Hello DDN members..
I've been lurking for a while and thought I would post a message myself. I am curious about members' thoughts on various terms we use when we discuss 'information society'. First, I would like to focus on the "e vs i" issue. (electronic vs information) We have been using terms such as e-govt, e-business, e-commerce, e-education/learning, e-health, etc for about 10 years now. My feeling is that this is not an accurate description and a better alternative would be to use 'i' instead of 'e'. (i-govt, i-business, i-commerce, i-education/learning, i-health, etc) Information society is not simply about 'electronification'. It is about 'informatization', which involves 'electronification' plus changing work processes (e.g. BPR : Business Process Re-engineering). Using 'government' as example : We can use the term 'i-government' as a short term for 'informatized government' or 'informatization of government'. or if the term 'informatization' is not comfortable, We can still use 'i-government' as a short term for 'ICT based government' It's interesting that in the WSIS declaration and action plan, the term 'ICT Applications' is used. But WSIS declaration and action also uses terms 'e-government, e-business, e-health, etc' This is somewhat inconsistent. On the other hand, the ITU uses the term 'e-applications'. Perhaps we can unify these terms so that we have : i-applications : to describe applications in general i-government, i-business, etc : to describe sectoral applications The WSIS also urges national governments to develop national 'e-strategies' by 2008. Perhaps a better term might be 'information strategies' or 'information society strategies' or 'i-strategies'. Second, I would like to mention ICT vs IC (information & communications technology vs information & communications) Here, I prefer the term 'information & communications'. The term ICT is often used as it seems easier to grasp considering that without technology, the 'current' information society would not be possible. Still, 'technology' itself is not the core of information society, 'information' is. (There are many issues such as 'information privacy' which is not just about online information privacy, but is also about offline information privacy as well) Technology is something which plays supporting role in all sectors such as finance, industry, environment, transportation, health, etc. Yet, we don't say finance technology policy, envrionement technology policy, etc. We simply say finance policy, environment policy etc. The same logic should apply to information & communications. It's interesting that during WSIS-1, in the initial non-paper on WSIS declaration prepared by the President of Prepcom, the title read 'Information & Communications for All'. (which was later changed to 'Building the Information Society : a global challenge in the new Millennium'.) It didn't say 'Information & Communications Technology for All'. On a side note, I thought 'Information & Communications for All' was much better than the 'Building the Information Society : a global challenge in the new Millennium', as the latter seems to depict information society as something we pass through in the course of history rather than a permanent fixture among human activities such as health, economic, transportation, politics, social, education, etc. (e.g. Humans have always conducted 'transportation' activities, even though we didn't have 'transportation policy' till later stages of human history. Same can be said for information & communications. Humans have always conducted 'information & communications' activities, even though we didn't have 'information & communications policy' in the modern sense till recently) It's interesting that in some countries, there is Ministry of Information & Communications, in others, there is Ministry of Information & Communications Technology. (The EU on the other hand, uses the term 'information society' for the name of the Directorate General) In addition to 'e vs i' and 'ict vs ic', there are other terminology issues such as 'information vs digital', 'telecommunications vs communications', 'information & communications vs ICT vs information society vs information economy vs digital economy' , etc, but perhaps we can discuss that some other time. Hope this is some food for thought. Sincerely, YS Lee National Computerization Agency Republic of Korea www.nca.or.kr (our Agency's name is a bit interesting too... we are working to come up with a better name ... ^*&)
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