Abstract:
«Information society» – this concept was created in 1963 by Tadeo Umesao, but it became popular in the 21st century with the increasing availability of new technologies and the progressive use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in individual sectors of the economy, including public administration. Data and information have become the raw material that citizens use by ICT and with their help they e.g., shape a new paradigm of representative democracy, transforming it into e-democracy. According to Alvin Toffler, from the end of the 20th century, the economy enters the post-industrial stage (the third wave), in which knowledge and information constitute the most important resources, and thus transforms into a «super-symbolic economy». Dirk Helbing even claims that we are becoming a «participatory market society» characterized by «ubiquity of information, bottom-up participation, ‘co-creation’, self-organization, and collective intelligence». In practice, the omnipresence of digital technologies and the progressive networking of individual dimensions of human activity, including social relations, led to the fact that researchers define the effect of the ongoing digital transformation more often as «Economy 4.0”.