By Nico Stehr
This publication argues that wisdom is now imperative to the trendy economic climate and its efficient techniques. it's also crucial for social family, social solidarity and clash solution. now we have moved from a society established round heavy commodities to symbolic items, from located markets to non-place-specific destinations, from machines to software program and from issues to principles. those adjustments produce new varieties of social interplay and new views on id, perform and organization. This penetrating publication slices throughout the cliches and blind alleys of discussions round the wisdom society to bare the tendons of latest swap. Written with perception and panache the ebook explains the momentous nature of the alterations linked to the be aware of
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Additional resources for The Fragility of Modern Societies: Knowledge and Risk in the Information Age
Example text
This is the social significance of language, writing, printing and data storage. Modern societies have made dramatic advances in the intellectual appropriation of nature and society. There is an immense stock of objectified knowledge that mediates our relation to nature and to ourselves. 61 This secondary nature is overgrowing the primary nature of humans. The real and the fictional merge and become indistinguishable; theories become facts, but not vice versa. Facts, for example, cannot police theories.
What justifications are there to designate the presently emerging society a knowledge society rather than a science society (Kreibich, 1986), an information 26 The Fragility of Modern Societies society (for example, Nora and Minc, [1978] 1980), a post-industrial society (Bell, 1973), a postmodernization (Inglehart, 1995), a network society (Castells, 1996) or a technological civilization (Schelsky, 1961)? There are several important reasons that argue for ‘knowledge society’ as the term of choice.
Once knowledge has been ‘mastered’, it is difficult to arrest and return it. The development, mobility and reproduction of knowledge are difficult to regulate. It is ‘troublesome’ to censor and control knowledge. It is reasonable to speak of limits to growth in many spheres and resources of life, but the same does not appear to hold for knowledge. Knowledge has virtually no limits to its growth, but it takes time to accumulate. Knowledge is typically seen as a collective commodity par excellence; for example, the ethos of science demands that it is made available to all, at least in principle.
