From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 49

nor by more or less stable relations, but by large flexibility and liq-
uidity). Where Beck basically relates (informational) uncertainty to
contested science and knowledge and Castells does hardly problema-
tise knowledge or information in terms of being fundamentally uncer-
tain or contested, 11 Urry puts uncertainty in a much broader perspec-
tive of global fluids. Uncertainty is not only related to measurements,
information, facts and risks, but has become a structural property of
global flows/fluids that constitute a global complexity. A global com-
plexity that is inherently unpredictable, unmanageable, unexpected,
chaotic, constantly on the move, unknown and thus fundamentally
uncertain. 12 As such uncertainties relate to the outcomes and effects of
all kind of social (and material) networks and flows, and - compared to
Castells - information flows and ICT are considered less fundamental
to the coming of a new - fundamentally uncertain - social order. In
that sense, it becomes logical that Urry ( 2004 ) recently acknowledged
the significance and influence of Ulrich Beck in understanding global
complexity.
Having worked with Urry at various moments (e.g., Lash and Urry,
1987 , 1994 ), Scott Lash is not too far from Urry's analysis. But Lash
( 2002 ) focuses much more strongly on information itself (and is in that
sense closer to Castells), and - compared to Urry - takes a more cultural
turn. According to Lash, contemporary times should be understood as
an Information Age - and not as postmodernity or the Risk Society -
in that the historical transition is one of a national, organized manu-
facturing capitalism to a global informational capitalism based on the
spaceless mobility of idea-capital. Every sphere of life becomes increas-
ingly mediatised and digitalised through information and disinforma-
tion. Much in line with the work and ideas of Marshall McLuhman
and Jeremy Rifkin (2000), Lash's new information order replaces own-
ership and physical property relations by relations of access and intel-
lectual capital. Power, inequality and wealth are reconfigured around

11

Castells is more focused on the informational processes, rather than on the
content or substance of information. Uncertainty in Castells's analysis is thus
not related to science and scientific knowledge but to uncertainty of economic
producers in a globalised network economy, in which they lose sight and
control on what is happening in their social and economic environment (cf.
Castells, 1996 : 153, 190, 193).

12

From a different analysis, Wallerstein reaches the same conclusion in claiming
that the mutation of the World-System has now arrived “in the true realm of
uncertainty” (Wallerstein, 1991 : 15).