Towards the Information Society

3 assignments on the study material Towards the Information Society

Mind-quake - Change of the role of USSR in WWII
When dealing with my father and his view on the events regarding the role of Soviet Union, that is the most ideal example of Theobald's 'mind-quake' and the difficulties related to the need of change to it. Of course there are different, more IT-related mind-quakes (from hacker to cracker; linear-wars to cyberwars), but the "pain" and also the disturbance of changing your views on a subject that's for half a century was perceived 180 degrees differently, is in my opinion a very good example of a mind-quake (mind-ruptures?!).

All beliefs are constructed for us. Countless semioticians etc. have concluded that everything we perceive, are perceived in that way because of our education, society, parents or other alike features of humanity. In the case described before, the belief of USSR troops being only liberators and not occupiers/terrorizers , was implemented on my father during his studies in high school, service in the military and by his parents, who had been through the same in their work-time etc.

From Theobald's view of mind-quakes, the situation is as follows - everything my father knows about WWII history, is wrong, since the model (history) has been retold by Eastern-European politicians and historians, who in some fields rule his social environment (him being a citizen and a media-consumer). Now should come the "constructing a new image of the past", that being achieved bit by bit. I could say, that this has happened. Thanks to documentaries shown on ETV, a lot of historical events have gotten sidelines for my father. What then was race to Berlin, in the goal of freeing the world from fascism, is now also series of raping, terrorizing and hooliganism towards the local people.

Of course it is always questionable, if the new model is the correct or more honest/true model. That makes it extra difficult for the older generation to live through the mind-quake fast, because they have greater life-experience and more developed sense of ignoring bullocks than the young generation. But as always, the society forces or lures us to accept the same beliefs as the majority, as the fear of rejection is strong within us.

Paradox of time - Intensification of our work-time
For me, the Handy's paradox of time is the perfect and at the same time a horrible case of a situation, where the innovation of technology has got me working on projects longer and more stressed.

I am a e-mail-a-holic. When not on a vacation outside Tallinn, I basically read my e-mail twice an hour. Even spam! (well, I don't read it, I delete it, but it's still a waste of my time). Since I am currently not working, the workload on my inbox is not so harsh, but remembering one of my last jobs, I dealed with my work-tasks far more often than only 9 to 5, 5 days a week. This lead to situations, where I had too few sleeping hours, had to say no to sports and a lot of my friends were left to be web-based buddies, not real-time mates for life etc.

I want to stress out, that my employer didn't force me work on my spear time (there were some tough dates on some certain projects, but that is common in our country), I rather got addicted to it. Himanen spoke about the race of work, that is more and more hitting our work-force all over Europe and I have to admit, it is quite bad.

I think the basis of the paradox lies in technology - exchanging letters, organizing conferences or leading a project - ALL now being web-based, have become so fast, that we can do more in lesser time. But when we do something fast, we always doubt in it's quality. I personally then try to compensate the feeling by doing more.

Why the feeling? I guess it comes from comparison - comparing my work to forerunners, colleagues from different fields of work etc. Of course this is not a truly correct thing to do, because the development of instruments supporting my work a optimized every year, thus giving me more means to work faster, more effectively than my predecessors.

Now, I control this over-working habit by not using mobile-phones and I read (theoretically, since I am currently not working) my work-related e-mails only on site (behind my office desk). Of course this leads to my employer thinking, that I'm not working as hard as my rivals would work, so the situation has a chance to become a loop.

Network society: information based economy
How to analyse something, that is apparent?

The transition to hard-core information-consuming/creating/depending economy took it's form in my belief just lately. Idea behind this is, that you will not succeed by having state-of-the-art capital, qualified labor and a good monetary health, instead you (your company) has to have the advantage of "knowing". Whether the knowing consists of policies soon to be adapted by the government or multinational organisations; knowing what your competition is doing or knowing what the market wants tomorrow - these are the aspects that will bring success to one's company today.

Example - Lenovo, freshly started laptop-producer (not so fresh though, as they took over IBM's section) versus Apple (no introduction needed). Although Lenovo - being more successful in industrial means (cheap labor, massive production availability, even a wide line of products (Apple has basically only 3 laptop-products), but still the more successful economically and socially (customer satisfaction, market awareabouts) is Apple. Why? Because of their great design and marketing efforts, which are generated by INFORMATION gathered from customers, competition etc.

This is not a rock-solid example but it gives the general idea of how a firm's success depends now firstly on the sphere of info where it lies. The bigger, diverse and exact it is, the more greater starting point the company has. Only then will the industrial-age benefits (labor, machinery) take account.

Review of Himanen's paper

Review of the article by Pekka Himanen's "Challenges to the Global Information Society"

First of all, the text was very Finland-oriented, which at some point turned a little bit annoying. You can´t write a paper recommending Finland´s economic etc model, being Finnish. That´s not being objective.

The mayor mistake the study makes, is that the society would accept "gerontosociety" (majority of elderly people). I have a great doubt in the statement, that the youth of a nation simply accepts the pensioners dictation and pays taxes happily ever after.

In my opinion the welfare society model is silly - author suggested, that developed nations should mainly focus on products made for the public sector and/or the elderly. This leads to a following situation - workforce produces products for the elderly, they in turn pay from the support from the government and the government gains it´s money from the workforce. Why this over-simplified and ineffective circle?

There were some interesting points made, when introducing the transformation from welfare state to welfare society. "... the most successful innovations are made when the users of the services or products in question are able to participate in the innovation process" - I´m sorry that the author did not give no clues of what exactly he was talking about. I do believe the statement, but I would have liked to get to know some cases exactly.

I also agree on the fact, that schools are coming more and more solely responsible for the development of a nation. "learn to learn" etc suggestions made by Himanen are all in their places, but the model in my opinion is being negatively affected by the unstandardization of school-systems. This leaves us to greater communication-errors, once the future-workforce is out of the school-benches.

Ideas about the promotion of health, runned by government, are also interesting. Again I wonder, if that is a realistic goal in western societies. Being obese nowadays seems to be turning into a choice - like as being gay, vegetarian etc. If unlucky, someone would maybe even get sued by the "Americans With Food-Disorder" etc organization.

Thoughts about "international exercise campaign" led me to think, that it is mighty weird - you work to later on exercise/relax from work. Again - not very bright system.

The affection against immigrants was also quite surprising, because no nation has yet been successful in integration - thus leaving the nation to future conflicts regarding nationalism vs. cultural freedom for the immigrants. When we think about immigration, the first pictures typically people visualize for themselves, are some Africans taking sunbathes in the middle of the workday at the city mall. I just came from Cyprus, not being racist here.

But I do agree, that the immigration is the only way to sustain western living standards. Also - why should we keep our land for ourselves, if we wont give birth and don´t want to work. Effective in this situation is to let the land be used by people who need and want to use it. Outcome of this would be ideally positive, but it will certainly destroy nationalism as a main thing to hold a country together. But nationalism is a last-century figure anyway.

Lastly, I would like to refer to "Wikinomics" - skilled labor does not have to be hired by a company - modern communicative solutions and open source support communities could give the company the ability to harness workforces all over the world, paying them project-based fees, thus eliminating the need to bring them to the headquarters. But this is a hole new story, which I would continue in my review of "Wikinomics" later on in here.