From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 41

A second, related argument has especially been developed within
UNESCO and the call for a so-called New World Information and
Communication Order, NWICO. 4 Through the concentration of media
and information in the hands of a limited number of states and corpo-
rations of the North, the Information Society will result in an unbal-
anced (in terms of quantity and substance) flow of information from
the North to the South, heavily controlled and biased by the cultural
and hegemonic interests of northern actors. After the stages of military
colonialism, Christian colonialism and mercantile colonialism, we are
since the 1950s in a phase of electronic colonialism (McPhail, 2006 ).
There is a strong cultural and informational dependency of poorer
regions of the world on the postindustrial nations and (their) multi-
nationals, established by the dominance of the latter two in the infor-
mation and communication hardware and software. This situation has
only worsened with the neoliberal developments and privatization of
the media, as states are increasingly out of control, or can legitimately
claim to be out of control. Hence, the NWICO adherents (many of
them coming from developing countries) argued for a restructuring of
the information order, providing for a stronger dominance and control
of nation-states (especially those of the South) on the production and
flow of information, and a limitation of the freedom of transnational
information flows.
The third main negative (side) effect of the Information Society is
related to the enhanced possibilities for states, but also for powerful
economic actors, to control and monitor civilians in their daily life and
practices. Following the work of Michel Foucault, the theme of surveil-
lance is more than incidentally linked to the coming of the Information
Society (cf. Champbell and Connor, 1986 ). Whether related to the mil-
itary and the police, to 'transactional information' (Burnham, 1983 )
of purchases and money transfers or to monitoring daily practices of
citizens, the systematic collection, processing and storage of informa-
tion is thought to be problematic, especially because in contemporary
societies this relates so strongly to unequal power relations, discipline
and loss of privacy. Surveillance through the use of computers has been
related to the nation-state, to bureaucracies (in the Weberian sense),
to technologies (in line with Ellul's work) and to the political econ-
omy (where it is related to conflicting interests and economic power

4

See Chapter 9 for a further analysis of the NWICO debate.