During today’s lesson, Maria taught me about the Information Society. Information, when used in relation to media technologies, refers to codified data that doesn’t have to be associated with context and meaning.

Digital media and information technologies has developed quickly becoming faster and more reliable (increased carriage capacity), cheaper (for information and transmission) and smarter (convergence). These improvements in digitalisation have led, and will continue to lead, to an increase in the volume of information we exchange.

Maria also taught me about the economic change – the economic value of information where significant wealth is generated by information processing activities and where industrial capital base activities are being displaced by information processing sectors. For example advanced capitalist economies (circa in the 1950s) such as the USA have seen information related services sector expanding 2x faster than the rest of the economy. This shift from production of goods to (information based) services represented emergence of post-industrial society/information society with consequent shifts in status and power (Bell, 1970).

I found this lesson quite difficult to concentrate on as the lesson was moved to Tuesday and I had had lessons all day before this one started. Apart from that I found this lesson really interesting because I learned about the development of digital information. The original definition is ‘which is answers to requests for instruction, guidance, directions… what? where? how?’ This is the exchanging of information between people to convey meaning.