Speed dialup connection, web security and access to websites and computer networks are indicators of an information society.

With the explosion of information, the blogosphere is doubling in size every six months; it is now 60 times bigger than it was three years ago. About 1.2 million new weblogs are tracked on the World Wide Web each day equivalent to about 50,000 per hour, exposing humans to an immense amount of information.
Today, many nations have embraced the information society. The early concept of information society, first developed by economist Fritz Machlup in 1933, has expanded since the 1960s, while sociologist Daniel Bell, who argued that post-industrialism would be information-led and service-oriented, also made positive contributions in this regard.
Bell proposed three components for a post-industrial society shifting from manufacturing to services: the centrality of the new science-based industries and the rise of new technical elites and the advent of a new principle of stratification.
However, theorists of information society, particularly British sociologist Frank Webster, have distinguished five characteristics for an information society, namely technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural.
The common element in these characteristics is that the information society boosts the quality of social services and transforms the way we live.

Diverse Views
Hamid Shahriyari, secretary of the High Council of Information Dissemination, is of the opinion that an information society will be marked by greater public access to information and knowledge, cultural and linguistic diversity and high quality education.
“We are still unable to change our data to information and our information to knowledge. Neither have we been able to provide the grounds, cultural in particular, for the emergence of an information society,“ he said, referring to “an informational recession“ in the IT sector.
According to Esmaeel Qadimi, a university instructor, establishing an information society requires a national strategy and identification of threats and opportunities.
“Due to obstacles to development, our country has failed to keep up with other developing states in the information sector,“ he said, adding that the government should show more flexibility in supporting the activities of an information society.
Ali Asghar Kia, head of the Communications Department of Allameh Tabatabaei University, said that all social, cultural, economic and political sectors of society as well as technological and technical sectors should participate in setting up an information society.
He added that cultural measures for establishing an information society should begin from schools as well as research and development sectors.
Kazem Motamednejad, the father of Iran’s New Communications Science, however, is of the opinion that efforts have been made to form an information society.
“But no single entity has been officially assigned with the task of following up and coordinating national measures in this regard, despite the fact that university professors have made great efforts,“ he said.
Motamednejad called on the government, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the High Council of Information Dissemination, Culture Ministry, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting and other organizations to help achieve national development goals in this regard.
“Because we have no other alternative but to move towards an information society for forging development and preventing underdevelopment,“ he said.
Mohsen Javdan, an expert in electronic commerce, said although there is a great potential among people and non-governmental organizations for the reception of IT, the qualitative and quantitative indicators of information society in Iran are lacking.
He categorizes speed dialup connection, web security and access to websites and computer networks as well as bandwidth and penetration coefficient of telephone lines, the number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol as quantitative indicators of an information society.
“Electronic infrastructure such as the ability of citizens in using IT and Information and Communications Technology-related rules and regulations, which are necessary for setting up electronic commerce, is the qualitative indicator of an information society,“ he said.

Technological Aspect
Technological developments expedited since late 1970s and reached its peak in the 1990s with the emergence of the Internet. Technological developments are in fact the most tangible index of the information society.
Article 50 of the World Summit on the Information Society document, which was ratified in Tunis on November 2005, stresses inexpensive Internet services and calls on governments across the globe to prioritize rendering free Internet services, particularly in developing states.
In technological terms, although there are Internet speed limitations, which seriously hamper the technical infrastructure, an estimated 16 million Iranians have access to the Internet on the basis of the bandwidth and phone lines, indicating a 106.5-percent growth in Internet users. This shows the rapid expansion of information technology in Iran within the framework of an advanced telecommunications network as stipulated in the Fourth National Development Plan (2005-10).
Minister of Communications and Information Technology Mohammad Soleimani earlier said that Internet services in Iran should be provided free of charge while skilled human resources, enhanced public and private capabilities in handling related schemes and the presence of highly developed communications and telecommunications infrastructures facilitate the sector’s growth.
Motamednejad stressed that all IT-related sectors should help adopt policies for publicizing the Internet nationwide.

