Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5. Digital Resistances
postmodernism
The period between the early '
s saw the advent
of the much-heralded information society. The inadequacies of
Fordist-Keynesian ideas in relation to global competition and finan-
cial deregulation necessitated restructuring on the part of capitalism
to more responsive, fluid models of organization. This was bound
up with concurrent developments in information communications
technology, which presented the technical means to realize a new
flexible capitalism. At the same time those developments in ICT
also led to a new range of commodities based on microelectronics,
personal computers, and video games. Thus the vision of a society
dominated by information and information technologies pro-
pounded by academics such as Daniel Bell or Futurologists such
as Alvin Toffler would seem to have been realized. But, unlike Bell's
vision of the move towards such a society as an evolutionary pro-
cess, its realization was antagonistic and sometimes violent, in with
traditional industries and industrial models being either radically
overhauled or, effectively, dispensed with, often at great social cost.
The '
70
s and the late '
80
s in particular saw industrial antagonism on an unprece-
dented scale throughout the industrialized world. In the '
70
s these
antagonisms were 'resolved', in some countries at least, by the
coming to power of right-wing governments, whose invocations of
traditional values masked radical neo-liberal economic agendas.
80
 
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