The Future Information Society

The following sections are included:

• ABOUT THE EDITORS
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• CONTENTS

The information age is the age of the information societies, into which industrialized societies are gradually transforming under the influence of new information and communication technologies (ICTs), in the same way as the industrial age is the age of industrial societies, into which agricultural societies had been and are still transforming worldwide. However, a full-fledged development of science is still in need to catch up with the actual societal and technological development. The accelerated technological development of the modern society is not accompanied by an equally rapid growth in scientific insight, let alone foresight, into the impact of technology on the levels of society other than that of technological organization. Attempts to observe and understand the basic nature of these changes are still going on. The public use of the notion of “information society” has been reduced to denoting a society in which applications of modern ICTs are widely spread in order to facilitate the handling of the phenomenon commonly called “information”. A scientific conceptualization of this transformation has not had time to develop. There is still no discipline that deserves the name “science of the information society” or “science of information”.

Starting point is the résumé of a systems theoretical analysis of the information age as an age of global challenges. Global challenges indicate a crisis in the evolution of humanity’s social systems. They indicate a Great Bifurcation, one trajectory of which would signify another Great Transformation – a transformation into a Global Sustainable Information Society (GSIS). Such a social formation would be characterised by three properties that are concretisations of generic properties characteristic of any complex system. One of those properties refers to the information generation capacities of the agents of world society in statu nascendi. In order to promote the advent of such a social suprasystem, there are historical-concrete requirements to be met on each level of social information processes, which forms an imperative for human co-operative, communicative, and cognitive information in the information age. A new step in the evolution of social information is needed in order to avoid the extermination of civilised human life. Information technology – its development and implementation – is subject to that imperative.

I start with a brief summary of kinds of information used in science, showing how they are nested (or hierarchically arranged), with inner kinds inheriting properties of the outer kinds. I further argue that within each kind there is also hierarchical organization, and that the major kinds are distinguished by their dynamics, not just being ordered in a hierarchy, though similar principles apply at all levels. Next I argue that rules applying to non-equilibrium thermodynamics apply also to information systems, and I give some examples of resulting selforganization, or what we have called “rhythmic entrainment”. I point out that entrainment that results from forces within a system are more efficient than ones that are entrained by outside forces. This gives a sort of resilience to such systems, and in higher kinds of information allows for self-adaptation via accommodating both external forces and internally generated forces. I then apply these lessons to management and argue that the most efficient and creative form of management comes not from severe control from the top, or from imposed “efficiency” but through self-organization allowed by a low degree of control and the encouragement of diversity. This form of management I call facilitation. There may be specific people assigned a facilitation role, but this is not required; any member of a group can act as a facilitator. What is required, however, is that members of the group are accustomed to being open-minded and flexible. This form of management is most compatible with anarchism as a political (and management) theory, but has benefits in pretty much any political system.

It is needless to insist on the significant increase of the complexity we are living in. Whereas the social order arisen with modernity encompassed – at the level of the nation-states – a reduction of social complexity through cultural normalization, the new social and political order is nowadays, as a consequence of globalization, to be intercultural, multilingual and even multi-national. We may encounter a different way of diminishing the complexity at the level of the human agency, but we have to do it in a different way as modernity did it. The management of information and complexity in biology provides some clues to this endeavor. As we see, living beings through its management of complexity enact the subsidiarity principle that can equally be applied to the organization of decentralized political systems. It enables the decrease of complexity at the level of the heterarchical organized agents, while preserving the complexity at the global level. eSubsidiarity was essayed in Allende’s Chile following Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model and in many other human organizations. Could it become a new ethical paradigm at the information age?

