Week 4 a.k.a. Big Challenges Of The Information Society

This week our task was to read and give our opinion about the Challenges of The Global Information Society report by Pekka Himanen. This is Week 4 of SPEAIT2021K course and I would like to analyze aforementioned report.

The aim of the report was to take a look at the main challenges in the information society. Report also proposes a way to overcome these challenges - so-called "Finnish model", the model of the information society combined with the welfare state. Dr. Pekka Himanen, world famous researcher of the information age, was asked to prepare the report for the Finnish Parliament's Commitee for the Future.

After listing ten global trends in strong progress that accompany the global development of the information society, Dr. Pekka Himanen proceedes to describe three development scenarios - The "Sillicon Valley model", The "Singapore model" and The "Finnish model", that has the danger of "dead hand passivity". This means, that people continue protecting the industrial era structures of the welfare state, which results in the welfare being cut further and further back. According to the Dr. Himanen, the future of the welfare state can be secured by reforming the welfare state with same form of innovation that the information society has gone through.

The first step towards that would be building a creative economy, spearheds of which would be stronger IT sector, culture and welfare. Since routine jobs and production will not allow developed countries to compete with Asian markets, they should focus on expertise and creativity instead. This includes impleneting work encouraging taxation system and enviroment.

The second step would be creating a creative welfare society. The general idea is for people to have equal opportunities to realize their potential, equal access to education, training, healthcare, etc. According to Dr. Pekka Himanen, although the government is the best alternative for providing equal opportuninties and protection, since it is democratically controlled by citizens, this does not mean that all welfare services should be provided solely by government. In many areas, it is useful to separate service purchaser from service provider. Dr. Himanen also stresses the importance of high-quality education system and suggests using innovative technologies to create better work environment and increase productivity.

The third step towards reforming welfare state would be humanly meaningful behaviour. Dr. Himanen suggests ways of promoting a socially, mentally, physically and culturally balanced development. This includes such things as an agreement on more flexible working hours and allowing employees to excercise during the workday.

Finally, Dr. Himanen proposes the idea of a global culture, where many different cultures would be merged into one single culture. This would help the internationalisation of higher education and attracting skilled labour.

As a matter of fact, this 17 years old report described the information society of the future quite precisely, since a lot of predictions have come true and lots of proposals and suggestions have been implemented. The greater part of the report circled around the idea of the better work environment and work conditions have actually changed a lot since then. Dr. Himanen's predictions about IT being one of the spearheads of the creative economy also came to be true, Estonia being the great example of which.