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2004-05-08

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Conceptual Framework Of The National Information Society Development Of Lithuania

source_2
Marius Povilas Saulauskas. “Personal Identity Possibilities” (excerpts)

source_3
Marshall Mcluhan. "Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man" (excerpts)

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source_1
Conceptual Framework Of The National Information Society Development Of Lithuania

Status: Legal (official) document

Note: First (INTRODUCTION) and second (KEY OBJECTIVES) parts are most essential. There is Lithuanian version of this text.

http://www3.lrs.lt/cgi-bin/preps2?Condition1=130056&Condition2=

I. INTRODUCTION

1. The world today witnesses changes: markets transform rapidly as well as work places, home and leisure environment. Human activities are less restricted by distances and time, they become more global and specialization intensifies. Therefore, competition in the open market makes cooperation essential. New opportunities arise, such as virtual companies, e-public administration, e-development of work, studies and culture. Being informed, competent and able to use the opportunities provided by information technologies - all those skills are of significant importance today.

All those factors initiate changes since changes safeguard the quality of life, social welfare, cultural values and language. Changes also accelerate economic activities, the development of democracy and cooperation on the regional and national levels; changes facilitate the governing of the state too.

However, the power of information, competencies (knowledge) and information technologies (IT) is fully revealed only in the information society if, ideally, all its members: producers, service providers, the common people and managers at all levels are able, know how and want to take their advantages.

2. A large number of Lithuanian people cannot and do not know how to use the potential of IT. The conditions for the development of the information society are particularly unfavourable in rural areas. In the European context, Lithuania is lagging far behind since among the countries of Europe we are at times only the third from the bottom of the list.

3. Key reasons for lagging behind are the following:

3.1. most people do not know how to use modern information processing tools and they lack opportunities to learn to apply them. For instance, only eight percent of the Lithuanian population use the Internet constantly while in rural areas this figure does not reach even one percent;

3.2. rural population has almost no opportunities to use IT and computer networks due to the lack of skills and communications channels as well as due to high prices of communications facilities;

3.3. pupils lack teaching materials, qualified teachers, computers and contacts with global computer networks. Only three percent of schools are connected by exclusive links to computer networks, and there is only one computer per 60 pupils;

3.4. there is no competent governmental institution with relevant authority to manage, regulate and coordinate the activities of the development of the information society;

3.5. in utilizing funds allocated for the development of information science ministries and other government institutions have enjoyed a total freedom of action or inactivity and have been able to utilize the assigned funds as they deemed necessary while their activities were only minimally coordinated. Consequently, budget appropriations from the state budget of the Republic of Lithuania as well as from foreign funds have been used unreasonably, thus no evident results have been achieved;

3.6. the information register system which is of great national importance has not been organized yet and, as a result, the effective activities of public bodies and municipalities are brought to a standstill. For instance, out of 160 registers approved by laws only two are accepted for usage in accordance with the established procedure; interaction among registers is missing and their information is not reliable;

3.7. staff of governmental institutions do not know sufficiently well how to employ the possibilities of information processing; instruments regulating electronic exchange among institutions are also lacking;

3.8. businessmen are not encouraged to support the development of the information society of Lithuania.

4. The current Conceptual Framework aimed at the improvement of the existing situation contains the approach towards phenomena related to the development of the information society of Lithuania; it also covers objectives and tasks and includes priorities and expected results. The Conceptual Framework also considers specific conditions of Lithuania and key objectives defined by the political initiative of electronic Europe:

4.1. to involve every citizen, family, school, company and every government institution into the digital era;

4.2. to create electronically knowledgeable Europe supported by an educated business willing to fund and develop new ideas;

4.3. to ensure that this process is socially attractive, fosters the trust of customers and enhances social cohesion.

II. KEY OBJECTIVES

5. When specifying the objectives of the information society, the information society has been viewed as open, educated, continuously learning and grounding its activities on competencies (knowledge). Its members, both the common people and managers at all levels, enjoy the opportunity and are able to use effectively in all areas of their activities modern IT, national and global computerized information resources, while government and municipal institutions utilize all those facilities and resources and are able to make decisions and guarantee the public accessible and reliable information.

