Information Society

Today, the word of “information” might have different meaning compare with decades ago. Information is no longer about a message from the sender to the receiver or a tool for answer our curiosity anymore, but has connection with other aspects in human life.

One of those aspects is culture. The definition of culture here is including personality, behavior of human life. For example in our daily life there has been a great increase of information and technology, which bring impact in people’s mind, personality. Here, I am trying to give an example by condition in Japan. In Japan, we could see that people get engaged in their mobile phone or another electronic gadget. Like in train, some are listening to their i-pod or music player, some are playing with their mobile phone, or sending message. When I saw this phenomenon, it seems people have their own world even though at the same time they were in the same place. Today, although information is getting easier to be accessed and technology growth is very helpful to human life, but people are getting more individualist. The value of communication and culture has changed. If we saw children sitting together, playing Nintendo DS, only a little interaction happened around them. What will happen in the future if they are getting used only with individual activity?

Technology, internet, information era, and the others, are bring many advantages to human life, including economic sector. The number of variety of occupation has increased than before. But, it also brings many dilemmas to the social factors. Daniel Bell said that we life in white collar society, instead of physical strength, companies need intellectuality, a person with knowledge, a person who mastered technology. Even though the number of job’s variety is increasing, but the number of people who can’t get advantage from these things is many. According to Manuel Castells, even in city of information, there are information rich and information poor. High class and middle class could access information easily, have a spectacular lifestyles, proud to be global society. On the other hand the low class or who live in poverty environment, their information activity, limited to the television news or newspaper, or their experience as immigrant. Because of their condition and environment, it is hard to stop this circle of poverty or exit from. Then as mentioned above, that the demand of intellectual worker is increasing, how about these people which according to Castells is underclass? Could they enjoy the advantage of information era maximally? Or they just became victim of this information era? This condition happened not only in developed country, but also in developing country. In developing country we face problem like digital divide, which many people can’t access information by internet or another digital tools, because factors like poverty, location, or age. Information era has brought many advantages in human life. People live in an era where we are get forced to compete to keep survive. This is the technology era, where knowledge is important tool, which makes people keep learning new things every time. But it also gives negative impacts in certain factors such as in social life. The structure of society has changed, people are getting individualist, interaction and communication has changed in new way like digital message, blog, sms, etc. The gap between the rich and the poor is getting wider.

Adapted from my final report for class of Comparative Study.