Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 12

flows as crucial and essential architectures of a new phase of moder-
nity. Knowledge and information, and its networks and infrastructures,
were increasingly interpreted as (one of) the essential categories and
formative factors in entering the new millennium.
The thesis of an emerging Information Society or an Information
Age has been debated heavily, and Chapter 2 goes into the details of
these ambivalences and debates. In this introductory chapter, I want to
stress especially the missing environment in the literature and debates
on the Information Society/Age. Quite surprisingly, in their analyses of
a changing modern society through information, information and com-
munications technology (ICT), and informational processes all major
social theorists have almost neglected the environmental domain. Ini-
tially, in the writings on the postindustrial society and the Informa-
tion Society, the environment figured marginally as one of the driv-
ing forces and positive consequences of social change. Also, a few of
the more recent studies in the Information Age literature use inciden-
tal examples and illustrations from the physical environment in their
argument for the transformations that can be witnessed (cf. Giddens,
1990 ; McNaghten and Urry, 1998 ; Beck in various writings). But the
major scholars of the Information Society and the Information Age
have not really included the environment fully in their analyses, as will
be argued and illustrated more in depth in Chapter 2 .
5. Environmental assessments of the information revolution
With the 'information revolution' in the 1990s, the widespread emer-
gence of information and communication technologies around the
globe and the growing centrality of information in all kinds of social,
political and economic processes, new research traditions on environ-
ment and information are emerging. We can distinguish three lines of
analysis, where academics try to assess the consequences of these new
informational developments for the environment. Although social sci-
entists do play a role in such analyses, the problem definition is more
than incidentally of a technical nature.
A first line of analyses seem to concentrate on the direct environmen-
tal implications of these new technological systems related to informa-
tion. This line falls apart in scholars stressing the potential environ-
mental dangers of the ICT revolution, and those - much in line of the
glorifiers of the postindustrial society - who celebrate the positive envi-
ronmental outcomes. So, the environmental side effects of computers