Distance Education in Transition - Master of Distance Education ...

"Information" and "Knowledge" - On the Semantic Transformation of Two Central Terms
2001, p. 2) and to the central category of economic life, a "value-added factor of the
first order " (Degele, 2000, p. 23).
In his references to new developments Nico Stehr (1994, p. 36) demonstrated just how
far this knowledge has transformed society: " 'Scientification' as the scientific penetration
of all areas of life and field of action, professionalisation (of occupations) as the
crowding out of other forms of knowledge through science, the development of science
as a direct productive force, science and education policies as the creation of a special
sector of politics, the production of knowledge as the formation of a new production
sector, the technocracy debate as a change in hierarchical structures, the power of
experts as a transformation of the basis for legitimation of a hierarchy through to special
knowledge, the development of knowledge as the foundation of social inequality and
social solidarity and the transformation of the dominant sources of social conflicts."
For this reason, the term "knowledge society" has been a key word since the 1980s
alongside the term "information society".
"Informed" Knowledge
When we have experienced from the history of knowledge just how fundamentally new
media have structurally altered the knowledge that they impart5 , we must expect this to
be the case with knowledge that is acquired with the help of computers. The assumption
that "our" knowledge changes will be strange for many people because scientific
knowledge in particular has long appeared to be beyond doubt. In the second half of the
19 th century scientific knowledge in particular was sacrosanct (Gerhardt, 1999, p. 95).
We are still today under the impression made by the part played by knowledge in the
industrialised world of work and everyday life and as laypersons have made a firmly
outlined image for ourselves which still contains the concept that knowledge survives
time, because it is traditional and in its fundamentals (the cognitive universals) is
actually unchangeable.
This makes it all the more important that we understand why knowledge that is produced
with the help of networked computers has now changed so much that we have to speak
of "another" knowledge. Michael Gibbons et al. referred to this other knowledge in
1994 in their book "The new production of knowledge" (1994, pp. 3–16). The authors see
the cause of the creation of the new knowledge in the changed structure of knowledge
production. In their opinion this structure can be characterised above all by the following
special features: there is a close connection between the production of knowledge and
its application. The reason and starting point for the production of knowledge are
typically formed by a practical problem. Knowledge production no longer takes place in
the traditional institutes that were created for this purpose, but increasingly in new
locations, e.g. in independent research institutes, small specialised companies, consulting
firms and think tanks. The organisation of knowledge production is not hierarchical.
Work is trans-disciplinary and not mono- or multi-disciplinary in the traditional sense.
5 There have above all been three momentous occurrences in the history of knowledge: the verbalisation of
knowledge in the mind, the writing down of oral knowledge and printing written knowledge. Each of these
occurrences changed knowledge fundamentally as the result of using a new medium (Ong, 1987; Damerow &
Lefevre, 1998).
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