Mobilizing the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity

This magisterial book offers a comprehensive assessment of the European Information Society programme. It is the results of a decade of research to provide a “factual account” (p. viii), and provides an authoritative antidote to visions driven by technological determinism and technological utopianism. At a more local level it warns against using stereotypes to design societal interventions: the case of the “senior citizen” being pertinent here. The analytic framework is stakeholder analysis. The authors explore the histories and likely futures of three main groups:

1. 1.

   incumbents (such as government and other public agencies who have historically controlled information in the national jurisdictions of the European Union);

2. 2.

   insurgents (the commercial companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle whose power in the market allows them to assume the role of shapers of the information society); and

3. 3.

   “virtual communities” such as consumer groups who are affected by, but also influence, the emerging information society.

The book emerged from Forecast and Assessment of the Socio‐economic and Policy Impact of Advanced Communications and Recommendations (FAIR), funded by DGXIII of the European Union under the Advanced Communication Technologies and Services (ACTS) research initiative of the Fourth Framework research programme. The starting point of the narrative is the 1993 EC White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, and Employment (EC, 1993). This set a narrow technological agenda to develop an information society, an agenda with which the authors disagree, as there are “many possible European information societies depending on the rate and implementation of technological developments” (p. 1).

The overview presented in the introduction highlights three important areas. The first is the extent to which the “dematerialization” of social and economic activity is likely to happen. The second is emergent patterns of interactive service among consumers and citizens and the implications of these for the “social ordering” of society, and the third is the uncertainty of the demand and the development of services supported by a “new” platform of technologies. The authors explain the rationale for the sequencing of their chapters in terms of two blocks. The first (Chapters 2‐5) considers patterns of technological development and their societal impact in terms of inclusion/exclusion and draws on an analysis of how the three stakeholder groups are jostling to control the development of information society resources, at the expense of the comparatively weak “virtual communities” group. The technological developments that are covered include local area networks, the contest between network and optical disc (with important consequences for the development of Europe's multimedia industries) and the platforms that have emerged to support electronic commerce (e‐commerce).

The second block considers the key institutional issues that underpin development of the information society. These include regulatory developments related to liberalization and universal service; technical standardization (both covered in Chapter 6); intellectual property rights (Chapter 7); personal privacy and electronic payment systems (both covered in Chapter 8). The authors express concern that in the areas of regulation and property rights the interests of the virtual community have been underplayed, and that market‐led developments have led to division rather than cohesion.

The overall structure allows the authors to make an informed and credible critique of policy decisions, and to justify the case for a stronger emphasis on the “human features” of the information society (p. 17) in order to bridge a widening gap between the interests of the virtual community stakeholder group (“individualised and customised content and services”) and those of incumbents and insurgents (“mass adoption and scale of use”). The social usefulness and value of technology, they maintain, evolves concurrently with research that leads to products and services; users are themselves producers of content. The authors warn, however, against too reductionist an approach to the digital divide with over‐simplified definitions of literacy and competence (here described in terms of “levels of abilities to make choices and to take action” (p. 50)). Disadvantage is relative; exclusion is complex. Following Castells, they observe that technologies are not themselves the source of the organizational logic that is transforming the social meaning of space; their use is determined by the process of the socio‐economic restructuring of capitalism (p. 55).

Our grasp, however, of the structures that might support increased participation in the information society is inadequate. The authors provide an analysis of status hierarchies and emerging social orders that may help us understand how participative groups might be formed (or “how to join the information society”). Participation is the essential precursor of markets – the authors thus observe that “individual and social use of information and communication technologies requires the evolution of an information society that draws its dynamism and vitality from much smaller and more focused communities of interest than constructions like the ‘use’ or ‘the citizen’. Understanding the structure of these smaller communities … is a primary basis for comprehending the evolution of the information society” (p. 96).

In addition to neglecting the role of virtual communities, policy‐makers have misjudged the ease with which infrastructure may be developed to support an information society. The authors provide a masterful account of the failure to deliver universal ISDN access, and review the piecemeal development of a range of infrastructural components, that have emerged through market opportunism. A similar pattern can be observed in service provision, reflected in the title of Chapter 4 (“Chaos in service innovation”). Chapter 5 analyses the prospects for e‐commerce in Europe, and focuses on the application of information communication technologies (ICTs) to one or more of three basic activities: production and support (chains); transaction preparation (getting information in to marketplace and bringing buyers and sellers together); transaction completion, concluding transactions and handling payments.