This article is a part of a collaborative, interdisciplinary research effort to develop multilevel models of organization in living systems, with a broader aim to develop new scalable solutions to enable multilevel sustainability between economics and ecosystems. To facilitate further interdisciplinary collaboration and research, an initial scaffolding of multilevel ideas and observations has been put out. It presents a multilevel view of organization in living systems that spans across molecular, cellular, ecological, and social systems. In developing the scaffolding, some definitions of key organizational characteristics have been put forth. An examination of multilevel living systems through the lens of these definitions reveals two common multilevel level organizational patterns (CMOP). These CMOPs provide new insights into the possible natural roots of our socio-economic human society. The research also points to possible organizational and role similarities between subsoil Mycorrhiza networks, gut bacterial networks, and our financial investment networks. New insights from the CMOPs have been discussed, important implications outlined, a possible new direction for multilevel sustainability between economic and ecosystems has been presented, questions and areas for further research have been put out.

My presentation is relevant to all people who are searching for an alternative to the present way in which our world is managed. It draws upon the diagnosis posed by Ivan Illich in 1973. According to him a radical move is necessary. People must choose convivial tools if they want to avoid being crushed by machines and to save their freedom and their dignity. I will try to present the characteristics of these convivial tools as they are described in the convivialist Manifesto. This Manifesto presents four basic ethical and political principles, on which we must organize our societies in line with Illich’s argument. These principles are not new, they are drawn from doctrines, religions and philosophies in so far as their recommendations made possible, and helped to improve, a sustainable life altogether (cum-vivere). It is necessary to go on with a strong intellectual promotion of these ideas to have a chance to escape from the looming threats on humanity.

The convergence model illustrates ongoing changes in the Net Society. The theoretical model synthesises the theoretical framework in the author’s research on the psychosocial environment and computerisation. Interdisciplinary research programmes were initiated by the author in the 1970s, leading to an analysis of societal changes related to various periods in ‘the history’ of ICT. The description of the convergence model is structured with reference to the core concepts of Globalisation, ICT, Life Environment, Life Role, and Effects on Humans. Convergence and Interactions are important features of the model that organises analysis at individual, organisational, community, and societal levels. This chapter then focuses on the Effects on Human Beings and which aspects are most sensitive to the use of ICT, followed by a section entitled “From Theory, Visions to Actions” where the author reflects on actions for achieving a good and sustainable society.

For decades, social scientists and philosophers, citizens and politicians have been engaged with scientific and technological progress, its intended and unintended consequences and cultural implications but also with opportunities for shaping new technologies according to social desires and ethical values. These activities are currently considered under the heading of “Responsible Research and Innovation”. The ideal behind is to anticipate the implications of scientific and technological advances in order to provide societal and political orientation, e.g. for decision-making. However, this consequentialist approach comes up against limits because many future developments can be anticipated neither in a predictive way nor by identifying a set of plausible scenarios. Therefore it is the purpose of this paper to systematically examine an aspect of reflections of technology and technology assessment that has hitherto been considered only sporadically: its hermeneutic side. While the consequentialist idiom deals with assessing statements about possible futures in terms of their plausibility, the hermeneutics of discourse on technological futures focuses on the meaning of these debates for contemporary attitudes towards new technologies.

The accepted view in evolutionary biology is that we humans and our animal cousins are built with a survival instinct, an instinct that watches out for our personal survival ahead of everything else. Yet when we encounter a saber tooth tiger on a pathway, we have three modes of response: not just fight or flight, but fight, flight, or freeze. And freeze can be suicide. When you are fired or your wife tells you she is leaving you, your survival instinct should put your mind into overdrive, hunting with energy and creativity for your next step. But that high-power cognitive processing is not what your biology serves up. Instead, it bogs you in depression, a state in which it’s hard to think of even tying your shoes. How could natural selection possibly favor such obvious self-destruct mechanisms? The answer is in the algorithms that power collective intelligences and massively parallel processing learning machines like neural nets, supercomputers, and the immune system.

