Danger and Hope in the Information Age :: Philosophy Religion Essays

Danger and Hope in the Information AgeWhere can we find hope in forthwiths knowledge age? To answer thisquestion satisfactorily iodine must be clear as to its presupposition. To find hopein the nurture society means that at that place faces to be something wrongwith it, so that one needs to search for hope in such a society. In this paper Iwould the like to outline some of the perils of todays selective information society and topoint out that, though the perils are real and actually strong, we nonetheless canover do them through concerted action which I shall outline in the sectionsto follow. In short, I would like to show that at that place is a real, practicablehope in todays information society, but such a hope can never come into fruitwithout move. Hope does not come through a arrive negation of the technology,nor does it come through a blind adherence to it. Rather realistic hope canobtain only through concerted effort to understand the implications andimpact of t he technology. As for the cultures of the Third Word, where thepotential dangers of the technology appear grave, hope can come throughstrengthening of local resources and searches for ways to co-opt the technologyand to adapt it into the cultures particular life-world.Human society is increasingly characterized by an increasinglypervasive use of technologies, notably among which are the information andcommunication technologies (ICTs). Today in Bangkok one could hardly revealto be giant billboards exhorting commuters to log on the Internet and visit oneweb site or another. Name cards increasingly draw out email addresses as well aspersonal web sites. In Thailand, new Internet cafs spring up everyday likemushrooms in rainy season. Nowadays it is estimated that there are around iv million people on the Internet in the country, up from tho one or twomillion just a hardly a(prenominal) months ago. These events and numbers are just superficialindicators of a deep permute that is go ing on throughout the world.Technologies are obviously becoming much and more important, or atleast they are becoming ubiquitous. Since there is no time in human historythat this kind of ponderous pervasiveness of technologies, especially thoseconnected with information and communication, occurs, human beings needto reflect and imply hard about what kind of life, what kind of society we as aspecies are creating. This thinking calls for a bold vision and an imaginative aspect of possible scenarios more than ever before, since the situationwe are facing is altogether new and we cannot rely solely on lessons of the past.We cannot just compare the afoot(predicate) situation to a historical event in order to