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Speech
Inevitable Transformation
into a Smart Society
Korea Institute of Information
and Telecommunication Facilities
Engineering (ITFE) chose 'technology
trend of disaster communication
and emergency broadcasting systems"
for the fall seminar, which
was held November 25th, at Seoul
Education Culture Hall. Experts
from each relevant field gave a presentation
on the country's disaster
communication and emergency
broadcasting policies as well as technology
trends and response plans.
At this Fall seminar, they reviewed
the overall technological development,
effective disaster prevention
measures, and what is needed for
further improvement of the system.
Kim Seongman, Chairman of
ITFE, remarked that the subject of
the seminar seems particularly fitting
after what happened in
Yeonpyeongdo recently, emphasizing
that, for effective disaster communication
and emergency broadcasting systems, we need to be
able to secure communication and broadcasting tools in any circumstance,
and to also respond flexibly in a state of crisis.
President of the National Information-Society Agency (NIA),
Kim Seang-tae, was a special guest for the seminar, providing the
audience with a lecture on smart society. "As a futurist," Mr. Kim
explained, "I have met with a lot of global experts. The current
change in our society is not just a matter of daily life, but it is actually
marking a change of social paradigm into a new civilization."
He said that the emergence of smart society is following 700 years
of the agrarian society, 250 years of the industrial society, and 50
years of the information society; and the rapid acceleration of
such a trend led to the transformation of a contemporary social
paradigm, thus, emergence of smart society."
Smart technology
and smart values that form a smart society
Smart society changed knowledge and information-based technology
into the one based on networking and cooperation, i.e.,
44 KOREA IT TIMES | December 2010
Kim Seang-tae, President of the National Information-Society
Agency (NIS)
smart technology, by which hard
work turned into smart work and
brought a change in management
strategies in the form of convergence
and mobile innovation, etc. What
this means is that the society is looking
for a more creative and open
mind where central values of our society
are shifting toward human dignity
based on flexibility and originality.
The major arguments of futurists
can be largely classified into two categories:
one that stress technology
and another that focuses more on
values. Rolf Jensen's Dream Society
places emphasis on human values,
whereas William Halal and Alvin
Toffler predicted that the new human
society will revolve around human-oriented
technologies such as
artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
This is one of the examples
where smart technology meets
smart value, therefore, creating a smart society.
Global issues are also prompting the need for a smart society,
which could well provide solutions to challenge such as the global
economic and financial crisis, unusually high unemployment
rates, climate change, and terrorist threats, etc.
Korea is no exception. As the country enters an aging society
with a low birth rate, we need to prepare for a super-aged society
by adopting a smart economy and a social safety net. A smart society
can be an answer to Korea's current problems. For that reason,
the government has been making efforts by building a wide
range of information and communication infrastructure, and
those efforts are recognized worldwide as South Korea ranks in
the top spots of the UN's e-government survey.
However, despite the top-level infrastructure, there is still plenty
of room for improvement in terms of utilization of societal values
created by information technology. At the moment, Korea is
finding itself in a crucial transition from information society to
smart society. Then, the question arises: how are we going to apply
this change to solving real problems as ICT expands its influ-