From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 52

In that sense, the Information Age ideas depart from the state cen-
teredness of the Information Society literature. And this departure
is closely linked to not only processes of globalisation, but also of
the growing importance of a new technological paradigm, with ICT,
cyberspace and information flows. The emergence of electronic news-
papers, interactive cable, the Internet and direct satellite broadcasting
indeed raises questions about the role of state regulations and the con-
cept of national borders and boundaries. Kobrin ( 2001 )isillustrative
of a number of authors who point at the unique sets of governance
questions that are emerging around cyberspace, the Internet and global
information flows; questions on deterritorialisation, complexities, the
irrelevance of space, the postsovereignty era and others.
4. Continuities between Information Society
and Information Age
Notwithstanding the significant differences between the Information
Society literature and the Information Age scholars, there are clear
lines of continuity that justify discussing both in one chapter. Let me
give four illustrations of the major continuities, beyond the general
idea of the centrality of information (technology) in the constitution of
a new modern order.
The continuities between the Information Society literature and the
Information Age theorists are perhaps best stressed by Kumar's ( 1995 )
major study on new theories of the contemporary world. He starts
his analysis with the postindustrialism/Information Society literature
of Daniel Bell and his contemporaries and ends with interpreting the
globalisation literature as the last version of similar studies that try
to define and interpret the changing constitution of modernity. In that
sense, according to Kumar, these studies and analyses all belong to the
same family: interpretations of the (new) constitution of the modern
order.
Second, much of the concrete empirical research that was carried out
in the 1970s to assess whether a change in quantities (of the economy,
the occupational patterns, of the information technologies, of speed
and volume of transactions) resulted in a qualitative different phase of
modernity is still done today. Today's studies on occupational patterns
and their shift, on the contribution of informational sectors to the
national economy of GNP (cf. Wilenius, 2002 ), on the diffusion of