Please meet the fourth issue of the scientific and analytical journal “Information Society” for 2025. The main theme of the issue is Knowledge is the mainstay of the information society. The articles in this issue cover, among others, the following topics:
The problem of “undisclosed public knowledge”
Cognitive agency of Artificial Intelligence
Digitalization and sanction pressure
Knowledge as a key business asset
Opportunities and risks of innovation exchange in the digital economy
The current stage of the productivity paradox
Information expansion and identity
“Network people” and new media
Quantum communications for information security
The phenomenon of visual storytelling
In her address to readers “Knowledge is the light and freedom of the information society”, the journal’s editor-in-chief Tatiana Ershova wrote:
Henry Ford once said it very correctly: “If money is your only hope for independence, you will never have it. The only real security a human can have in this world is a stock of knowledge, experience, and ability.” Who better than an American billionaire could grasp the true essence of wealth to judge this? A whole century has passed since he said this, but his words are still true.
Sociologists claim that new generations (zoomers, Alpha), who grew up in the digital world, are much more indifferent to money and the consumption of material goods, but they are very intensive consumers of information and technology, which, in the absence of the necessary knowledge, can lead a person into a dead end and will certainly not protect against manipulation or ensure independence and happiness. The coming Beta generation will live in the era of artificial intelligence, and for them, knowledge will become an antidote to neural network hallucinations and other negative consequences of progress.
And the majority of currently living representatives of older generations also achieved success and self-realization thanks to knowledge. Those of them who sought to understand the secrets of nature, including human nature, received, thanks to knowledge, an inoculation against pseudoscientific concepts and cynicism. The Russian writer Mikhail Prishvin once very accurately expressed this in his book “Diaries 1914-1917”: “Knowledge is an eternal monument to the struggle between talented lies (mysticism) and talentless truth (rationalism).”
The improvement of technologies leads to the accumulation of enormous intellectual capital, which is associated with the formation of a knowledge economy. This concept was popularized in his work “The Age of Discontinuity” (1968) by social philosopher, futurologist and management theorist Peter Drucker. Its essence is the strengthening of the importance of knowledge as a driving force of socio-economic development.
Our editorial board has always attached great importance to research in the field of knowledge economy. For example, the last double issue of our journal for 2002 was entirely devoted to the materials of the international conference “Partnership Networks as Instruments for the Development of the Information Society and the Knowledge Economy”, which took place on December 9, 2002 in Moscow. The conference, organized jointly by the Institute of the Information Society and the Global Knowledge Partnership, brought together more than 100 scientists, experts, politicians, public and government figures from 19 countries who were actively involved in the formation of the “knowledge-intensive economy”. Numerous materials from the issue, available online thanks to the journal archive, remain relevant to this day. We took care to translate all the reports made in English into Russian.
In this issue of the journal, we publish three articles directly related to the problems of the knowledge economy: “Artificial Intelligence in the Perspective of Cognitive Agency” by S. A. Khmelevskaya and D. N. Ermakov, “Impact of Digitalization on Knowledge Management in the Digital Economy” by N. V. Dneprovskaya and I. V. Shevtsova, “Exchange of Innovations as a Progressive Model of Sharing in the Digital Economy” by N. P. Kononkova and D. A. Mikhailenko. We will always give the green light to publications devoted to the knowledge economy.
The full text of the issue can be found on the journal’s website.