From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 45

tradition, differ on at least three points fundamentally from the anal-
yses of both adherents and critics of the Information Society.

Globalisation

If anything distinguishes the literature on the Information Society of
the 1960s and 1970s from the theories on the Information Age of
the 1990s and beyond, than it is the centrality of globalisation pro-
cesses. When the first commercial satellite began circling the earth by
the end of the 1960s, enabling and enhancing global communications,
we entered a new phase of modernity. And many Information Society
scholars in the 1970s pointed already to the potential these new devel-
opments bring to global communication systems. But the full contours
of the ways in which these global communication and information sys-
tems interfered with, strengthened and coproduced other globalisation
dynamics became only visible in the 1990s. It was only by the end
of the 1980s that the concept of globalisation became widespread, to
dominate the social and political science literature and debate of the
1990s. Elsewhere (Mol, 2001 ), I have detailed how the discontinuist
school 7 in globalisation studies especially has argued that globalisation
has recently fundamentally altered the modern order.
Information, information and communication processes and infor-
mation and communication technology form central elements in
much of the discontinuist globalisation interpretations and literature.
Anthony Giddens ( 1990 ), for instance, emphasizes the significance of
the new telecommunication and information technologies in acceler-
ating the compression of time and space and thus contributing to a
qualitative change in globalisation. These technologies and the related
organizational innovations have altered the scope and speed of eco-
nomic decision making. This enhances the capacity of the economic

7

The discontinuist school of thought contrasts with the continuity scholars, who
argue that globalisation is not really something new but dates back as far
as the sixteenth century: “The widespread view that the present degree of
globalization is in some way new and unprecedented is, therefore, false” (Glyn
and Sutcliffe, 1992 : 91). Discontinuist scholars such as Anthony Giddens, Phil
McMichael, David Held, and Manuel Castells, in contrast, argue that the forms
and dynamics of global interconnectedness and interdependence have changed
fundamentally in the last thirty years, bringing about a new social order.