6. The mission of the state and municipalities is to establish conditions for the development of the information society and to promote this process; to facilitate the integration into the global information society and to utilize the opportunities provided by it. To carry out this mission, the following principal objectives are envisaged:

6.1. to ensure the possibility for the public to acquire knowledge and skills. Having utilized possibilities provided by communications and information technologies, people will be able to adjust more flexibly to rapidly changing living and working conditions and will be able to compete successfully in global markets;

6.2. to modernize the management of the state. It will require the utilization of computerized information sources, the creation of the adequate legal environment, the development of electronic government (hereinafter referred to as “e-government”, correspondingly with other words) and e-democracy; to provide the public with factual possibilities to obtain information from all public authorities, to create conditions for the development of the information society of Lithuania and to submit proposals, criticize and participate in decision making;

6.3. to develop business based on competencies (knowledge), information, communications and information technologies;

6.4. to minimize urban and rural information infrastructure differences and to offer all the population equal opportunities to use IT for social and public needs;

6.5. to promote Lithuanian culture and to preserve the Lithuanian language in the global information society;

6.6. to encourage the participation in the programmes and projects of the European Union aiming to create favourable conditions for the development of the information society of Lithuania.

III. TASKS
..............

IV. PRIORITIES

13. Competence:

13.1. to achieve that every school graduate acquires appropriate IT-based

13.2. to provide the possibility for students, lecturers, research staff and the personnel of cultural establishments to use modern IT,

13.3. to establish open points of contact, particularly in rural areas and to use for this purpose libraries and schools whereby people who do not have computers, for example, agricultural workers, could be able to learn and acquire skills and accumulate experience in using IT and to utilize the possibilities of the Lithuanian and foreign information networks for their needs;

13.4. to raise public awareness on the importance of the development of the information society.

14. Public administration: E-Government

15. Electronic business

16. Culture and language - to design automatic translation, recognition and synthesis tools of the Lithuanian language; to lithuanize computer software by carrying out tasks put forward by the Programme of the Lithuanian Language in the Information Society in 2000-2006;

V. RESULTS

17. With the implementation of the set objectives and tasks it is anticipated that the following results will be achieved:

17.1. the public will be able to acquire knowledge and skills more easily, people will be able to update, develop and successfully apply them in life and work in a rapidly changing environment of the information society since:

17.1.1. with the introduction of e-literacy certificates meeting the requirements of the information society and the European educational standards, pupils will sit the national e-literacy examination and those wishing will have opportunities to acquire skills in specialized centers and take tests;

17.1.2. every person will have possibilities to acquire knowledge as distance learning centers will be established. Every person will have a chance to improve professional skills, to learn new competencies, take tests and sit exams in order to obtain a course completion certificate.

17.1.3. in every school one computer will be available for ten pupils (the number of pupils is estimated starting from the first class) and one computer for four students.

17.1.4. teachers and civil servants will achieve e-literacy, their professional skills will improve;

17.1.5. libraries will be linked to the global computer networks, each library will have at least two computers;

17.1.6. various teaching programmes will be prepared (at least 50 teaching aids);

17.1.7. students, lecturers, and research workers will be able to use modern IT and computerized data storage facilities; possibilities will become available to develop joint activities with foreign partners.

17.2. an efficient informatics and communications system governed by regulations will be implemented;

17.3. conditions for serving the public will improve due to the development of the IT-based public services of the e-government; every person will be able to submit inquiries to any government institution and receive replies through the public networks as well as to participate actively in various surveys in solving important issues of the state policy;

17.4. civil servants and municipal employees will be able to solve issues of the state management and the utilization of national resources more effectively, rationally and flexibly:

17.4.1. all employees will have to achieve e-literacy and possess certificates proving it;

17.4.1. almost all employees will have processing cards with the e-signature and will work with electronic documents;

17.4.3. the public will be served in accordance with “one-stop shop” principle;

17.4.4. public procurement will be transparent for all tender participants who will be able to obtain promptly all the information they are interested in through a special Internet portal and institutions announcing tenders will receive centralized public procurement and organization services;

17.4.5. tax collection system will be linked to a joint information system;

17.4.6. existing national communications and data transfer networks (currently there are about 11 of them) will be linked to a joint network in respect of the centralized network administrator;

17.4.7. the system of accounting and supervision of social services provided for the public (social insurance, health care, payment of pensions, etc.) will be integrated.

