Center for International Disaster Information (CIDI)

[Page 54][Page 55]The late 1960s and the 1970s fostered debates on the West's transition from an industrial society to an information society. In an information society, the distribution, production, diffusion, and manipulation of new information and knowledge is seen as a major economic and political activity. Knowledge and information are considered the primary production resource, compared to an industrial society, where capital and labor are the major modes of production. It may also refer to the use a certain society gives to information. As a part of a general theory of modern modes of knowledge production and distribution, cultural studies professor Nico Stehr proposed to define knowledge societies as societies that create, share, and use knowledge for the prosperity and well-being of its people. On ...