From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 43

discontinuities in the global order. I will use Castells's label Information
Age to contrast the ideas and framing in this period to the Information
Society literature of the 1960s and 1970s. 5
After briefly introducing Castells's major work to better understand
the context of this second group of authors, I will compare the two
periods in how they frame informational developments. I will do so
by first analysing the differences - focusing on three main aspects:
globalisation, uncertainty and governance - to finalize with the main
similarities and continuities between the Information Society ideas and
the literature on Information Age.

Castells's network society

In his three-volume opus magnus, Castells ( 1996 /1997) analyses in
rich empirical and theoretical detail how in the 1980s and 1990s a new
social morphology emerged through globalisation and the constitution
of a new technological paradigm (called informationalism), coining
this transition as the coming of the global network society. The global
network society is a new way of structuring time and space through
reintegrating the functional unity of different elements at distant loca-
tions made possible by modern transport, information and communi-
cation technology (Castells, 1996 ). Networks are the key constituting
units, both in terms of physical infrastructures and social systems. The
core activities that shape and control human life around the globe are
organized in networks. As indicated earlier, Castells is not the first
to analyse the role of information and networks in reconstructing the
modern order. But his analysis is radical in that he replaces conventional

5

These labels should not be taken too absolutely: also in the 1990s and in the
new millennium the term Information Society is still regularly used (e.g., by the
European Commission in launching their research program on Information
Society Technologies; in the 2005 World Summit on the Information Society),
and in the 1980s incidentally authors referred to the Information Age
(cf. Naisbitt, 1984 ). It is partly for pragmatic reasons that I use these labels,
although they generally do refer to different substantive writings. The notion of
'age' seems more adequate than 'society' for the second group of scholars, as in
the new millennium several of them consider society a zombie-concept (e.g.,
Beck and Willms, 2004 ; Urry, 2003 ; Castells, 1996 /1997). See also Castells
( 2004 : 6-7) for counterpositioning the concept of Information Society and his
own work on the Information Age.