18. Civil servants and municipal employees will be able to solve state management and resource utilization issues more effectively, rationally and flexibly.

19. Employees of companies will be able to develop business based on competencies (knowledge), information, communications and information technologies in the context of the rapidly expanding globalization and specialization.

20. Urban and rural population will enjoy equal opportunities to use computerized information resources and possibilities provided by IT.

21. Global and the European Union projects will become more easily accessible for undertakings and government bodies and they could be more active in implementing them.

22. In order to use the Lithuanian language in the electronic media:

22.1. essential computer software will be Lithuanized up to 2003;

22.2. in 2004 trial samples will be produced: for the automatic translation of legal acts, initially the European Union instruments; for the automatic recognition and printing of oral texts covering a few hundred words; for the rendering of Lithuanian texts into sounds (that is of particular importance for the disabled); information systems for verbal replies to verbal requests through, for example, communications channels; speaker’s voice recognition (the voice lock).

VI. MANAGEMENT
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VII. FUNDING
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source_2
Marius Povilas Saulauskas. “Personal Identity Possibilities” (excerpts)

http://www.infovi.vu.lt/mps/pub-mps.htm

The Spell of Homo Informaticus: Two Superstitions & Three Dreams.
Even at the dawn of a full-fledged information society Homo Informaticus already carries a handful of badly compatible fears and hopes. First, anxieties about an inevitable desolation of habitual patterns of human interaction and values, as well as an inexorably pending threat of horrifying global control. Second, evergreen optimism of rapidly approaching egalitarian era under the pledge of free universal access to information, cornucopian abundance of all imaginable material and spiritual goods, and unrestricted reign of knowledge once for all overthrowing unjust orders of power and brute force. The article puts under the close scrutiny the key pro et contra arguments involved in the theoretical articulation of these basic attitudes and examines its topical question: why neither the dreadful fears nor gaily hopes of Homo Informaticus cannot be reasonably sustained in the face critical inquiry?

THE FIRST LAST DECADE: NETIZEN's - HOMO IRRETITUS - INCIPIENCE. It is almost crystal clear that the last second millennium's decade serves as the first decade of the newfangled information society. It was a period that shaped the most important social features of Homo Informaticus on the background of the global net. Thereof the rise of an avantgarde hypostasis of Homo Informaticus - one who nets in the net, the netting and netted human being, - Homo Irretitus. The last decade of the second millennium inserted at least three records in the story of his birth certificate: the fabrication of global village net, the establishment of business-net and netted working place and the generation of global netting of popoculture.

Introduction: information society and its inhabitant

The computer mediated communication society made popular by Prof. Yoneji Masuda as johoka shakai or information society (Masuda:1983) is rapidly approaching the age of legal consent. It is almost crystal clear that the last second millennium's decade serves as the first decade of the unfolding information society. It was a period that shaped the most important social features of Homo Informaticus on the background of the global net. Thereof the rise of an avant-garde hypostasis of Homo Informaticus - Homo Irretitus (literally "irretitus" in Latin means "caught in a net, trapped"), one who nets in the net: the netting and at the same time netted human being.

The last decade of the second millennium inserted at least three records in the story of his birth certificate: first, the fabrication of global village net (CNET:1999); second, the establishment of business-net: the netted working place and global e-commerce (ZDNET:1999); third, the generation of global netting of popculture (Saulauskas:1999). Below is a brief featuring of Homo Irretitus, whose numbers at the end of 1999 exceeded 200 million persons or almost five percent of the world’s population (Nua:1999):

· language -- International English, net English;
· (cultural) identity -- netizen, avatar;
· place of work -- netsites (LAN, intranet, extranet, internet);
· recreation place -- netsites (newsgroups, chat rooms, portals);
· ideals -- netknowledge and netmanagement (geek, guru, high tech, hacker);
· phobias -- netgarbage and netcollapse (computer virus, bug, spam, Y2K).

