It can increase the quality of human experience, create new environments to realize our dreams and help us to get beyond problems that trouble our world. In the last century Western culture gradually learned to see society as an “information society”. Many are now convinced that we will all benefit from the systematic development of an “information economy”. It is hard to underestimate the added v
alue of recent “Information and Communication Technologies”.
• Computers, software and the internet drastically increased our possibilities to compile, select, organize, analyse and disseminate information.
• Intelligent environments and machines can provide automated services that humans would never be able to perform
At the same time it remains clear that the mere processing of information - and even the deployment of “Information and Communication Technologies” - does not necessarily produce the powerful “active information” that increases the quality of human experience, and opens new perspectives of action.
• Listed information. Processing of information risks to remain the mere repetition, accumulation, re-grouping and dissemination of standard information listed on paper, film or digital media. "Listed information" may originally have been active as a clarifying and inspiring input into some specific context, but when listed and moved away from its living context, it is also stripped of its clarifying and inspiring power.
• Active information. When we are looking for information that is active and guides and deepens our own experience, “listed information” can only play an inspiring role after some radical “re-interpretation” or “translation” (or “transfer”) to our own context. For several decennia and more, we are developing information-intensive activities, explicitly targeted towards a direct impact on the way we live.
• Innovation is promoted as a process that goes all the way, from information over new technologies to social change that improves the daily life of people.
• Security efforts massively compile information into “intelligence systems” in order to protect people against crime and disasters.
• Data protection and privacy efforts are promoting and enforcing mechanisms to avoid information reaching society in the wrong way and ultimately hindering people. For each of these developments, we experience serious problems, opponents doubt whether the approach will ever be successful and proponents feel the need to intensify their efforts.
