NIERÓWNOŚCI I NIEDOSTATKI SPOŁECZEŃSTWA INFORMACYJNEGO

Abstract

Despite many opinions to the contrary, the Information Society is not at all the embodiment of Utopian pictures of equality, welfare and perfect communication. What it does, rather, is to create new, or maintain the already existing, social and economic inequalities across continents, states, regions, as well as those between; urban and rural communities, the educated and the less (the un-) educated, the rich and the poor, the young and the elderly, and so on. This problem is of material significance because the elements of an information society, and the Internet in particular, could play an important role in the (positive) development of societies in places where they appear. Besides those social and economic inequalities, the information society shows certain shortcomings as regards social communication - above all a weakness to downgrade real social contacts in relation to virtual communication and virtual societies. All this is, however, ambivalent because communication in an information society creates new and hitherto unknown social effects.