The Information Age
History is expressed as a series of great ages, all characterized by their particular living conditions and means of affecting the world that surrounds us. Like the creation of the steam engine and its propulsion of society into the Industrial Age, ICT are stimulating and creating our most contemporary distinction of social change: the Information Age.
Emphasizing that the emergence of the network society signifies a revolution of world systems, Manuel Castells (advisor to the United Nations lead World Summit on the Information Society and professor of sociology at Berkley University) is a firm advocate that ICT have facilitated the emergence of dominant world processes characterized by their network logic of inclusion and exclusion, determined in part by access and the digital divide. In his discussion of the Information Age, Castells demonstrates that the economic repercussions of informationalism have been observed to bind national economies throughout the world to intricate global financial and supranational economic institutions. The same is happening with social and human rights movements such as those promoting women's and aboriginal rights.
As suggested, it is the ‘variable geometry’ of the networking logic, its ‘flexibility’ and ‘adaptability’, that makes it a particularly powerful means of constructing connections and thus consolidating both power and cooperation. Whether one discusses the emergence of global financial systems or growing citizen solidarity networks, one thing is at the core of the new society, the solicitation and exchange of the world’s most valuable resource: information.
There is a “widespread surge of powerful expressions of collective identity that challenge globalization and cosmopolitanism on behalf of cultural singularity and communities’ control over their lives and environment”. The effect of this movement is that senses of self are increasingly formed around shared experience that is expressed in solidarity through ICT. It is in these ‘culture codes’, shared as ‘information’ and ‘representation’, that new forms of civil society are emerging. It is in the minds of people, and who they envision themselves to be, that the power of identity is created and impacted upon by the flows of information that characterize the Informational Age.
The advent of ICT, with its capacity to infiltrate media, is an increasingly powerful means to share knowledge and make it accessible in all political contexts. Many examples exist of case studies where these technologies have played a positive role in the ability for social movements to organize their actions and distribute information that is otherwise unavailable.
The Information Age represents a complete revamping of socio-political and economic institutions. This is a revolution fuelled by its networking logic, applicable to the support of political struggles in all corners of the world, beyond the confines of borders and media.