Economic Aspects
An information-based business will bring in its wake an information-based economy, which will help shape an information society.
In Iran, no research has been conducted to identify information-based businesses. However, as experts say, an industrial-based economy, which is poles apart from an information-based economy, is more likely to develop in Iran.
Actually, participating in global markets without digitalization and a developed telecommunication systems is impossible.
Post-industrialism is largely concerned with information and thus many scholars regard a post-industrial society the same as an information society. From such a viewpoint, sociologists believe that because information is the raw material of non-manual labor, an increase in such works can herald the arrival of an information society.
In Western Europe, Japan and North America, over 70 percent of the workforce are now found in the services sector and white-collar occupations constitute a majority. Countries where the predominant group of occupations consists of information workers can be referred to as an information society.
In an information society, a major part of workers and businesses are dependent on information technology. Therefore, developing the IT infrastructure appears to be unavoidable in an information society.
From the occupational point of view, Iranian labor-intensive ministries are moving toward an industrial-based approach for employment. Even entrepreneurial efforts are aimed at tightening the industry-university link rather than encouraging information-led sectors.

Cultural Aspects
Perhaps the most important feature of an information society after its technological characteristics pertains to culture.
We are witnessing an extraordinary increase in information circulation, particularly in radio, television and the press sectors.
A society saturated with media is exposed to many cultural developments arising from the transfer of information. That’s why an information society is basically formed in a cultural context.
In Iran, television channels, both for domestic and foreign viewers, registered a sevenfold rise in comparison to the 1980s and newspapers and magazines have also increased considerably. While radio channels air programs round-the-clock, some TV channels also present 24-hour programs.
More than 1,950 publications are currently distributed across the country, which offers 50 copies of newspaper for every 1,000 people.
Also, 51,916 books were published in the last Iranian year (ended March 20, 2007), indicating a 30-percent increased compared to the previous year.
The mass media, which form the main source of cultural dissemination, has also partly saturated the Iranian society.

Technical Aspects
In Iran, launching a national broadcasting satellite is necessary, as we are already managing fiber-optic systems. The six overseas channels of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the sole broadcasting monopoly, are presently broadcast by foreign satellites.
Having a national satellite will provide us with bandwidth facilities, promote the quality of programs and make it possible for IRIB to increase the number of channels.
If we had an independent satellite, not only could we render satellite services to regional countries, but can also prevent foreign companies from blocking our television and radio programs.
Majlis Research Center recently announced that 57 percent of websites of major Iranian state organizations have been created on foreign Internet service providers, stressing the need for reversing the situation as “a vital necessity“.

This Hubble Space Telescope composite image shows a ghostly "ring" of dark matter in the galaxy cluster ZwCl0024+1652.

A hazy ring of dark matter spawned by a colossal cosmic crash eons ago offers the best evidence to date that vast amounts of this mysterious stuff reside in the universe, scientists said.
Images taken by NASA’s orbiting Hubble Space Telescope allowed astronomers to detect this ring of dark matter created by the collision of two galaxy clusters 5 billion light-years from Earth, Reuters reported.
“This is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark matter,“ astronomer Myungkook James Jee of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore told reporters.
Astronomers believe dark matter--as opposed to ordinary matter making up the stars, planets and the like--comprises about 85 percent of the universe’s material, but evidence of it has been difficult to come by.
Dark matter cannot be directly seen. It does not shine or reflect light, but astronomers infer its existence in galaxy clusters by observing how its gravity bends the light given off by even more faraway galaxies. They do not know what it is made of, but think it could be a kind of particle.
Astronomer Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology, not involved in the research, said the findings are facing skepticism within the astronomical community.
“It’s really exciting if it’s right. But to be sort of convinced of the ring, astronomers would really want to see some independent observations verifying it,“ Massey said.
Previous Hubble observations showed another collision between two galaxy clusters in which dark matter appeared to behave differently.
Scientists came across the new evidence while studying the distribution of dark matter within a galaxy cluster designated as Cl 0024+17.
Wondering about the genesis of this ring, the researchers came across earlier work showing that the galaxy cluster had run into another cluster 1 billion to 2 billion years ago.
They developed computer simulations of such collisions that indicated when two clusters collide, the dark matter cascades toward the center of the newly combined clusters, then moves back outward while slowing under gravity’s pull.
“The collision between the two galaxy clusters created a ripple of dark matter that left distinct footprints in the shapes of the background galaxies,“ Jee said.
“It’s like looking at the pebbles on the bottom of a pond with ripples on the surface. The pebbles’ shapes appear to change as the ripples pass over them. So, too, the background galaxies behind the ring show coherent changes in their shapes due to the presence of the dense ring,“ Jee added.
Dark matter previously has been detected in other galaxy clusters, but the scientists said the stuff never previously had been found to be so distinctly separated from the hot gas and the galaxies that make up these clusters.
“Given that dark matter is the most common stuff in the universe, the fact that we know almost nothing about it at the moment is really rather embarrassing,“ Massey said.