The Information Society

[RonPrice]

I began my university entrance studies in 1962. I completed my final year of baseball, having decided not to play the game in organized leagues ever again, and began my travelling and pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in the small town of Dundas at the heart of Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe in the same year. The case for the information society, what became known as the information age thesis, was also launched in 1962 by Fritz Machlup’s Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. This book brought to the fore for the first time the large and increasing role of the ‘knowledge industries’ in an advanced economy. By the 1970s there was a whole literature which concerned itself with this knowledge industry. Machlup(1902-1983) divided information use into five types of knowledge:

• practical knowledge

• intellectual knowledge, that is, general culture and the satisfying of intellectual curiosity

• pastime knowledge, that is, knowledge satisfying non-intellectual curiosity or the desire for light entertainment and emotional stimulation

• spiritual or religious knowledge, and

• unwanted knowledge, accidentally acquired and aimlessly retained

-Ron Price with thanks to Alistair Duff, The Normative Crisis of the Information Society, in the Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace: Cyber-psychology, Vol.2, No.1, June 2008.

 

I was beginning to be swamped

by that knowledge explosion &

had no idea that information was

enveloping society as well as me

as I tried to study nine subjects in

1962/3, and then five subjects in

1963/4. I was so bludgeoned by

the endless words and that mild

schizo-affective state as well as

those erotic entanglements that

a curtain parted this lover & the

loved one. Secrets were many &

strangers were myriad while the

world of knowledge had been so

multiplied that my journey in the

spirit of search was hidden by the

veilings of sense.1 I nearly missed

the knowledge of the Manifestation

of the Sun of Reality in those days

of confusion and long beginnings.

 

1 Baha’u’llah, The Seven Valleys, Baha’i Pub. Trust, Wilmette, 1952, p.24.

 

Ron Price

14 February 2012

[Turtle]

I began my university entrance studies in 1962. I completed my final year of baseball, having decided not to play the game in organized leagues ever again, and began my travelling and pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community in the small town of Dundas at the heart of Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe in the same year. The case for the information society, what became known as the information age thesis, was also launched in 1962 by Fritz Machlup’s Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. This book brought to the fore for the first time the large and increasing role of the ‘knowledge industries’ in an advanced economy. By the 1970s there was a whole literature which concerned itself with this knowledge industry. Machlup(1902-1983) divided information use into five types of knowledge:

• practical knowledge

• intellectual knowledge, that is, general culture and the satisfying of intellectual curiosity

• pastime knowledge, that is, knowledge satisfying non-intellectual curiosity or the desire for light entertainment and emotional stimulation

• spiritual or religious knowledge, and

• unwanted knowledge, accidentally acquired and aimlessly retained

-Ron Price with thanks to Alistair Duff, The Normative Crisis of the Information Society, in the Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace: Cyber-psychology, Vol.2, No.1, June 2008.

...

Ron Price

14 February 2012

 

arguably any historical milestone in facilitated communication could be a marker of an "information society". the first smoke signals, the first semaphore, the first writing, the first printing, the first telegraph, first telephone, first radio, first tv, first internet, and whatever is yet to come. all heralded by some while castigated by others. promised land and hell in a handbasket all at once. cat's out o' the bag, jin is out of the bottle, and pandora's box is wide open. c'est la vie.

 

on another note, your "pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community" is our proselytizing and something to avoid here if you please.

[RonPrice]

arguably any historical milestone in facilitated communication could be a marker of an "information society". the first smoke signals, the first semaphore, the first writing, the first printing, the first telegraph, first telephone, first radio, first tv, first internet, and whatever is yet to come. all heralded by some while castigated by others. promised land and hell in a handbasket all at once. cat's out o' the bag, jin is out of the bottle, and pandora's box is wide open. c'est la vie.

 

on another note, your "pioneering for the Canadian Baha’i community" is our proselytizing and something to avoid here if you please.

--------------------

Hardly proselytizing, Turtle. If you go to this link, Turtle, you will see that what I have done here is hardly proselytizing by any stretch of the imagination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proselytism

-Ron Price, Tasmania

[Turtle]

--------------------

Hardly proselytizing, Turtle. If you go to this link, Turtle, you will see that what I have done here is hardly proselytizing by any stretch of the imagination: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proselytism

-Ron Price, Tasmania

 

no thank you. i am only concerned with your material here and i had no problem making the stretch. thanks for your cooperation in this matter. care to discuss my other comments on "information societies" without reference to your faith?

[RonPrice]

no thank you. i am only concerned with your material here and i had no problem making the stretch. thanks for your cooperation in this matter. care to discuss my other comments on "information societies" without reference to your faith?

------------------

I just saw your Valentine's Day post, Turtle. I'll try to get back to this issue of the information society after I've had a good sleep and some breakfast.-Ron in Tasmania

[sigurdV]

Hi Ron!

 

I just created a thread in the theological forum for you..."What is the Bahai Religion?" Hopefully you will enter it to give an informative answer with as little preaching as possible :)

[RonPrice]

I just saw the above post after more than 3 years. Thanks for letting me know about that "theological forum".-Ron

[HydrogenBond]

The Information age is nothing but the collecting of data. This is driven by business and the selling of computer memory and electronics that can collect data; cameras. It justifies bigger and new, when old is not worn out. I hope an analysis age comes next. This is where we say we have enough data, and now it is time to make sense of it. 

 

As an example, say a person posts their day to day life on FaceBook. This is sharing information, like I had a bagel for breakfast. But what does all those years of data collecting and posting mean, in the sense of a complete life? Does it make any larger sense, or is it nothing but random short term information that leads  to nowhere? If the latter was determined to be the case, after data analysis, maybe the post data will change to reflect a larger game plan; quality instead of quantity.   

Edited August 11, 2015 by HydrogenBond