online information industries

NAME HASSAN ABBA

NUMBER MIM/EDUC/1242/2009-2010

COURSE LIBS 883 ONLINE INFORMATION INDUSTRIES.

Scholars are of the view that if there is going to be another world war, definitely that war would be war of information. That is why over a trillion dollars was spent on information related goods in United States of America. This ranges in creation and collection of information, manufacturing of information and then transportation of information to attain global scale by partnering with other similar companies. Hence a projection reveals that in the next fifteen years the world would undergo one of the history’s greatest technological transformation “mega industries”.

Even though there is inefficiency in the industry due is waste of economic and ecological resources, inadequate matching of information content with the need’s of the recipients and severs time and place constraints on information access and availability, but there would be convergent information industry. The convergence will assemble the imagined and unimagined technologies i.e. [what is feasible in the technology and what is not imagine is happened].the industry will definitely grow by merger and alliances among them selves. This will go along way in depleting the three traditional concept of information industry and substituting it with five basic forms. Namely: voice, text, images, audio/video and data. This equally changes the kind of information function in the in the industry. Thereby bringing about breakthroughs in communication technology. Thus there is a shift from centralised to distributed processing in the computer industry. This shift also results in behavioural pattern. ie how people shop , socialise, how people are entertained, how they conduct business and handle finances. This paradigm of shift of new technology also brought about changes in structural transformation in the industry.

CRITICISM

It is a general belief that the factors of production are: the capital, the land, the labour and entrepreneurship, but now the fourth is information technology. This is by the scholars down to the technocrats and the lay man. This notion is taken very serious that almost everything now is attributed to information world. The projection about the next world vis-à-vis information is so lopsided. It gives way to maximisation of profits. In order word this paper opens way for globalisation thus promoting capitalism and capitalist tendencies. Critically speaking this Information advocacy is only on the advantage of the western world. Since information flow is always one-way. i.e. from the advanced capitalist west to the South Pole [2^nd and 3^rd worldcountries]. There is this saying that “he, who has the piper, dictates the tune”. So they have the technology and this assertion about information world is technology driven.