When reading this "faceless", "artificial" and "rootless" Homo Irretitus portrait from the point of view of "normal" modernity one can easily understand the rapid increase of various eschatological visions proclaiming the pending end of received human world, be it better or worse. Here Homo Irretitus falls victim to his own casted net thereby justifying the literal sense of the very title: irretitus does not mean only that one who creates and casts the net, it points as well to those who are already helplessly caught in it. On the other hand, the voices of hope continue to usher perfected perspectives of far better, more human, prosperous, more predictable and sustainable new world order. Therefore is worthwhile to look straight into the eyes of the settler of the coming information society – newly born Homo Irretitus – and ask: is s/he legitimately afraid of frightening developments and hopes for something that is worth desiring?

The transformation of the social habitat into the global information society of the 21st century depends not only on the increasing growth rate of the amount of recorded (written, audio-visual, and even tactile) information and the rapid development of economic and technological infrastructure based on digital communication. The fundamental changes of social, cultural and political life directly or indirectly generated by the fast information society technology (IST) development, implementation and dissemination are no less important. The amount of information or technical equipment itself is not a sufficient factor for the information society to emerge. The calculations show that the number of published books doubles in seven years from the 16th century; the estimated growth of science and technology literature in the 20th century and of business documentation in 90s is incredibly similar (Slamecka:1997). Children of Ancient Greece were playing with toys constructed using the steam engine principle. However, this or the fact that a human being walked on the Moon and has launched artificial satellites all around the Earth does not mean that the steam, lunar or satellite society has come into being.

Therefore the general concept of information society presupposes not only and not so much the technological type of society, but the social condition of digitalized habitat - a society becomes the information society if and only when IST becomes a decisive component of everyday social interaction. Or: the information society is a special kind of human habitat when it is decisively constituted by the social structures of digital technologies in genetic, morphologic and functional sense, i.e. it points not to the existence and development of these technologies per se but to their constitutive integration into the economic, cultural, political, and stratificational fabric of social being. In the face of this enacted social reality and perception of its unavoidability, specific fears and hopes of the new Homo Irretitus do emerge.

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source_3
Marshall Mcluhan. "Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man" (excerpts)

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~gisle/overload/mcluhan/um.html

Games: Extensions of Man (summary)
The games are kind of folk art, collective and social reaction to the main culture direction or act. The games as institutions are the extensions of the social man and the political body; technology is the extension of biologic organism. The games and technologies suppress irritation or they help to adapt to the tension, which emerges in every social group.
The game is the machine, which can function (operate) only if players agree to be marionettes. This adaption for western individual means that s/he has to obey to collective requirements.
Conclusion: the games are extensions of collective but not individual consciousness. The games are communication media. The games are situations which let to the people to take part in real time collective events (ways of life).

Media as Translators (excerpts)

Media as Translators /57
In this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of consciousness. That is what is meant when we say that we daily know more and more about man. We mean that we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of expression that exceed ourselves. Man is a form of expression who is traditionally expected to repeat himself and to echo the praise of his Creator. "Prayer," said George Herbert, "is reversed thunder." Man has the power to reverberate the Divine thunder, by verbal translation.

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynanuc by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat- controls all such extensions of our bodies, including cities will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation such as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its shell and its nerves outside its hide. Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo- mechanistic fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and all other extensions of his physical organs. But there is this difference, that previous technologies were pardal and fragmentary, and the electric is total and inclusive. An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier.

