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society of 'state or private control of investment decisions' and increasingly
a society where such decisions are wholly private concerns. Second, the most
important economic sector is not finance, as neo-Marxists might argue, or
research or science, as Bell might argue, but media - a particular form and
structuring of information and the key means of social organization, com-
munication, value transformation, and sociopolitical control. Third, Bell did
not fully see the extent to which, and all of the ways in which, information
might become a mass-marketed product in and of itself.
Basically, according to this analysis, the media is right-wing, monopo-
lised, commercial, superficial, dominant and unsustainable. Only few
exceptions exist, most notably not in North America but, rather, in
Europe, according to Paehlke. Others have joined Paehlke in criticis-
ing what I have labelled informational governance with respect to envi-
ronment and sustainability. For instance, Bill McKibben ( 1993 ) focuses
especially on the (trivial, commercial) content of information, rather
than the structure of the information producers and processors, its
power relations and monopolisation.
But one has to make a further refinement and distinction. In his anal-
ysis Paehlke makes a strong division between the 'old media' (newspa-
pers, television, radio) and the 'new media' (especially the Internet and
related services). Where the old media remain pretty much in control
of economic and political elites, the new media seem uncontrollable
and have a much larger potential to play a key role in emancipatory,
democratic and sustainability agendas, especially because the produc-
tion and spreading of information via Internet is more democratised.
But also here we should be aware of the digital divide, the inequalities
regarding access, the control of the Internet by, for instance, undemo-
cratic states 10 and MNCs, and the growing invasion of commerciali-
sation on Web sites and other Internet services. Informational gover-
nance of the environment - both with respect to the 'old' and the 'new'
media - will not be excluded from these inequalities and power play
around information. With the growing centrality of information in
10
At the November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis,
fifteen countries plead - in vain - for more state control of the Internet, by
strongly pushing for a new UN organisation to manage the Internet instead of
the U.S.-based nonprofit organisation ICANN (Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers). Reporters sans Frontieres listed these
countries as “black holes of the web” and “enemies of the Internet”.
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