COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY The Mobile Information Society
	NEW PERSPECTIVES ON 21ST-CENTURY COMMUNICATIONS Conference, May 24-25, 2002 Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Dear Director Sugár, dear Guests, dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen!

The interdisciplinary research program "Communications in the 21st Century", conducted jointly by Westel Mobile Telecommunications and the Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was launched in January 2001. In that year we organized several workshops and two major conferences; the present event is the first international conference. I would like to express my thanks to all who made this event possible. First, of course, to our speakers from abroad. Their participation means an important step forward in the direction of broadening the scope of our research. Secondly to my fellow Hungarians partaking in the project – researchers and organizers – without whose effort and commitment the program could never have gotten underway. And last but not least to the colleagues at Westel for their initiative, support, and intellectual input. Especially, thanks to you, András, for your interest and unfailing help.

The early phase of the research program went under the title "The Mobile Information Society", a phrase that has been current since 1999 or so. This title still figures on our project website, but we have increasingly come to realize that the formulation is somewhat misleading. Mobile communications point to a future which has to do with knowledge as well as with information, and with communities as well as with society. As regards the first distinction (I have told this story in one of the volumes we have published last year, but I need to tell it again here) it was the Telecom Policy Executive Director of Westel, Dr. Ferenc Tompa, who at the March 2001 workhop shook our complacency by reminding us of T.S. Eliot’s famous lines from the early 1930s: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?".

Echoing Eliot, John Naisbitt in his popular book Megatrends, published in 1982, bemoans the phenomenon that the world is "drowning in information, but is starved for knowledge". Naisbitt’s formulation is taken up by Vartan Gregorian among many others, in an address given in 1992. Gregorian – at the time President of Brown University – there also refers to Carlos Fuentes as saying that "one of the greatest challenges facing modern society and contemporary civilization is how to transform information into knowledge". The conclusion Gregorian reaches is that today’s educational institutions must be careful to "provide not just information, but its distillation, namely knowledge".

The notion that "information" is somehow inferior to "knowledge" is not of recent origin. "Informare" in Italian, "informer" in French, and "to inform" in English all had from the beginning the connotation of conveying knowledge that is merely a matter of particular details. To have information amounted to knowing details, adding up to no larger unity. Hence the use of the word "information" in the contexts of criminal accusation, charge, legal process. John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), could affirm that "information" had to do with "truth and real knowledge";  however, what the OED refers to as the "prevailing mod. sense" of inform, namely "to impart knowledge of some particular fact or occurrence", or the Larousse phrase "informer quel-qu’un de quelque chose", indeed appear to capture the essentials of the concept.

Thus Roszak can correctly point out, in his The Cult of Information (1986), that in the days of his childhood, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, "information" was a dull word, referring to answers to concrete questions, having the form of names, numbers, dates, etc. But with Shannon’s and Weaver’s technical concept of information, put forward in their book The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1949), and with the emergence of computers, it also became a misleading word with new - and glorious - connotations. Attempts at clarification of course abound.  Daniel Bell made such an attempt in 1979, writing: "By information I mean data processing in the broadest sense; the storage, retrieval, and processing of data becomes the essential resource for all economic and social exchanges. ... By knowledge, I mean an organized set of statements of facts or ideas, presenting a reasoned judgment or an experimental result, which is transmitted to others through some communication medium in some systematic form."

Let me sum up the foregoing by saying that the term knowledge can be usefully regarded as signifying: information in context. Now it is a standard observation that the sort of information that is sought through mobile phones is, characteristically, location-specific and situation-specific. It seems, then, that mobile communication tends to engender not just information, but information in context: that is, knowledge per se. This is one of my reasons for suggesting that the phrase "mobile information society" is not an entirely felicitous one. The other reason is that ubiquitous interactive multimedia communication, employing various channels synchronously – today's mobile telephony – appears to sustain those very types of human connections that, in the traditional parlance of sociology since Tönnies, are characteristic of communities rather than of societies.

In his 1992 book The Transparent Society Gianni Vattimo warns that equating community with unrestricted communication represents a romanticised ideal of community. I think his admonitions are exaggerated. Certainly we do not want to fall victim to romantic notions, and personally I very much share Robert Edgerton's position as expounded in his volume Sick Societies where he takes issue with the "'community-lost' way of reconstructing history", that is with the view that the "small, isolated, and homogeneous folk societies" of the past were, invariably, "harmonious communities". However, it is one thing to believe in primitive harmony, and quite another to maintain that the distinction between community and society is a methodologically useful one, and that it is precisely the difference in communication patterns that can best serve as a basis for that distinction. This is the approach taken by Karl W. Deutsch in the 1950s when he applied to the issues of social communication the notion of complementarity, originally a concept in communications theory.  According to Deutsch, to whom I will return in my talk tomorrow, communities are characterized by patterns of communication that display a high level of complementarity between different channels of information. Or, as Dewey has so memorably put it some decades earlier: "There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the things they have in common; and communication is the way in which they come to possess things in common." Dewey also came to stress that in its "deepest and richest sense" a community must always remain "a matter of face-to-face intercourse". Faced with modern mobile multimedia communications devices combining voice, text, and live pictures Dewey would no doubt have found mobile telephony a medium with a great potential for the fostering of social cohesion. Let me add that Dewey's belief in the intrinsic connection between communication and community is fully corroborated by the insights of contemporary cognitive science. Robin Dunbar, one of our speakers this afternoon, has in his famous book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language convincingly shown that language evolved specifically to service social relationships, and even today is mainly used for exchanging information on social matters. Mobile telephony thus brings back a world that very much fits our anthropological makeup: the world of ubiquitous multimodal communication.

These are, then, some of the considerations which made us entertain the idea that an analysis of the human impact of mobile communications should perhaps proceed in terms of knowledge and communities, rather than in terms of information and society. The present conference is built around the basic concepts of mobile cognition and mobile communities. The first talks today will focus on some fundamental new social and spatial relationships within communities which are increasingly on the move. The discussion will then turn to the cognitive capacities – some unchanging, some changing – the members of these communities possess, or will come to possess. The papers tomorrow morning will deal with various aspects of communication – verbal, pictorial, scientific – examined from the perspective of new mobile technologies. In the afternoon, the first two talks will be on the human costs of the new communication patterns, while the third, from a computer scientist's point of view, on the computational means to lessen those costs. The conference will conclude with a paper relating to some very new – and very old – patterns of behaviour members of the political community display in an age of mobile communications. The topic: mobile telephony in the 2002 Hungarian elections.

It is envisaged that each talk will be followed by a discussion of fifteen minutes. I hope you will enjoy the talks, and actively participate in the discussions. Thank you for being here, and have a good conference!