Zugang zum Wissen (tphff2015)

The claim that knowledge is increasingly central to the global economy—or that the global economy is today “informational,” rather than industrial—thus must be understood as a more specific claim: that advances in the ability of humans to codify, organize, exchange, and test certain kinds of scientific and technical knowledge have created revolutionary changes in modes of economic productivity. These changes can be traced back many centuries, for example, to the advent of the print- ing press—a technology that made copying much more reliable and written texts much more widely available and that enabled feedback loops that allowed information to be collected and corrected over time. 15 Newer information and communications technologies have intensified this process by increasing the speed of information transfer and processing, earlier through technologies such as the railroad and telegraph and more recently through the pervasive networking of digital technologies that we associate, for example, with the Internet. 16 This increased capacity to codify, store, process, and exchange information has been a precondition for the development of information-intensive sectors from biotechnology to financial engineering. It is also a precondition of the shift toward more flexible, networked, information-intensive business systems such as just-in-time production. (S 20)