Policies for a new world or the emperor’s new clothes? The Information Society

Abstract

Third-generation mobile phones, broadband connections, wireless applications, cybercommunities, cyberwars, cybersex, e-commerce, e-democracy, e-learning: this is some of the language that has come to describe the era of accelerated tele/communications and transactions. These terms have not escaped from a science fiction movie, although some of them have their origins in science fiction novels, but from the consultative papers of ‘think tanks’ and government policy documents. They have become part of everyday advertising, policy, newspeak and even casual conversation, in global cities across the North-South divide. These are the terms of a particular form of capitalist economic organization of social relations that adheres to two overarching qualities of the new Information Age: speed and universality. CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999) not only embodies the ideas and policies that characterize the era of the Information Society and the Knowledge Economy, it also constitutes a manual for the direction of future technological development, policy, economic organization and even social relations. Speed, instant capital transaction across geographic nodes that would have taken hours and days to cross through physical means, almost ‘cancels’ the concept of time as an obstacle or expense for transnational companies.