This chapter surveys a wide variety of potential applications of distributed intelligence technologies. These are systems that tackle complex challenges in a distributed manner, by collecting, processing and routing information and actions that are spread across a global network of human and technological agents. The eventual integration of all these systems is expected to produce a distributed intelligence at the planetary scale, the Global Brain. Supporting technologies for such distributed problem solving include Wikipedia, the Semantic Web, the Internet of Things and the Smart Grid. These and future extensions will facilitate the propagation and coordination of information, knowledge, energy, physical objects, actions and personal identity. By extrapolating from existing applications such as social media, data mining, online shopping and MOOCs, it is argued that these technologies can in principle satisfy all our material, health, safety, social, achievement, cognitive, and even self-actualization needs.

The Internet of Things is an emerging Information and Communication Technology with revolutionary potentials. Its areas of application include (1) the real-time measurement of the state of our techno-socioeconomic- environmental systems, (2) the development of a Global Systems Science to manage our world more successfully, (3) greater awareness of chances and risks to support everyone’s decision-making, (4) possibilities to enable self-organizing systems, and (5) opportunities to create collective intelligence. I will, in particular, reveal plans to build a “Planetary Nervous System” as a Citizen Web, which is envisioned to be an open and participatory information system to unleash the power of the Internet of Things for everyone in the world.

This chapter is motivated by the question why so many innovations are driven by the past rather than by the future. It will be shown that this is due to our cognitive/biological conditions (“predictive mind hypothesis”). As a possible way out of these limitations, we will develop the concept of future-oriented/Emergent Innovation. The core idea is that the future can be understood as an affordance; we propose to compare the future itself as a kind of affordance offering us potentials that have to be identified/”sensed”, cultivated, and finally realized. It is these potentials that enable us to “learn from the future as it emerges”. We will show how such an approach can bring forth innovations that are not only (radically) new, but that are also sustainable, thriving, and fit into existing structures. Finally we develop implications from such an understanding of innovation for organizations and education. We show that a completely new set of skills, mindsets, and attitudes as well as a kind of personal transformation (or perceptual and cognitive patterns) is necessary for realizing it.

The development of organizations, and thus socio-technical systems, is increasingly driven by its members. They focus on modelling business processes in order to have a point of reference and intermediary representation that can be implemented by information and communication technologies. While modelling, stakeholders articulate knowledge about their work. It requires socio-cognitive effort and is influenced by the method and notation used for modelling. Subjectoriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) claims and aims to provide a natural way for articulation due to its modelling notation. Although it needs only a few symbols to describe business processes and the notation allows for direct execution of validated models, so far it has not been taken up by practice, neither management nor operation. However, stakeholders could profit most when utilizing the S-BPM capability to dynamically design processes. In this chapter, the coherence of articulating knowledge on work tasks with representing this knowledge in terms of executable models is revisited. Proposing an intentional approach, task-specific behavior of stakeholders is framed by its triggers, such as individual intention, and its expected effects, in particular its outcome. This framing can be done on arbitrary levels of granularity, depending on a stakeholder’s perspective and/or level of competence or insight.

Massive policies that are blind to individuals and their true needs compel the educators, as well as the pupils and students, to imitate true functioning. And when imitations are tolerated for the sake of pragmatic concerns, disregarding the essence and long-term goals of the process of education, education is tacitly replaced by its simulated version. However, simulated education supported by some advanced technologies turns out to be particularly destructive for students, who have a genuine capacity for becoming prospective developers of technology. This constitutes a rather unexpected corrective feedback to a system gone astray.

The service and the disservice of information overload have been a part of the human experience from the very beginning of our existence. Overcoming the problems associated with information overload has led to breakthroughs in communication and information processing including the emergence of speech, writing, mathematical notation, science, computing, the Internet and the World Wide Web. Possible ways of dealing with information overload are suggested including the importance of context and feed forward, the notion of the compact library, and the need for a general systems or multidisciplinary approaches to education, research, commerce and the formulation of public policy.

