Social Development, Information and Knowledge: Whatever happened to communication?
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development. Copyright © 2002 Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (200212) 45:4; 5–9; 029599. NB When citing this article please use both volume and issue numbers.
Thematic Section
Social Development, Information and Knowledge: Whatever happened to communication? CEES J. HAMELINK
ABSTRACT Cees J. Hamelink reviews the current interest in information societies in the discussions around the World Summit on the Information Society. He argues that the current emphasis on information and knowledge largely bypasses the fundamental question as to whether information and knowledge are primary resources for social development. In doing so he queries the popular myths that fuel the enthusiasm of information and knowledge societies. He warns that we have to be careful not to adopt the dialogical form of communication as the ultimate panacea for development issues. KEYWORDS development; governance; human rights; power; World Summit on the Information Society
Information and social development There is an abundance of writings on the significance of information in processes of social development. This is understandable since in matters of population growth, hygiene and health, agriculture, finance and public policy the provision of information to those concerned is essential. Around information a whole industry of extension workers, rural media and consultants developed over the past decades. By and large, all this work has been inspired by the conviction that the acquisition and distribution of information is essential to human empowerment and that if people have better access to this basic resource this would greatly benefit their standard of living. Because of the critical importance of information, the international community has repeatedly expressed its concern about the unequal access to information and its related technologies around the world. Already at the 1948 United Nations Conference on the Freedom of Information, the Yugoslav delegation drew attention to the wide disparities in
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available means of mass communication and claimed that freedom of information should be linked with the standard of equality (Hamelink, 1994: 155). In the 1950s the concept of ‘information famine’ emerged at various UNESCO conferences to describe the gravity of the situation. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the same problem was referred to as the gap between the information-poor and the information-rich and more recently the common buzzword became ‘the global digital divide’ (Hamelink, 2000: 81). As modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) developed into the key infrastructure of modern economies, the early 1980s saw the introduction of the term ‘information society’. This turned out to be a contested notion with different meanings to different people. However, whatever its precise meaning may be, the information society became a stan
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