Information society

The people who information technologies are sometimes called "Netizens", deriving from citizen.

Information was always important, but the scale of the transformation we have undergone recently is enormous (Boyle 1996, 6). This transformation can be seen as (the result of) the meeting of two tracks of development; the track of information and the track of individual media (Verschraegen 2002, 5). This means that for the first time there is an integration of photography, film, etc. with the computer; e.g. the several spots of which a picture consists can be digitized and interpreted by a computer, which becomes gradually a universal media-machine (Verschraegen 2002, 7).

Considering that metaphors and technologies of information move forward in a reciprocal relationship, we can describe our society (and more specifically the Japanese society) as an Information Society because we think of it as such (Boyle 1996, 6).

We can also see a change in the concept of the common memory[?], a change related to how we deal with information. The common memory is not fixed anymore, like in the era of the written word, but has become plastic. The structure of the World Wide Web changes constantly, there is no beginning and no end and pages are connected by hyperlinks (Verschraegen 2002, 17). In this context, we can say that the society and its common memory have undergone a facelift in recent years.

Credit The idea in the article is based on [Internet and copyright - a japanese example (http://akira.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/andreas/english_paper_gaidai)] by Andreas Bovens