In this chapter, the ‘Frame Problem’ in AI is mobilized as a trope in order to engage the ‘question’ concerning the inclusion and/or exclusion of Islam (and Muslims) from European – and, more broadly, ‘Western’ – society. Adopting a decolonial perspective, wherein bodypolitical, geo-political and theo-political concerns are centered, the meaning and applicability of categorical dichotomies such as ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ and their relationship to the historical entanglement of ‘religion’ and ‘race’ in the formation of the modern world are interrogated in the context of understanding the nature of the relationship between Islam and Europe/‘the West’. It is argued that the tendency within Western liberal democratic discourses to (1) frame the problem of Islamophobia and ‘the Muslim question’ in terms of misrepresentation – that is, misinformation, disinformation and ‘distortion’ of the flow of information – and (2) frame the issue of “Islam and Europe/‘the West’” in terms of inclusion and/or exclusion of the members of a ‘religious’ minority into a post-modern, post- Christian/‘secular’ polity circumvents disclosure of the violent historically-constituted structural background or ‘horizon’ against which such ‘options’ are generated. The essay concludes by sketching some possible decolonial responses to this critical and existentially-problematic state of affairs.

The Islamic State (IS) is (in)famous for its professional propaganda on the Web. Attempts to create narratives to counter the narratives of IS utterly failed up to now. The project presented intends to construct an alternative hegemony restricting the online space of IS and its claim to be the sole representative of Islam.

This article presents two contradictory perspectives on the development of reproducible media. It starts with W. Benjamin’s idea on the progressive character of new media and confronts it with Adorno’s rather pessimistic view expressed in his concept of media industry. Then it finds parallels in the current evaluation of social media by J. Surowiecky with his idea of the wisdom of crowds and J. Lanier’s idea of digital Maoism. The article concludes these contradictory perspectives can have validity as mutually dependent only.

This chapter discusses the reasons of the European crisis, by examining the failures of the EU institutions to bring the citizens closer to the EU, the impacts of neoliberal ideology on politics and the effects of the media in the division of the publics. Lastly, it discusses the role of social movements in the transformation of society and the rebuilding of democracy.

In today’s world, characterized by rapid social changes, technology is being demonstrated as the driving force of history and as the key of a more participatory and democratic society. Both dominant and dissident groups are suffering a fetishized technology narrative. Contrary to this defect, the ignorance of technology as a non-human factor in the understanding of social change is another flaw. In order to overcome the pitfalls of both “technological determinism” and “social determinism”, the study tries to offer a dialectic materialist position on the understanding of the relationship between technology and social change by examining çapul TV. This non-commercial “alternative media” will be analyzed as a class effort to release emancipatory praxes in order to build “alternative” ways for communication. By this questioning the study aims to go beyond the narrow perspective that limits the issue to the role of “alternative usages” of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in “social movements”, and to reach a critical understanding of “alternative media”.

This chapter discusses why democracy in the European Union is under strain, by highlighting the causes of its malaise and the perils involved in the way multiple crises facing the Union are currently handled. Also, it discusses conventional channels of representation available to Europeans and a novel instrument of participation, the European Citizen Initiative and concludes with how transdisciplinary scientific collaboration could help strengthen European democracy.

In recent years, a nascent trend called “Constructive News” resp. “Solutions Journalism” has become visible in Western societies. These stories – often presented in a positive, encouraging tone of “good news” – show examples where people are working toward solutions for social problems. We can grasp this phenomenon theoretically with regard to the news values theory, and we see two different factions of journalistic protagonists: one system-inherent (with social entrepreneurship as the main field of coverage, claiming to be unpolitical, neutral observers) and one system-critical (coming from social movements and seeing themselves as change agents on the path to a degrowth society). I argue that this new journalistic genre can have opportunities on a micro level (for the psychological well-being of individuals) and on a meso level (for the prosperity of media organizations) as well as on a macro level (for social progress). Also, I discuss criticism and problems of “Constructive news”, especially a proximity to public relations and lobbying, and ideological traps by defining the respective problem and its causes.

