From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 46

system to respond rapidly to fluctuations, but it also renders it more
vulnerable to overreaction to relatively minor disturbances, thereby
producing major crises. Manuel Castells is even more outspoken on
the role of information and communication technology in bringing
about the global network society. Globalisation is directly related to
informational processes and technologies in understanding the emer-
gence of a new social morphology, the global network society. It is the
centrality of informational processes in combination with globalisation
that make us have to use new concepts to understand the global net-
work society. Building on Castells, John Urry ( 2003 ; 2004 )isarguably
the most radical scholar in doing away with 'zombie' concepts such
as state and society under conditions of globalisation, putting (infor-
mation) flows and networks as the new architectures of a global
modernity.
The key position of globalisation processes in assessing the trans-
formations taking place in modernity is reflected in the core concepts
that are used. Where the Information Society literature focused on the
changes in the national economies and societies, the Information Age
scholars were and are particularly concerned with how global net-
works and flows of information (and capital and persons) restructure
the world. Late modernity, reflexive modernity, second modernity and
global modernity all refer to these global changes and transformations,
much more than notions of postindustrial society, Information Society,
home-centered society or - an arbitrary case - the Risk Society. 8 Conse-
quently, the argument of a fundamentally different social order through
the information revolution is much more powerful in the Information
Age literature, as it strongly connects to globalisation arguments. Cur-
rent scholars in global communication and information studies follow
that line of argument by doing away with first modernity concepts and
notions. McPhail ( 2006 : 331), for instance, claims that we are presently
in a postsovereignty reality, in which the Internet and cyberspace make
that 'industrial-era concepts such as space, location, control, bricks
and mortar, and monopoly are marginalized.'

8

Ulrich Beck in his 1986 Risk Society only indirectly emphasises the increasing
role and influence of information processes on the making of a new social order.
This did change in his more recent work on reflexive modernity, globalisation
and the World Risk Society (cf. Beck et al. 1994 ; Beck, 1997 ; Beck, 2004 ; Beck
and Willms, 2004 ), although the core of his analysis remained the same.