is a perfect example of the creativity of the internet societies.

The Information Society is a very difficult term to define. Some of the classic definition involve assuming that the information will become the new basic asset. Possesion of information in either the form of academic knowledge, know-how or other structured information is the basis of wealth in the information society. Frankly it's pure theory. And what about the facts?

What is Information Society for you?

[Lord Illidan]

Glad to help.

In a nutshell, according to me, the Information Society is the global ICT community, that uses the powers granted by technology to share information.

Linux is a direct child of this Information Society. Linus Torvalds himself and the early developers who joined shared much of their information required to build linux, using the primitive internet as a medium. And this still persists today.

[Iandefor]

A buzzword!

Well, in the sense I'm aware of it- a society in which information is the primary form of exchange.

Society is a collection of people sharing ideas, thoughts, and values (mostly reinforcing the latter, though, but there is active debate, too). Society has always been about information in the first place. Gossip, howtos, news (a more advanced form of gossip, really), and debate are already the primary forms of interchange in society. By restricting it to commerce (your hints at information becoming an asset imply this), you're locking out the much larger ecosystem of information that's already there. 'Information Society' is a buzzword for what amounts to little more than a shift in the way society shares its information and conducts its business. It'll still be gossip, howtos, and debates, with commerce, but merely in a different way that lets two people on different ends of the earth to exchange information without the overhead of moving one person from one end of the earth to the other.

Also, information has already become a commodity, not anything of worth. Google indexes an entire Internet full of data and lets you search it for free, and Wikipedia authors manually combs through this and the printed word to build articles on a menagerie of topics, ranging from astrophysics to embryogenesis to what a human being is. Information is already free and will become little more than a source for reinforcing what's already being traded freely. Commerce has it's place, but it'll still move by the dollar.

[adamkane]

Fun subject. Very hard to explain to friends and family ignorant of Linux and opensource.

I think that LAMP CMS is a movement in itself. A movement for the moment based on the powerful opensource tools PHP and MySQL.

osCommerce (along with Paypal) - create your own store, and distribute goods from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world.

Moodle - provide education tools to any group anywhere. All you need is a local area network.