Review: The information society; issues and illusions, by D Lyon (original) (raw)
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Cultural Critique, 1998
Information technologies have profoundly transformed the world and people's conceptions of the world in the past two decades. Exploring the impact of information technologies on culture and society in terms of time and space, Manuel Castells argues that new information technologies have not only given rise to the phenomenon of "the space of flows," which supersedes the conventional meaning of the space of places, but have also destabilized the process of power formation and the foundation of traditional power structures, which have traditionally been mobilized more or less on the basis of geopolitical localities. The consequence of such technological transformation, Castells observes, is that "social meaning evaporates from places, and therefore from society, and becomes diluted and diffused in the reconstructed logic of a space of flows whose profile, origin, and ultimate purpose are unknown, even for many of the entities integrated in the network of exchanges" (Informational City 349). In a prediction of the future of uncertainty, which has been conditioned by the interaction between what he calls "the informational mode of development" and