On May 2, 2012, I was at UOC headquarters in Seville, Spain, speaking on the [sic] Debating the trends on the Information and Knowledge Society.
The idea of my speech in the session — which I shared with Marc Bogdanowicz — was to perform a quick overview of how the development of the Information Society has been measured in the last 20 years and how the design of these measurements inevitably conditions (or just determines) the design of policies that would come after measurement.
In a nutshell, what was presented is that governments, in general, have focused on infrastructures and what is related to them (infrastructure level of usage, the ICT sector and some regulation of the ICT sector market). And, on the other hand, citizens (in fact, customers) demand a sufficient supply of content and services at affordable cost.
But, it does seem that the long term is missing in both approaches. Besides daily usage or investment, it looks that especially policies focusing in the long term and the strategic level are totally non existent and, thus, we are riding the change but not levering the transforming potential of ICTs. And digital skills might be the what could fill the gap between simple adoption to sheer transformation.
Some examples in the context of Spanish politics/policies were provided at the end in the field of institutional design, education and ICT, open government and teleworking.
More than wires: measuring the Information Society
Some bibliography on the topic
Proceedings of ICTD 2010. 4th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development. London: IEEE.
Libro de Comunicaciones de la II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social. Comunicación presentada en la II Conferencia Internacional Brecha Digital e Inclusión Social, 28-30 de Octubre de 2009. Leganés: Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.
Information Society: where to? with whom? by Marc Bogdanowicz
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