From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 42

relations, for instance following the work of Braverman). David Lyon
( 1988 ; 2001 ) has perhaps been mostly associated with what is now
called 'surveillance studies' or the 'surveillance society'. According to
him, computerisation and digitalisation have enabled surveillance far
beyond what was originally envisioned by Foucault and his contem-
poraries, leading to a superpanopticon and hypersurveillance.
3. The Information Age
Although academic persuasion of, research into, and debate on the
Information Society continued in the 1980s, the momentum, innova-
tion and quantity of this research line and school clearly stagnated.
Although a significant group of scholars remained attracted to ideas
of the Information Society, in general the academic social sciences as
well as the general public shifted to other schools and ideas in the
1980s. It is only in the 1990s that ideas on the Information Society,
on the central importance of information and on information technol-
ogy received a new impetus, be it framed and conceptualised partly
in a different way. And a different group of authors became the lead-
ing spokespersons, among them Manuel Castells, John Urry, Anthony
Giddens, Saskia Sassen, Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash. Not all give infor-
mation and information technology an equally important place in the
transformation of modernity, but they share a common frame of ref-
erence, in which globalisation is closely related to information (flows
and infrastructures), networks and uncertainties.
In his impressive tetralogy on the history of industrial societies from
1789 to 1991, the historian Eric Hobsbawm identifies four periods,
each defined by a characteristic leitmotiv : the Age of Revolution (1789-
1848), the Age of Capital (1848-1875), the Age of Empire (1875-
1914), and the Age of Extremes (1914-1991). The fundamental con-
cepts express the 'structuring principles' of those eras, perhaps less
perceived by their contemporaries than by historians studying social
developments in these time periods. To understand developments in
different social sectors of industrial societies of that time, the ana-
lytic perspective should start from such a fundamental leitmotiv ,as
Hobsbawm argues. Manuel Castells's major trilogy on The Informa-
tion Age should be understood in this tradition, claiming that infor-
mational developments are the key leitmotiv to understand the present