COMMUNICATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The Mobile Information Society

Interdisciplinary research program


 

  Kristóf Nyíri:

From the Information Society
to a Knowledge Community

Outline
   
In my introduction to the first phase of this project ("Bevezetõ gondolatok"), and in the talk "The Mobile Information Society: Back to the Roots" I gave at the May 29, 2001 conference (in Hungarian), I made the following observations: 1. Communication and community are interdependent. 2. Communicating via perceptual signs is anthropologically prior to communicating via verbal language. Multimodal communication is more fundamental than verbal communication. 3. As compared with communicating in spoken or written language, computer networking vastly increases our capabilities for multimodal communication. A new type of personality emerges: the network individual. 4. The rise of the internet leads to more, not less, physical movement; and to more, not fewer, personal contacts. Increased volumes of communication can imply increased levels of travel and transportation, while more travel leads to an increase in the demand for mobile internet access. 5. Information does not amount to knowledge; knowledge is information in context. 

These observations inevitably lead to issues bound up with the dichotomy between the two concepts of "community" and "society" as formulated in Tönnies' classic Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), as well as with the related dichotomy between "culture" and  "civilization", and even with David Riesman's threefold distinction of “tradition-directed", "inner-directed", and "other-directed" personality types. In my outline I plan to show that under the conditions of mobile networked multimedia communication it is possible not only that the gigantic torrent of information by which we are confronted may become transformed into flows of real knowledge, but also that today's society of mere civilization might become a community of culture. We can hope, in other words, for a new type of synthesis of inner-directedness and other-directedness.