The Information Age and a New Humanity

[Willamena]

This is a course offered by Carthage University. I was wondering what your responses to the points might be:

The information age is changing who we are, how we think, what we believe, how we behave. We are developing a new humanity. Growing numbers of human-beings take more decisions based on available facts and less on feelings, experiences, traditions, habits, myths or the authority of others. Information about almost everything is more freely available. What is the information era doing to us?
*It enhances our individuality and uniqueness; services and products could be tailored to suite almost everyone
*Humans experience that they are more in controle of who they are, what they want and what they do
*Being better informed leads to greater accountability
*What we have and what we do is becoming more transparent; we reveal ourselves maybe even more than we would want to
*It lifts humankind to higher levels of morality and to giving account of what is being considered to be right and wrong
*We can be less dictated to by goods and service providers, for we are more informed and little is being hidden.
Social service providers have to adapt their practices more to cater more humanely and appropriately for the growing new kind of enmerging humanity. They will also be required to deal more aptly with the growing devide between those in the information era and those still living in the pre- information era.

Comments?

Also, do you think the information age is changing humanity? For the better or worse?

[Quagmire]

My first thoughts on reading that were: surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have done much for our grammar or spelling skills.

[Willamena]

I noticed that too, and personally I think it's indiciative. With the growth of information, standards are deterioriating left and right at a rapid pace. I see it on the job. Grammar and spelling have been hit hard, but also ordinary lines of communication that used to be rote are bypassed by e-mail, and the loss of the use of letterhead as a standard can equate to a significant expense of manpower in chasing down required information that used to be readily available. The organization I work in is delved into chaos every time a new operating system comes out, and a big part of our job is adapting to change.

It's a different world--but are we different people because of it? How will we adapt and evolve out of this chaos?

[Willamena]

-> *What we have and what we do is becoming more transparent; we reveal ourselves maybe even more than we would want to

That's another thing--phone privacy! People who don't seem to get that saying, "I love you too," or "Don't forget to wash your hands after you do that," to a bus-wide audience used to be bad form just a few scant years ago.

I expect the same thing happens on social networking sites.

[Jayhawker Soule]

Originally Posted by Willamena

*It lifts humankind to higher levels of morality and to giving account of what is being considered to be right and wrong ...

And let's not confuse more information with better information.

[Quagmire]

Originally Posted by Jayhawker Soule

And let's not confuse more information with better information.

I don't think it's helped combat ignorance so much as eliminated a few of it's excuses.