Understanding knowledge societies

Knowledge society has become a household term these days. Yet in too many cases, the understanding of it remains erroneous or shallow. At the same time, deep transformative currents related to knowledge and its production and dissemination in society promise to change the world as we know it, perhaps in the historically short time of a few generations. We are witnessing the beginnings of this transformation and our understanding of the pattern of change will impact our policy choices, with very serious long-term consequences. That is why a profound understanding of knowledge societies, as they are emerging the world over, is of such great importance. This Report maintains that humanity is not so much entering the "Age of Knowledge" as the "Age of Responsibility"; now that our world has learned how to mass-produce and mass-utilize know-ledge, responsible policy choices are needed to steer us all towards a future in which knowledge is secured to support high levels of quality and safety of life for all people everywhere. The Report also argues that an urgent and broad global debate is needed to formulate the right policies and create an environment conductive to their implementation. It attempts to delineate the parameters of such a debate by naming key concepts that may be useful for its fruitful conduct. These are, inter alia, the concept of people and information as the main assets of the knowledge society; the notion of institutional change to allow limitless development of people and information; the view that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has inherent limitations as the force behind acceleration of the mass production of knowledge; the idea that the knowledge economy is a subset of the knowledge society and that the knowledge society can come to us in nominal, warped or smart form; the conviction that while the knowledge "to do" - the basis of technological innovations - is important, so is the knowledge "to be," "to coexist" and to "maintain developmental equilibrium"; the thesis that we urgently need a unifying central cultural thought for humanity; and the idea that the current tension between - on one hand - ICT and techniques for mass-produc-tion of knowledge and - on the other - society, can only be solved by the development of people as citizens and the development of democracy as a social institution. Finally, the Report proposes an Index of Knowledge Societies and makes recommendations for governments and political and economic elites, as well as for the business, civil society, news media and academic communities.