-
Nov 6, 1440
Information and knowledge
The start of mass communication was the creation of Johannes Gutenbergs printing press, as it printed books faster than ever, bringing the price down and making it possible for more people to read books and educate themselves -
Defining knowledge
John Locke (1632-1704) defines knowledge like this: "Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas - John Locke (1689) BOOK IV. Of Knowledge and Probability. An Essay: Concerning Human Understanding."
He views humans as having sense organs that produce "ideas of sensation" when stimulated. Our minds then work with these "ideas of sensation" to produce "ideas of reflection". He continues by saying that our ideas come from our experiences, and that we only know what we -
The legacy of Gutenberg
The first person to significantly improve the Gutenberg printer was Tolbert Lanston. This new machine, called a "monotype" machine, allowed a person to print a text, which is printed on a perforated paper with holes as characters. This paper is then read by a second machine that slides brass letter from a "letter bank" down to the printing plate. -
The half-tone press
This printing machine was invented by Frederick Ives to reproduce photographs in print. It works by using tiles in black and white to simulate a conitunous image to the eye. -
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan viewed technology as something that shaped us rather than the other way around. His most famous statement would be that the medium is the real message and that people are only passive responders to media. Later in his life howerver, he changed his ideas slightly as he came to believe that the relationship between media and people was more interactive than he used to believe. He also wrote a book with his son Eric about the "tetrad" in his later years. Here he writes about four -
The knowledge industry
Fritz Machlup defines knowledge as a merchandise and tried to measure its value. In doing this he recognized knowledge as an information source. He divided knowledge into three categories: instrumental, intellectual and pastime knowledge. "In addition, Machlup distinguishes five types of knowledge:
practical knowledge, intellectual knowledge, pastime knowledge, spiritual knowledge and unwanted/accidental knowledge. -
The knowledge worker
Peter Drucker taught that knowledgeable workers were essential to the modern economy and a key resource to an organization. -
The information age
As one of the most famous sociologists of our time, Daniel Bell put forth the concept of the information age in i´his book "The coming of post-industrial society". By information age Bell means that knowledge has now become the major commodity rather than manufactured goods. Information, he claims, is expensive to produce, but cheap to reproduce. For example it is rather dear to produce the first of a new mobile phone model, but once people start buying it it becomes cheaper to reproduce fast. -
The waves of societies
Alvin Toffler described the evolution of societies as having come in three waves:The First Wave: the agricultural society, when people started to deveop a sense of time by watching the change of seasons as they farmed. They stayed in one place and worked on their farms. The Second Wave: the industrial society, when people's tools started to improve and develop. We started building railroads, ships and cars, investing in labor and production of goods. The Third Wave: the information society. -
The internet
Internet began to grow as an experiment by US Department of Defense. They created a network called ARPANET that would continue to function in case of a disaster. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson wrote the first email program. But the real boost for the growth of the internet was in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee and others at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The team created a protocol based on hypertext, which is the very foundation of the internet. -
Intellectual capital
Karl-Erik Sveiby, a worker at a Swedish insurance company, argued that a traditional balance sheet often didn't show the real market value. To more accurately compare a company's book value with the market value he instead came up with the "Navigator", that considers a number of factors describing the difference as the dollar value of the firm's "intellectual capital". -
The knowledge spiral
Ikujiro Nanaka and Hirotaka Takeuk came up with a theory of how knowledge is created which they called "the spiral process". It is based upon explicit and tacit knowledge and a spiral movement between the two. They also suggested that knowledge is a result of four processes: externalisation, internalisation, combination, and socialisation that change acording to sequence and context. -
Working knowledge
Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusac together wrote the book "Working Knowledge" in which they introduce the concept Viscosity and Velocity. They defined velocity as the speed with which knwledge moves through an organization, and viscosity as the richness or thickness of the knowledge transferred.
