Information Revolution

According to several historians, the Information Revolution is the third revolution in the history of the world after agricultural and industrial revolutions. Information age is the time, which brought fundamental changes in intellectual, social, philosophical and cultural aspects of the world.

Some historians are of the opinion that actually information revolution was the first revolution ever occurred and the agricultural and industrial revolutions were caused due to information revolution. To prove their claim they said that when civilization started, travelers and traders traveled from one place to another, as they have access to many cultures and traditions, they shared information and this information was actually the beginning of civilization as well as led the humanity towards the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

The Information Society can be determined as the large group of people within a country or a region wherein most workers generate or depend upon information for performance of their jobs. Today information is the largest export of most News services, banks, insurance companies, television stations etc. these all organizations collect data, process it into information, distribute it, and store it as a major part of their business.

Although we are living in an information society but it is equally true that only a part of the world has access to all its facilities. For example Internet is the best source of sharing information but there were digital, cultural and content gap between different parts of the world.

Digital Gap

The digital gap is most evident at the phase of connectivity; the lack of affordable access to PCs, Internet devices, modems, telephone lines, and Internet Connections. Steps to reduce this gap include devising cheaper access devices, creating Internet community access centers and bringing down access prices by creating a favorable climate of competition among Internet Service Providers.

It has been estimated that there are more phones in the New York alone than the whole rural area of Africa and almost 80% of the world population has never made a phone call (World Bank 1998). It has also estimated that there are more Internet Connections in London alone than the whole Africa

The developed countries, whose population comprises only 15% of world population, has almost 88% of Internet users (United Nations, 1997)

It has also been estimated that only 1% of the Internet users live in Africa and, if we exclude South Africa then the number of Internet users is less than 100,000 in whole Africa, which is only .02% of the global Internet content (Africa)

Developing countries share of Internet users is less than 5% etc. The reason for such low usage of Information and Communication Technology in developing countries is the cost of Internet. In Africa, the average cost of using Internet for 5 hours only is approximately $50 per month. Most of the developing countries have not enough per capita income to cover the expenses of the usage of Information and Communication Technology and that is the main reason why the growth of Internet users is so slow in developing countries (World Bank, 1998).

Cultural Gap

Culture represents probably the biggest challenge in closing the digital gap. It involves overcoming cultural inhibitions and insecurities about developing competence for surveying the breakneck speed of the Internet age. Closing the Internet gap includes getting governments in developing countries to stop treating their telecom monopolies like cash cow and instead, getting government telecom players to invest in areas like research and development on Internet telephony, so that the technology is seen as a market opportunity on a global scale and not a threat on a local scale. It also includes getting career-track diplomats, bureaucrats, academics and public sector employees to take up Internet training and harness the opportunities as well as the plentiful challenges that accompany Internet diffusion. Closing the cultural gap entails the creation of a risk taking culture, in which accepting some initial failures should not be treated as sign of weakness or a loss of face.

Content Gap

There is a huge content gap between developed and developing countries. According to the International Telecommunication Union, there were more Internet hosts in Finland than in all of Latin America and the Caribbean in 1999, there were more hosts in New York than in all of Africa, and more than 80% of web pages were in English (International Telecommunication Union, 1999).

Advantages and Disadvantages of living in Information Society

Some positive points of living in an Information society are:
· In Information Society, communities are more equipped with the facility to generate employment opportunities and wealth in the global market
· Information society helps to improve the welfare trends of the world
· It has the ability to support the overall condition of cohesiveness and integration of the communities of the world
· Information society encourage the unemployed persons to work for their own
Although living in an Information society has several advantages but it has some disadvantages too:
· There is a huge gap between the people of different areas of the world. Although information society promotes a global world but it also promotes inequality between the people of developed and undeveloped regions
· Information society promotes risk to job security as it is not easy to maintain jobs in competitive market terms
· As information society encourages the unregulated free trade, this leads to the wider gap between the rich and the poor.

Right of Information

Information is the right of every human being. But due to different social, economical and political conditions people of different demographic regions of the world are not enjoying it equally. It has an important point to notice that developed countries have better opportunities for the right of Information than the developing countries.

The concept of right to information is based on the concept of freedom of Information. The freedom of Information and the intellectual freedom are the rights, which protect the human development.

According to the United Nations human Development report, “Human poverty constitutes a denial of fundamental human rights. To promote social progress and raise the standard of living within the wider concept of freedom, international human rights law... recognizes economic and social rights with the aim of attacking poverty and its consequences. Among these rights are an adequate standard of living food, housing, education, health, work, social security and a share in the benefits of social progress” (United Nations, p. 106). These all rights are more important than the right to information. For example if a person do not have food, health, work or shelter he or she do not need the right of information. The United Nations rectification status of major rights tell us that economic, social and cultural rights are ratified by 135 countries while 57 countries have not ratified them.