Mobile, broadband, ubiquitous, and the information renaissance

As the Internet has developed into a global phenomenon, the information-oriented society has evolved from a technological novelty into a major force fueling the transformation of society. Internet access in Japan is becoming more readily available through simpler, more user-friendly PC and mobile interfaces, while the demand for broadband is growing far faster than anyone imagined. The addition of IPv6 is now starting to give people ubiquitous access to knowledge and information, and growth of the information society is starting to move in a different direction: rather than simple quantitative expansion, the Internet-oriented society is having an increasing qualitative impact on peoples' lives by supporting greater diversity and popular value-added capabilities.This development is breaking down barriers of time, space, and cost, as well as the disparities in peoples' abilities to access information. Overcoming the flat dissemination of knowledge and information and the unavailability of information on both supply and demand sides of the market will create an information society that awakens public knowledge and opens up a vast wealth of information; indeed, this will create a self-actualizing society that can be fairly characterized as an information society renaissance.We are now seeing the collapse of uneven distribution of knowledge and information in certain groups that has been a persistent characteristic of traditional organizations, and as the entire general public become prosumers through equal opportunity access, we are moving away from the conventional business-to-consumer (B2C) paradigm to flattened lateral consumer-to-consumer (C2C) and peer-to-peer (P2P) interactions, and witnessing the emergence of a richer intellectual and emotionally rewarding environment.This opens the way to more venture-capital and small office home office (SOHO) distributed style businesses, the ability of individuals to leverage and exhibit the full extent of their knowledge and capabilities, and endless creation of new markets. This constant societal and economic regeneration will restore and refresh social systems, and will replace the old rigid social structures of the past with a dynamic structure that encourages flexible development and change, developments that will be accelerated through the interactive synergy between the IT-based technological revolution and the on-going transformation of society.