John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene - Information Society - 1982
In their book Megatrends (1982), Naisbitt and Aburdene reported that we are shifting from an Industrial Society to an Information Society. Altogether, they proposed ten Megatrends (changes), that would shape the information age:
- Industrial Society to Information Society
- Forced Technology to High Tech/High Touch
- National Economy to World Economy
- Short Term to Long Term
- Centralization to Decentralization
- Institutional Help to Self-Help
- Representative Democracy to Participatory Democracy
- Hierarchies to Networking
- North to South
- Either/Or to Multiple Option
In one of the trend listed above, “from hierarchies to networking,” an entirely different way of managing information and distributing power was predicted. Various networks would radically transform and increase public access to goods, services, data, on a global scale. This network became today's Internet. However, with this network came a major drawback...
We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge. - Megatrends
Later, Naisbitt would expound on this:
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge. This level of information is clearly impossible to be handled by present means. Uncontrolled and unorganized information is no longer a resource in an information society, instead it becomes the enemy.
In their next book, Megatrends 2000 (1990), they came up with a new list:
- The Blooming Global Economy of the 1990's
- A Renaissance of the Arts
- The Emergence of Free-Market Socialism
- Global Lifestyles and Cultural Nationalism
- The Privatization of the Welfare State
- The Rise of the Pacific Rim
- The Decade of Women in Leadership
- The Age of Biology
- The Religious Revival of the New Millennium
- The Triumph of the Individual
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