Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 95

4. Informational politics and power
As became clear in Chapter 2 , the neo-Marxist and critical theory critics
of the Information Society have made a strong case of analysing both
the continuities of the capitalist character of modern society and the
related inequalities and power relations that thus come along with an
Information Society. These valid points have not disappeared with the
emergence of the Information Age, and we have to take them seriously
in analysing informational governance of the environment.
With the growing relevance of informational processes in environ-
mental politics and governance, new questions of power and inequal-
ities emerge. Information, information production, information trans-
mission and information access are not equally divided over the globe,
nor within countries. Where Castells sees the potentials for social
movements and local communities to use informational resources
and networks in their environmental and other struggles (cf. women
emancipation, the Zapatistas), he is well aware of the strong links
between information and the dominant players and elites in the space
of flows. Multinational media conglomerates, transnational corpora-
tions (TNCs), political elites and powerful state bureaucracies have a
strong position in the production, distribution and control of infor-
mation. A strong recent representative of this line of argument with
respect to environment is Robert Paehlke ( 2003 ). In his recent topic,
he analyses how the emergence of what he calls electronic capitalism
is frustrating the attempts of building sustainability. Especially in his
third chapter, “Electronic Capitalism as Media Monolith”, he outlines
how electronic information has become crucial in today's capitalism,
but at the same time how this very capitalism monopolises, manipu-
lates and (mis)uses information flows for its own - narrowly defined
and usually private - purposes and interests. In dissociating himself
from Bell, Paehlke ( 2003 : 78) is most clear on his position on the idea
of an Information Society or Information Age:
Electronic capitalism, as a conceptualization of contemporary society, differs
from Bell's postindustrial society in at least three ways. First, both are models
of a society in which knowledge has become an important organizing prin-
ciple. But electronic capitalism is still first and foremost capitalist - its 'axial
principle' (Bell's term) remains economic growth, not as for Bell the 'cen-
trality of and codification of theoretical knowledge'. It is decreasingly also a