Information Society – We are in one.

What does information society mean?

I feel the need to personally define both words:

1. I classify information as any data that has meaning for the recipient (check out my blog post on defining information https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/therabbithole/2021/03/15/defining-information-musings/).
2. I see society as the term used to group several smaller communities or groups together. We could have a global society, a national society, but my local town is not a society, it is a community. Societies also tend to have an overarching group of norms or values that the majority of participants see as reasonable. Communities or groups tend to have tighter sets of values (I am thinking of religious, political or criminal groups here).

The infosphere is the landscape in which the information society dwells. The infosphere is global in nature so when considering the term ‘information society’, I think of it as global. Within this information society there are smaller information communities or groups, either entire nations or smaller again. These communities cannot dwell within a landscape without having an impact on that landscape (changes and additions to the information available) or on inhabitants within that landscape (recipients of this new or changed information).

As a librarian, having a clear understanding of what the information landscape is, and more importantly, what it is made up of (print, blog, twitter, video, etc.) and where it has come from is vital to our role as purveyors of information.

If we intend to guide our students through this landscape, we need to be sure we know the way, teach them how to recognise the traps and snares, where to find accurate and relevant information and how to survive without someone holding their hand. To this end we need to first be the intrepid explorer, then the cartographer followed by the navigator and finally the ‘old sailor’ who listens and offers up pieces of wisdom and direction as needed.