Media as Translators /58
Just as when information levels rise in physics and chemistry, it is possible to use anything for fuel or fabric or building material, so with electric technology all solid goods can be summoned to appear as solid commodities by means of information circuits set up in the organic patterns that we call "automation" and in formation retrieval. Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (the Greek word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become "paid learning," and all forms of wealth result from the movement of information. The problem of discovering occupations or employment may prove as difficult as wealth is easy.
The long revolution by which men have sought to translate nature into art we have long referred to as "applied knowledge." "Applied" means translated or carried across from one kind of material form into another. For those who care to consider this amazing process of applied knowledge in Western civilization, Shakespeare's As You Like It provides a good deal to think about. His forest of Arden is just such a golden world of translated benefits and joblessness as we are now entering via the gate of electric automation.
It is no more than one would expect that Shakespeare should have understood the Forest of Arden as an advance model of the age of automation when all things are translatable into any thing else that is desired:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.
AMIENS: Happy is your Grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.
(As You Like It, II, i. 15-21)

Media as Translators /59
Shakespeare speaks of a world into which, by programming, as it were, one can play back the materials of the natural world in a variety of levels and intensities of style. We are close to doing just this on a massive scale at the present time electronically. Here is the image of the golden age as one of complete metamorphoses or translations of nature into human art, that stands ready of access to our electric age. The poet Stephane Mallarme thought "the world exists to end in a book." We are now in a position to go beyond that and to transfer the entire show to the memory of a computer. For man, as Julian Huxley observes, unlike merely biological creatures, possesses an apparatus of transmission and transformation based on his power to store experience. And his power to store, as in a language itself, is also a means of transformation of experience:
"Those pearls that were his eyes."
Our dilemma may become like that of the listener who phoned the radio station: "Are you the station that gives twice as much weather? Well, turn it off. I'm drowning."
Or we might return to the state of tribal man, for whom magic rituals are his means of "applied knowledge." Instead of translating nature into art, the native nonliterate attempts to in vest nature with spiritual energy.
Perhaps there is a key to some of these problems in the Freudian idea that when we fail to translate some natural event or experience into conscious art we "repress" it. It is this mecha nism that also serves to numb us in the presence of those exten sions of ourselves that are the media studied in this book. For just as a metaphor transforms and transmits experience, so do the media. When we say, "I'll take a rain- check on that," we translate a social invitation into a sporting event, stepping up the conventional regret to an image of spontaneous disappointment: "Your invitation is not just one of those casual gestures that I must brush off. It makes me feel all the frustration of an inter rupted ball game that I can't get with it." As in all metaphors, there are complex ratios among four parts: "Your invitation is to ordinary invitations as ball games are to conventional social life."

Media as Translators /60
It is in this way that by seeing one set of relations through another set that we store and amplify experience in such forms as money. For money is also a metaphor. And all media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness. "It is an excellent invention," Bacon says, "that Pan or the world is said to make choice of Echo only (above all other speeches or voices) for his wife, for that alone is true philosophy which cloth faithfully render the very words of the world . . ."
Today Mark II stands by to render the masterpieces of literature from any language into any other language, giving as follows, the words of a Russian critic of Tolstoy about "War and World (peace . . . But nonetheless culture not stands) costs on place. Something translate. Something print." (Boorstin, 141)
Our very word "grasp" or "apprehension" points to the process of getting at one thing through another, of handling and sensing many facets at a time through more than one sense at a time. It begins to be evident that "touch" is not skin but the interplay of the senses, and "keeping in touch" or "getting in touch" is a matter of a fruitful meeting of the senses, of sight translated into sound and sound into movement, and taste and smell. The "common sense" was for many centuries held to be the peculiar human power of translating one kind of experience of one sense into all the senses, and presenting the result continuously as a unified image to the mind. In fact, this image of a unified ratio among the senses was long held to be the mark of our rationality, and may in the computer age easily become so again. For it is now possible to program ratios among the senses that approach the condition of consciousness. Yet such a condition would necessarily be an extension of our own consciousness as much as wheel is an extension of feet in rotation. Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well. Then, at least, we shall be able to program consciousness in such wise that it cannot be numbed nor distracted by the Narcissus illusions of the entertainment world that beset mankind when he encounters himself extended in his own gimmickry.

Media as Translators /61
If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

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