Deconstructing WSIS

Towards a Sustainable Information Society describes the potential of the future. Collectively, the contributors in this book discuss the possible revolution offered by the Information Society. They describe the development of a unified society where knowledge is available to all and the civic voice is integral within political debate and policy-making.

This utopian vision of the future was supported by the two-phased World Summit on the Information Society at which the United Nations appealed that concepts and policies would be developed that would similarly influence mankind. This book looks towards the ideal of a sustainable information society, drawing from ideas put forward by the WSIS. It is the second book to emerge from field-work by the European Consortium for Communications Research members.

Global politics remained up until a few decades ago a restricted area, which was mainly accessible to powerful nation states. This has gradually changed and 'new' actors have emerged on the global scene. This has prompted states and international institutions to adopt a so-called multi-stakeholder approach, involving more and more business- as well as civil society- actors. Civil society is a notion that has slowly regained respectability in academic, as well as policy-discourses, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the role of Eastern European civil society organisations in the democratisation of Eastern Europe. The World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) has become a test-case for this 'multi-stakeholder approach'. At the same time, the notion of a predominantly technological information society is making way for a more cultural and social interpretation, as identified in the term 'knowledge society'. The term knowledge society clarifies the shift in emphasis from ICTs as 'drivers' of change to a perspective where these technologies are regarded as tools which may provide a new potential for combining the information embedded in ICT systems with the creative potential and knowledge embodied in people. This collection, which presents the work of members of the European Consortium for Communications Research (ECCR), attempts to discuss the major issues for a sustainable future of Knowledge Societies.

Available at Intellect Books or on Amazon.