Every technology has two immanent functions: rationalisation and control.

In this chapter, we discuss the essential and disconcerting role of information and communication technology in the current military doctrines and strategies, which effected a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’. Life is going to be digital, so is warfare. The concept of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ describes how military doctrines and strategies change fundamentally with the advent of new military technologies. It is one of the predominant objectives to support, by means of a global network of battle units including unmanned combat vehicles, precision strikes in order to minimize collateral effects, and remote operations in order to spare own soldiers’ lives. The key technologies are computers or, more precisely, information and communication technologies. They are the driving force for novel weapon developments and the extension and empowerment of command-control-communication-intelligence infrastructures (C3I).

In the beginning of its development, the Internet seemed to be a great promise. World-wide communication was expected to be the basis of international understanding and peace. Today, however, we must acknowledge that the Internet has never got out of the focus of the military, being used as an instrument to prepare for cyberwar and world-wide communication surveillance. We have developed our concept of Cyberpeace to act as a counterbalance to military colonization. In this paper we will present the claims we have developed in order to achieve Cyberpeace.

This chapter is of an unusual format. I am writing from the perspective of a mother who is about to give birth to her robot “mind children” and who is thinking about how to raise them for the good. I am reflecting on how humanity could historically and philosophically develop a transhumanistic robot- or machine vision as we find it today in mainstream computer science. I think aloud about the nature of humanity in comparison to the nature of machines. I chose three pillars of human intelligence, which I believe distinguish our thinking fundamentally from machine intelligence; that is our use of metaphors, our context-embeddedness and our embodied consciousness. With the help of these three superior human qualities I want to rehabilitate confidence in humans’ natural superiority over machines. I also reflect on how the human-machine differences on these three axes might inform different and complementary future roles for humans and machines.

The concept of Homo informaticus (HI) in context of similar images of man (Homo economicus, Homo neurobiologicus) is described with several key issues: (1) the set of images of men, (2) distinctions of concepts like digit, data, information, knowledge etc., (3) three basic sub-dimensions of HI, (4) social conditions and consequences of HI. It will be shown that concepts of information science can make psychology more precise, but in case of application of this reconceptualization of psychology in information and communication technologies (ICT) and also in robotics invalid accounts are raised – e.g. “empathic robots” as they are proposed for medicine might not be possible. It is also claimed that the personal use of ICT is caused by “Homo deficiens”. Persistently excessive ICT use, depending on context could even result in ICT addiction, digital burnout and alterations of brain structures. Furthermore, regarding the societal dimension of HI, representation of humans by Big Data appears to be inappropriate. Finally, the potential disempowerment of HI on basis of information asymmetry between supranational organizations and individuals can result in a prescription of how to be a proper person in information society. Both, the intrinsic power of human desires and profit driven ICT-economy could accelerate a process of dehumanization.

Traditionally in health care, knowledge and authority have rested with medical professionals and care was delivered in professional settings. Individuals have been considered solely as “patients,” i.e. defined by their relationship to doctors. Health information technology (HIT) is enabling consumers (i.e. an individual outside of a patient context), patients, and family caregivers to more fully understand health and illness, to self-manage health and illness at home when feasible, and to partner with their medical providers when necessary. This brings a potential for a re-balancing of the power relationship between doctors and patients toward greater collaboration (including family caregivers), and increased attention to contexts of daily life in which “health happens.” However, the available technologies and their actual implementation are currently insufficient to empower consumers, patients and caregivers to fulfill their new responsibilities. In the coming decade, the most dramatic developments may come in the areas of “Big Data” – applying analytics to large databases of personal health information – and peer-to-peer sharing of information through social media. These activities carry risks related to privacy and to the exploitation of individuals. For the full potential of HIT to be achieved, technologies, policies, and personal information practices must come into better alignment.