Acta Univ. Agric. Silvic. Mendelianae Brun. 2019, 67(4), 1085-1095 | DOI: 10.11118/actaun201967041085

Digital Society - Opportunity or Threat? Case Studies of Japan and the Czech Republic

Martin Záklasník, Anna Putnová
Department of Management, Faculty of Business and Management, Brno University of Technology, Kolejní 2906/4, 612 00 Brno-Královo Pole, Czech Republic

Digital technologies, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence are seen as mater-of-course parts of the world today. Japan, as one of the leading countries in technological innovations, is the most advanced in terms of approach to digital society. Japanese society and government have been working on a new concept of life where all the digital technologies will communicate through the internet. Society organised in this way is called Society 5.0 - super Smart society. In Japan, this concept is centred about seventeen sustainable goals (United Nations, 2018). Society 5.0 is a reaction to the fundamental technological revolutionary changes known today as Industry 4.0. Thus, Society 5.0 is the consequence of a technological revolution that will eventually affect not just the production but all parts of today's life as well.
The new technologies evoke some fundamental philosophical and existential questions. How can technological advances improve the prosperity and functioning of society? What about the privacy and security of all the users? The present paper compares Japan and the Czech Republic from the perspective of digitalization of society based on three main aspects: government programs supporting digital technologies, number of technically educated experts and investments in science and research. The objective is to find out how much the Czech Republic has advanced towards preparations for digital society.

Keywords: Society 5.0, Japan, Czech Republic, digital society

Received: May 18, 2019; Accepted: August 1, 2019; Published: August 26, 2019  Show citation

ACS AIP APA ASA Harvard Chicago IEEE ISO690 MLA NLM Turabian Vancouver
Záklasník, M., & Putnová, A. (2019). Digital Society - Opportunity or Threat? Case Studies of Japan and the Czech Republic. Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 67(4), 1085-1095. doi: 10.11118/actaun201967041085
Share...
Download citation
  • BibTeX (.bib)
  • Bookends (.ris)
  • EasyBib (.ris)
  • EndNote (.enw)
  • EndNote 8 (.xml)
  • ISI WoS (.isi)
  • Medlars (.medlars)
  • Mendeley (.ris)
  • MODS (.xml)
  • Papers (.ris)
  • RefWorks (.txt)
  • RefManager (.ris)
  • RIS (.ris)
  • MS Word (.xml)
  • Zotero (.ris)
    • Open full article

    References

    1. CABINET OFFICE. 2017. Council for Science, Technology and Innovation. Cabinet Office. [Online]. Available at: http://www8.cao.go.jp/cstp/english/ [Accessed: 2018, December 2].
    2. ENDO, K., 2017. Public Sphere and Social Capital in the Age of Intermediality: Approach from Computational Social Science. In: ENDO, K., KURIHARA, S., KAMIHIGASHI, T. and TORIUMI, F. (Eds.). Reconstruction of the Public Sphere in the Socially Mediated Age. Singapore: Springer. Go to original source...
    3. EUROSTAT. 2016. Output of economic activities in the EU Member States. Eurostat. [Online]. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/DDN-20171023-1 [Accessed: 2019, June 20].
    4. FORD MOTOR COMPANY. 2019. Innovation: 100 Years of the Moving Assembly Line. Ford. [Online]. Available at: https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/100-years-moving-assembly-line.html [Accessed: 2019, April 29].
    5. HAYASHI, H. SASAJIMA, H. TAKAYANAGI, Y., and KANAMARU, H. 2017. International standardization for smarter society in the field of measurement, control and automation. In: SICE Annual Conference: 2017 56th Annual Conference of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan. Kanazawa, Japan, 19-22 September, pp. 263-266. Go to original source...
    6. LEE, R. B. and DALY, R. 1999. The Cambridge encyclopedia of hunters and gatherers. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
    7. MINISTRY OF EDUCATION. 2019. University graduates. M©MT. [Online]. Available at: https://dsia.msmt.cz//vystupy/vu_vs_f4.html [Accessed: 2019, May 3].
    8. MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR OF THE CZECH REPUBLIC. 2019. Digital Czech [in Czech: Program Digitální Česko]. Ministerstvo vnitra České republiky. [Online]. Available at: https://www.mvcr.cz/clanek/rada-vlady-pro-informacni-spolecnost.aspx?q=Y2hudW09Ng%3D%3D [Accessed: 2019, April 29].
    9. OECD. 2019. Gross domestic spending on R&D. [Online]. Available at: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm [Accessed: 2019, April 29]
    10. PUTNOVÁ, A., ZÁKLASNÍK, M. and RE®ŇÁKOVÁ, M. 2018. Technical education innovations in the czech republic - case study. In: Shaping the next wave of globalization: using current trends to reconnect with markets and create value, pp. 584-590.
    11. SEDLÁK, J. 2018. Digital Czech Republic: this is the national plan to make the Czech Republic a digital authority [in Czech: Digitální Česko: tohle je státní plán, jak z ČR udělat digitální velmoc]. Lupa.cz. [Online]. Available at: https://www.lupa.cz/clanky/digitalni-cesko-tohle-je-statni-plan-jak-z-cr-udelat-digitalni-velmoc [Accessed: 2019, April 29]
    12. SKOBELEV, P. O. and BOROVIK, S. Y. 2017. On the way from Industry 4.0 to Industry 5.0: From Digital Manufacturing to Digital Society. Industry 4.0, 2(6): 307-311.
    13. SMELSER, N. J. and BALTES, P. B. 2001. International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
    14. THE GOVERNMENT OF JAPAN. 2018. G20 Japan 2019. [Online]. Available at: https://www.japan.go.jp/g20japan/ [Accessed: 2018, December 2].
    15. UNITED NATIONS DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME. 2018. Background of the Sustainable Development. United Nations Development Programme. [Online]. Available at: http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/background/ [Accessed: 2018, December 2].
    16. UNITED NATIONS. 2018. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). United Nations. [Online]. Available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/ [Accessed: 2018, December 2].
    17. WORLD BANK. 2017. Worldwide Governance Indicators. World Bank. [online] Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/worldwide-governance-indicators [Accessed: 2019, May 3].
    18. PRASETYO, Y. A. and ARMAN, A. A. 2017. Group management system design for supporting society 5.0 in smart society platform. In: 2017 International Conference on Information Technology Systems and Innovation (ICITSI). Bandung, pp. 398-404. Go to original source...

    This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY NC ND 4.0), which permits non-comercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is properly cited. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


    Return to the content