The Ecology of Information Exchanges
    Tuesday 1 December 1998 - 10.45-12.15, Austria Center Vienna
    A session dealing with "The Attention Economy" at  IST 98

    The move to digital representations of all informational media, their growing accessibility via communications technologies, and the information-processing powers provided by information technology, are delivering a shock, akin to a sudden, brutally disruptive environmental change, to the information exchange ecosystem.

    The title of this session is an attempt to capture some of the uncertainty surrounding the following questions:
     

    • How does one measure information exchanges?
    • For information exchanges that belong to an economy, what is the key foundation of value (eg attention time, information usage, etc), and how can successful economic activities develop using appropriate business models?
    • What constraints do time-budgets put on the development of information exchanges and associated products and services?
    • How should non-economic exchanges and the activities that make them possible be funded? In other words, how can those involved in these activities make a living?
    • What tools, skills and services are needed to enable citizens to critically assess information and media in the Information Society?
    • Is the existing information economy and its leading business models compatible with the emerging Information Society, and how can transition proceed?
    The speakers at this session will address these issues as the culmination of a process involving the earlier posting of position statements on the Web and subsequent comments made by the public via a moderated Web forum.
     
    • Chair: John Browning, European Editor, WIRED magazine (USA)
    • Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Editor, The Indian Techonomist and International and Managing Editor, First Monday (IND)
    • Arnulf Grübler, International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis: Member, Editorial Board, Technology Forecasting and Social Change, and co-author with Jesse H. Aubel of Working Less and Living Longer: Long-Term Trends in Working Time and Time Budgets (A)
    • René Passet, contributor to Transversales Sciences-Culture and author of L'économique et le vivant (F)
    • Luc Soete, Professor of International Economics, Maastricht University: co-author with Chris Freeman of The Economics of Industrial Innovation and Work for All or Mass Unemployment: Computerised Technical Change in the 21st Century (B)


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