Intellectual Property and the "Information Society" Metaphor Today the talk about the so-called "information society" is ubiquitous. By many it is considered as the successor of the industrial society and said to represent a new form of societal and economical organization. This claim is based on the argument, that the information society uses a new kind of resource, which fundamentally differentiates from that of its industrial counterpart. Whereas industrial societies focus on physical objects, the information society's raw material is said to be knowledge and information. Yet the conception of the capitalist system, which underlies industrial societies, also continues to exist in an information-based environment. Although there have been changes in the forms of manufacture, the relations of production remain organized on the same basis. The principle of property. In the context of a capitalist system based on industrial production the term property predominantly relates to material goods. Still even as in an information society the raw materials, resources and products change, the concept of property persists. It merely is extended and does no longer solely consider physical objects as property, but also attempts to put information into a set of property relations. This new kind of knowledge-based property is widely referred to as " |
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Credibility The magic word is credibility. Disinformation can mean leaving out important informations. Telling lies is not the only method of disinformation. The not telling also creates thoughts and delegates them into certain directions, whereas other models of thinking are left out. Like this, the deaths on the own side are adjusted downwards whereas the victims of the enemy are counted proudly - as long as they are not civilians. The post-Gulf War period demonstrated how the population reacts if the number of innocent victims is much higher than expected. It was the fact of those numbers that provoked the biggest part of the post-war critique. The media in democratic states tend to criticize this, which does not mean that they always want to be free of governmental influence. They can choose to help the government in a single case by not writing anything against it or by writing pro-government stories. At the same time every democracy has undemocratic parts in it - which is already part of democracy itself. There are situations when a democratic government may find it essential to put pressure on the media to inform the population in a certain way; and also censorship is nothing that can only be connected to dictatorship; just think of the Falkland War, the Gulf-War or the Kosovo-War. |
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The World Wide Web History Project The ongoing World Wide Web History Project was established to record and publish the history of the World Wide Web and its roots in hypermedia and networking. As primary research methods are used archival research and the analysis of interviews and talks with pioneers of the http://www.webhistory.org/home.html |
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Hieroglyphs Hieroglyphs are pictures, used for writing in ancient Egypt. First of all those pictures were used for the names of kings, later more and more signs were added, until a number of 750 pictures |
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