Knowledge Workers in the Information Society addresses the changing nature of work, workers, and their organizations in the media, information, and knowledge industries. These knowledge workers include journalists, broadcasters, librarians, filmmakers and animators, government workers, and employees in the telecommunications and high tech sectors. Technological change has become relentless. Corporate concentration has created new pressures to rationalize work and eliminate stages in the labor process. Globalization and advances in telecommunications have made real the prospect that knowledge work will follow manufacturing labor to parts of the world with low wages, poor working conditions, and little unionization. McKercher and Mosco bring together scholars from numerous disciplines to examine knowledge workers from a genuinely global perspective.
The major focus of this Handbook is the design and potential of IT-based student learning environments. Offering the latest research in IT and the learning process, distance learning, and emerging technologies for education, these chapters address the critical issue of the potential for IT to improve K-12 education. A second important theme deals with the implementation of IT in educational practice. In these chapters, barriers and opportunities for IT implementation are studied from several perspectives. This Handbook provides an integrated and detailed overview of this complex field, making it an essential reference.
Complex knowledge and ideas are generated, shared and accessed globally. Andrea Cerroni turns to this knowledge society to offer a comprehensive social theory of its processes to bridge the gap between knowledge and democracy. Drawing on a long-term historical perspective, Cerroni assembles a cultural matrix, comprising ancient myths on nature, society and knowledge and modern myths of reductionism, individualism and relativism to improve our contemporary sociological imagination.
While there is a lot of talk about how we now live in a knowledge society, the reality has been less impressive: we have yet to truly transition to a knowledge society--in part, this book argues, because discussion mostly focuses on a knowledge economy and information society rather than on ways to mobilize to create an actual knowledge society. That all may change, however, with the rise of open data and big data. This book considers the role of the open data movement in fostering transformation, showing that at the heart of any successful mobilization will be an emerging open data ecosystem and new ways for societal actors to effectively produce and use data.
This volume aims to document the most important worldwide accomplishments in converging knowledge and technology, including converging platforms, methods of convergence, societal implications, and governance in the last ten years. Convergence in knowledge, technology, and society is the accelerating, transformative interaction among seemingly distinct scientific disciplines, technologies, and communities to achieve mutual compatibility, synergism, and integration, and through this process to create added value for societal benefit. It is a movement that is recognized by scientists and thought leaders around the world as having the potential to provide far-reaching solutions to many of today’s complex knowledge, technology, and human development challenges. Four essential and interdependent convergence platforms of human activity are defined in the first part of this report: nanotechnology-biotechnology-information technology and cognitive science (“NBIC”) foundational tools; Earth-scale environmental systems; human-scale activities; and convergence methods for societal-scale activities. The report then presents the main implications of convergence for human physical potential, cognition and communication, productivity and societal outcomes, education and physical infrastructure, sustainability, and innovative and responsible governance. As a whole, the report presents a new model for convergence. To effectively take advantage of this potential, a proactive governance approach is suggested. The study identifies an international opportunity to develop and apply convergence for technological, economic, environmental, and societal benefits. The panel also suggests an opportunity in the United States for implementing a program aimed at focusing disparate R and D energies into a coherent activity - a "Societal Convergence Initiative”. This study received input from leading academic, industry, government, and NGO experts from the United States, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
The editors of WRITING IN KNOWLEDGE SOCIETIES provide a thoughtful, carefully constructed collection that addresses the vital roles rhetoric and writing play as knowledge-making practices in diverse knowledge-intensive settings. The essays in this book examine the multiple, subtle, yet consequential ways in which writing is epistemic, articulating the central role of writing in creating, shaping, sharing, and contesting knowledge in a range of human activities in workplaces, civic settings, and higher education.
The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society explains why the digital divide is still widening and, in advanced high-tech societies, deepening. Taken from an international perspective, the book offers full coverage of the literature and research and a theoretical framework from which to analyze and approach the issue. Where most books on the digital divide only describe and analyze the issue, Jan van Dijk presents 26 policy perspectives and instruments designed to close the divide itself.
The original essays collected here under the general title of The Knowledge Society were first commissioned for a conference held in the late fall of 1984 at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt, West Germany. The conference in Darmstadt saw a larger number of contribu tions presented than could be accommodated in this edition of the Sociol ogy of the Sciences Yearbook. However, all contributions were important and affected those published in this collection. We are therefore grateful to all participants of the Darmstadt conference for their presentations and for their intense, useful as well as thoughtful discussion of all papers. Those chosen for publication in the Yearbook and those undoubtedly to be published elsewhere have all benefitted considerably from our discussions in Darmstadt which also included a number of the members of the edito rial board of the Yearbook. In addition, we are pleased that the authors were able to read and comment further on each other's papers prior to publication. As is the case in every endeavor of this kind, we have incurred many debts and are only able to acknowledge these at this point publicly while expressing our sincere thanks and appreciation for all the intellectual sup port and the considerable labor invested by a number of persons in the realization of the collection.
Uniting a team of international and interdisciplinary scholars, this volume considers the views of early twentieth-century European thinkers on the creation, dissemination and management of publicly available information. European Modernism and the Information Society will interest all who are curious about the creation of a modern networked information society.
