From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 34

infrastructure, but a complete restructuring of all institutions of mod-
ern society, including political and cultural sectors.
The transformation towards an Information Society is then believed
to have as its basis new technologies, new forces of production. But
these technologies influence and - according to some - determine new
forms of life and living in various sectors: work, leisure, at home, family
relationships, politics, culture and so on. Overall, Information Society
theorists tend to apply an optimistic, positive, evolutionary approach
towards such transitions, strongly rooted in the modernist and rational-
ist traditions. New democracy, egalitarianism, a classless society, decen-
tralized and horizontal institutions are some of the changes believed
to follow from the centrality of the computer. Thus, Information Soci-
ety analysts often - but not always, as we will see later - turn into
Information Society propagandists and advocates.

The Information Society and the environment

The emergence of the literature and debate on the Information Soci-
ety paralleled in time what I have labelled elsewhere the second wave
of environmental concern (Mol, 1995 ). From the late 1960s untill at
least the mid-1970s, Western industrialized societies were not only con-
fronted with increased attention for environmental problems and natu-
ral resource depletion by large segments of civil society. These societies
also witnessed major institutional innovations with respect to the envi-
ronment: new political institutions such as ministries for the environ-
ment, legal frameworks and environmental impact assessment systems;
new NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Friends of the
Earth (FoE) and mobilization campaigns such as Earth Day; new peri-
odicals, media specialists and educational institutes and new research,
innovation and education institutions that focused on the environment
(see Chapter 3 ).
Given these time parallels, it is remarkable how little of these envi-
ronmental interests and considerations have been at the centre of the
Information Society ideas and literature. In the overviews of Kumar
( 1995 )onthe Information Society literature, of Badham ( 1984 ; 1986 )
on the postindustrial society debate, and, more recently, of Webster
( 2002 )ontheories of the Information Society, the environment hardly
plays any role. 2 Although the general conclusion should indeed be that

2

In an edited volume (Webster, 2001b )onhow in the Information Age
information and information technologies are transforming politics and culture,