The dream of a conflict-free capitalism appeals to a diverse audience. No politician can win elections without eulogising the benefits of the information society and promising universal wealth through informatisation. "Europe must not lose track and should be able to make the step into the new knowledge and information society in the 21st century", said Tony Blair.
The US government has declared the construction of a fast information infrastructure network the centerpiece of its economic policies
In Lisbon the EU heads of state agreed to accelerate the informatisation of the European economies
The German Chancellor Schröder has requested the industry to create 20,000 new informatics jobs.
The World Bank understands information as the principal tool for third world development
Electronic classrooms and on-line learning schemes are seen as the ultimate advance in education by politicians and industry leaders alike.
But in the informatised economies, traditional exploitative practices are obscured by the glamour of new technologies. And the nearly universal acceptance of the ICT message has prepared the ground for a revival of 19th century "adapt-or-perish" ideology.
"There is nothing more relentlessly ideological than the apparently anti-ideological rhetoric of information technology"
(Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, media theorists)
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Traditional copyright and the practice of paying
Yet again new technologies have altered the way of how (copyrighted) works are produced, copied, made obtainable and distributed. The emergence of global electronic networks and the increased availability of digitalized intellectual property confront existing copyright with a variety of questions and challenges. Although the combination of several types of works within one larger work or on one data carrier, and the digital format (although this may be a recent development it has been the object of detailed legal scrutiny), as well as networking (telephone and cable networks have been in use for a long time, although they do not permit interactivity) are nothing really new, the circumstance that recent technologies allow the presentation and storage of text, sound and visual information in digital form indeed is a novel fact. Like that the entire information can be generated, altered and used by and on one and the same device, irrespective of whether it is provided online or offline.
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In parallel to the deregulation of markets, there has been a trend towards large-scale mergers which ridicules dreams of increased competition.
Recent mega-mergers and acquisitions include
SBC Communications - Ameritech, $ 72,3 bn
Bell Atlantic - GTE, $ 71,3
AT&T - Media One, $ 63,1
AOL - Time Warner, $ 165 bn
MCI Worldcom - Spring, $ 129 bn
The total value of all major mergers since the beginnings of the 1990s has been 20 trillion Dollars, 2,5 times the size of the USA's GIP.
The AOL- Time Warner reflects a trend which can be observed everywhere: the convergence of the ICT and the content industries. This represents the ultimate advance in complete market domination, and a alarming threat to independent content.
"Is TIME going to write something negative about AOL? Will AOL be able to offer anything other than CNN sources? Is the Net becoming as silly and unbearable as television?"
(Detlev Borchers, journalist)
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Since the invention of appropriate means and technologies, communication no longer requires face-to-face meetings.
From writing and reading to using computers, expanding and exhausting one's possibilities to communicate relies more and more on the application of skills we have to learn. With the increasing importance of communication technologies, learning to apply them properly becomes a kind of rite of passage.
A Small World
From the very beginning - the first Sumerian pictographs on clay tablets - to today's state of the art technologies - broadband communication via
Since the invention of the electrical telegraph, but especially with today's growing digital communication networks, every location on earth seems to be close, however distant it may be, and also time no longer remains a significant dimension.
Threatened Cultural Memory
More and more information is transmitted and produced faster and faster, but the shelf life of information becomes more and more fragile. For more than 4500 years Sumerian pictographs written on clay tablets remained intact, but newspapers and books, printed some decades ago, crumble into pieces; film reels, video tapes and cassettes corrode. Digitalization of information is not a cure; on the contrary it even intensifies the danger of destroying cultural heritage. Data increasingly requires specific software and hardware, but to regularly convert all available digitized information is an unexecutable task.
Compared to the longevity of pictographs on clay tablets, digitized information is produced for instant one-time use. The increasing production and processing of information causes a problem hitherto unknown: the loss of our cultural memory.
For further information see
For another history of communication systems see
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Looking for ways to create intelligent machines, the field of
b. December 26, 1791, London, England
d. October 18, 1871, London, England
English mathematician and inventor who is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. The idea of mechanically calculating mathematical tables first came to Babbage in 1812 or 1813. Later he made a small
Network information centers are organizations responsible for registering and maintaining the domain names on the