Review on 2004 Report about the Information Society by Pekka Himanen

-

Today, we are going to review the report about the challenges that Information Society faces back in 2004. We also will look into, how the author proposed to solve those challenges and which of those challenges is relevant to this day.

        Background

Pekka Himanen (Image source)

That report was done by a Finnish philosopher Pekka Himanen, who was born in 1973. This report was aimed to show how the Information Society impacts the world. How previously created standards changed because of the globalization. In the report the author also covers good and bad effects dealt by this society. For example, how changed the work environment, their ethical aspects from globalization and internationality.

    Global trends

In the report he mentioned several global trends and how each of them affects the world.

One of these trends were the "population ageing". By that the author means the growth of the average person age in Europe and the arising possible problem with that. One of which will be that the world be ruled by pensioners. This trend still takes place by today, which is alerting, because that means that Europe population will only decrease.

Another trend the author mentioned is the regional concentration. He shows the data, where we see that the people tended to live in the cities and as nearest as possible to their workplace, creating overpopulated regions in the city. This trend is semi true to this day. Because, by today, the percentage of people living in the city only increased, however nowadays cities are trying to build more horizontal than upwards. This lower the amount of concentrated areas in the city.

    Development scenarios

The author proposes a several future development scenarios and their impacts on the future.

One of the mentioned scenarios is neo-liberalist scenario. Where the weakest countries should be left behind and focus should be on innovations in the modern countries. Even though this scenario looks great for innovations, it have high social price.

    The Importance

This report was needed to show the possible outcomes that the integration with Information Society and internalization will cause. And to implement some changes before the end of transition to the Information Society. So, those changes will keep population from dangers this transition could cause.


Conclusion

This report helped the Finnish government implement some changes that ensured the progress of the best development scenario. However, some of the changes didn't take place in other countries, mostly due to slow nature of politics. Because of it not all countries transitioned into Information Society as smoothly as Finland does. As for Finland, we arguably could say, that those changes helped minimize the stress from the transition for the society.


References

    The Report 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review on 2012 The case of copyright reform

-
Image
Today we are going to review the book named "The case of copyright reform" and I will show my opinion on it.         Background Christian Engström  ( Image source )     Rick Falkvinge  ( Image source ) This book was written by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström back in 2012. They were two Swedish Pirate Party activists. Their intention on writing this book was that the current copyright system is broken and creates some difficulties for new artists and ordinary people. So, they proposed several reforms that could fix that problem.     Introduction In the book they clearly mentioned that they didn't want to abolish the copyright system. Instead, they propose a reform to it. In the first chapter authors mentioned how broken the copyright system currently are when it comes to intellectual property (IP) owned by some organizations. They also mentioned that those reforms are aimed to "end criminalization of the young generation and pr...
Read more

Two technologies from early days of the Internet and their place today

-
Image
When the Internet first started developing, back in those days there was plenty of new technologies that really helped people then. Most of these technologies became a standard, because of their usefulness. Sadly, not all standards have lived to this day. Some of them were replaced by other standards that became even popular. However, some are still relevant to this day. Today we are going to talk about two of those. One of which is still relevant, while other is disappeared in the dust.         Computer keyboard Image source One of the technologies that is still relevant to this day is a computer keyboard. Even though the computer keyboard were invented in early 1940s it is still most popular way of inputting an information into a computer. Also, it still mostly uses the QWERTY layout, which was created even earlier, in 1880s and have proven to be effective and comfortable.  Although it is merely a century old device, we still actively using it to type a mail, ...
Read more