From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 51

politics and governance. Politics and governance in the global net-
work society are in some respects fundamentally different from con-
ventional politics. From Castells's work, we can mention five points
that are of specific relevance for our analysis. First, states lose much
of the political and governance primacy and power in the global net-
work society, an idea that is radicalised in Urry's ( 2003 ) recent work
on Global Complexities. Second, politics in the Information Age is
characterized by the centrality of informational networks and media.
“Outside the media sphere there is only political marginality” (Castells,
1996 : 312). Activists, politicians and firms adapt their politics to the
media: symbols, sound bites and media presence become key issues.
This also means that the political battleground moves to information,
symbols and the media. Third, the players in informational politics
and governance no longer have any possibility of effective control, as
the networks are simply too fluid, too leaky and too undisciplined to
control final political outcomes. Fourth, there is a primary importance
of social movements in informational politics, as they offer collective
identities, are symbol mobilisers and are champions in new forms of
political agitation, connecting transnational networks with particular
locations. Fifth, Castells sees possibilities for revitalizing and empow-
ering localities by electronic connections and participation to political
debates; hence, a (yet to be proven; cf. Webster, 2001b ) potential for
informational or electronic democracy.
There seems to be wide consensus among the Information Age schol-
ars that a focus on state-based forms of national government is no
longer very helpful in understanding today's complexities - in terms of
diversity of actors, institutional arrangements and levels - in steering
and governance. Just as science loses its monopoly on truth-claims and
is faced with legitimacy problems, the nation-state also faces problems
of trust, legitimacy and sovereignty under conditions of information-
alism and global complexities. A whole new vocabulary emerges to
pin down the innovations in governance arrangements, which can be
witnessed as an answer to the limitations of nation-state governments.
These new concepts converge in the idea that the nation-state loses its
monopoly, but diverge in pinning down what complements or replaces
the nation-state. Subpolitics, hybrid arrangements, multilevel gov-
ernance, network governance, nonstate market-based arrangements,
governance without government and political modernisation are just a
few of these new conceptualisations.