From Information Society to Information Age - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 53

information technologies and on processing capacity and speed are
not fundamentally different from those of Bell ( 1973 ), Porat ( 1977 ),
and their contemporaries.
Third, it is also remarkable how close Castells and Bell come when
they both investigate the main drivers for their new society: these
drivers are to be found in the economy and in new technologies,
whereas politics and culture take a second place. If one reads the cri-
tiques on The Information Age, the similarities with the comments
issued against the Information Society thesis of Daniel Bell and his con-
temporaries is again striking. Garnham ( 1998 ) and Webster ( 2001b ;
2002 ) have collected a number of objections against Castells's overly
technological determinism, his reported empirical developments (and
their measurement) towards an informational order and his emphasis
on the transformation/innovation of his new order (while neglecting
continuities). This criticism sounds all too familiar after the Informa-
tion Society debate in the 1970s and 1980s (as has been mentioned
earlier). In a similar way, Paehlke's ( 2003 ) electronic capitalism the-
sis is quite similar to Schiller's ( 1969 , 1981 ) work on the marketisa-
tion, inequalities and monopolies that come along with the Information
Society.
And, last but not least, as in the Information Society literature, also
in the Information Age studies environment is only marginally empha-
sized, and then in a very specific way. If the environment comes to
the fore in the Information Age literature, it is to assess the direct
environmental consequences of a further informatisation, digitalisation
and computerisation of society. The paperless office, teleworking and
e-business are still the milestones to review the Information Society
and Information Age on its environmental performance. Equal to the
Information Society studies, only incidentally the Information Age lit-
erature relates information systems, networks and flows to a globalised
environmental movement (e.g., Castells, 1997; 2004 ), to environmen-
tal governance and to environmental information systems related to
economic activities that criss-cross borders. It is this omission that this
volume aims to repair.
5. Conclusion
At various times in the past four decades, scholars have pointed at
advances in information, informational processes and information and