KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY AND ITS DEFINITIONS

1) The term Knowledge Society refers to any society where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labour. It may also refer to the use that a certain society gives to information. A Knowledge society "creates, shares and uses knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people".^{(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_society)}

^{2) Yves Courier in his reference to Castells definition points out that information society} “ has to do with a society in which the conditions for generating knowledge and processing information have been substantially changed by a technological revolution focused on information processing, knowledge generation, and information technologies.”

Further on, he states: “What characterizes the current technological revolution is not the central personage of knowledge and information, but rather the application of this knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information/communication processing devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation.” And he vouches: “The diffusion of technology infinitively amplifies its power when its users appropriate it and redefine it. The new information technologies are not merely tools to be applied, but rather processes to be developed.(...) For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force, not only a decisive element of the production system.”

3) From the mid-1990s on, ‘the knowledge society’ (Stehr 1994) begins to compete with ‘the information society’ as a pervasive term in public discourse. While the term information society focuses on the raw materials so to speak (‘information’), the term knowledge society serves to emphasise the various menus (‘knowledge’) that may result from people’s handling of the raw materials. The change in concepts thus reflects a transformation in societal definitions of the fundamental levers of social development and of the competences necessary to bring about such developments.

In a knowledge society, the levers of development is the creation, circulation and appropriation of knowledge, i.e. non-material processes that in principle may take place anywhere and at any time. The creation of knowledge is no longer the prerogative of formal settings such as schools and work places; and hence the introduction of the term knowledge society is parallelled by a shifting emphasis from education (whose entry point is a teacher in an institutional setting) to learning (whose entry point is the learner in any given spatio-temporal context).

(A definition by Kirsten Drotner, drotner@litcul.
sdu.dk /http://www.ask.com/bar?q=definitions+of+%22knowledge+society)