[Air-L] digital society instead of info soc?

[Christian Fuchs]

Hello Petr,

Thank you for this interesting question.

Just some thoughts...

My view is that in the EU policy strategies eEurope 2002, eEurope 2005 
and iSociety 2010, the EU a) on the one hand stressed the importance of 
liberalized and commodified ICTs/digital economy and b) formulated a 
normative wish list of an inclusive, participatory European information 
society. It wanted to become "the world's most competitive" information 
sociey/economy until 2010 and failed in doing so. All three plans were 
basically neoliberal policy strategies, aiming at a largely commodified 
European information society. The normative vision of having an 
inclusive and participatory information society is contradicted by the 
focus on markets, competition, capital accumulation and commodification, 
but the European Union never realized this. This is my argument in this 
paper:
* 
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a919192441~frm=titlelink
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCNi5reW8Jk
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKbBH-tH-aI&feature=watch_response
* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_M1_jnZxDg&feature=watch_response

In the Digital Agenda 2020, the neoliberal dualistic strategy seems not 
to have changed. Ggoal: "The overall aim of the Digital Agenda is to 
deliver sustainable economic and social benefits from a digital single 
market based on fast and ultra fast internet and interoperable 
applications.".
"sustainable information economy" = commodified, deregulated, privatized
= contradicts the goal of "social benefits" for all

With such policy visions, we will also in 2020 have a class-strucuted 
information society, not a participatory one. The new crisis of 
capitalism does not seem to have created many cracks, fissures and holes 
into the neoliberal policy vision.

So there is no difference if the EU talks about "information society" or 
"digital society" - the ideology behind it (neoliberalism) has not 
changed. The question if there are small policy differentiations in the 
policy documents over the past 10 years is secondary, the primary issue 
is the larger concept of society framing it.

Also one should once more question if we indeed live in an "information 
society" or "digital society" or any other prefixed society that implies 
the dominance of knowledge or ICTs. The prefixes "information", 
"digital", etc imply that IT and knowledge are the major characteristic 
of contemporary societies, which they are not. IT and knowledge 
constitute one of many aspects, we at the same time live in information 
capitalism, finance capitalism (as the finance crisis shows), 
hyperindustrialist capitalism (as the reliance on oil and nuclear energy 
and the Fukushima crisis show), a global war society/imperialistic 
capitalism (as the various wars fought by the West in the past 10 years 
show), etc. The claim that "information", "digitization" etc is dominant 
is simply wrong - first and foremost we live in a capitalist society, 
which is multidimensionally contradictory and many-faced.

Best,
Christian Fuchs

-- 
Prof. Christian Fuchs
Chair in Media and Communication Studies
Department of Informatics and Media
Uppsala University
Kyrkogårdsgatan 10
Box 513
751 20 Uppsala
Sweden
christian.fuchs at im.uu.se
Tel +46 (0) 18 471 1019
http://fuchs.uti.at
http://www.im.uu.se
NetPolitics Blog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blog
Editor of tripleC: http://www.triple-c.at
Book "Internet and Society" (Paperback, Routledge 2010)
Book "Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies" (Routledge 
2011)