The authors describe e‐commerce as a business philosophy as much as an aggregation of technologies, and devote much of the chapter to exposing three “myths”. The first is the myth that cyber‐trading will supersede existing process: the niche opportunities that have been grasped by companies such as Amazon and Cisco have been mistaken for evidence of structural shift. The second myth, that virtual non‐hierarchical organization will become the dominant business form, is undermined by the costs of forming relationships and current perceptions that trust depends on presence. The third “dis‐intermediation” myth is untenable as intermediation and “re‐intermediation” are “probably the largest single source of new business opportunity in e‐commerce for many new and existing firms” (p. 223). The “realities” of e‐commerce are as follows. It does increase visibility and offers an expanded scope for integration between transaction and logistic structures. And there are new opportunities to be found in developing products (such as customer relationship systems) from “internal” or tactical applications. But the over‐promotion of e‐commerce on the grounds that Europe will “lose out” is misplaced, as the area is too little understood. E‐commerce is a process that “is unfolding at different rates and in different ways within a variety of commercial structures” (p. 235) and policy should focus on commercial governance. E‐commerce requires a high degree of socialization, built up in buyer and seller constituencies over time through familiarity and skills‐building. It is thus not a panacea for developing consumer interest in the information and communication infrastructure.

The subsequent sections of the book are concerned with the institutions that have emerged to date in the development of the information society in Europe. Chapter 6 provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the standards opportunities and dilemmas that face European firms. Chapter 7 is concerned with intellectual property rights. Here, as elsewhere, the authors question policy decisions that have shaped the current regime, as they believe that the “process of implementing the commodity transaction model as a universal legal and institutional standard is complex and it is not assured of success.” Policy‐makers in this area are faced with paradox: “harmonization on a universal and strong copyright protection agenda presents the real hazard of setting a standard that will make experimenting with new business models for information distribution more costly and difficult. In addition, the use of criminal penalties against copyright infringement is creating a substantial Internet underground community that is likely to provide a home for other objectionable activities” (p. 337).

The theme of policy paradox is continued in Chapter 8 (on building trust for virtual communities): while “global networks are facilitating the production of new forms of information property and new types of communities and forms of behaviour that fall outside consensual social norms” (p. 341), legal regulation may be problematic. The authors illustrate this with the case of “telemetadata” or pattern data, “the last toehold on illegal communications” now that strong encryption makes it difficult for the state to decipher message content, notwithstanding the legislative right it may have to do so.

In Chapter 9 the authors discuss the “consequences”, or macroeconomic effects of information society developments. Research, they say, has provided few systematic insights into the macro‐level at which “social transformation, the shift in governance powers to enable greater authority at the local or regional level, and the changes in competences and skills base for business enterprises are being experienced by people in the disadvantaged regions of Europe”. The problem is compounded by the difficulty of measuring effects as different things are being compared, and existing classification categories are in some cases inadequate. One problem that must be addressed is the potential for a serious decline in revenues from taxation if the Internet is maintained as a tax‐free zone for information goods and services. The concluding chapter emphasises the role of interdependency in sustaining the European Community, and suggests that this concept is fundamental to the success of a European information society: “Europeans not only were responsible for innovations that have contributed to this era such as the World Wide Web, but have also been quick to embrace the idea of the information society” (p. 453). While the authors fully subscribe to the vision of such a society, the authors re‐iterate that they question some of the premises on which policy decisions have been made: “some of the most basic assumptions underlying textbook economic analysis do not hold for many information society markets … individuals do not in any meaningful sense have pre‐existing preferences for the consumption of particular services or for investment in specific skills” (p. 455) … “The value of ICTs comes not only from the commodification of information goods and services but also from the processes of social exchange in the pursuit of cultural, education, religious and political goals” (p. 458). Policy‐makers should realize that such values may not lead everyone to participate, and “strive for an information society in which exclusion is the choice made by the individual rather than for him or her” (p. 463).

It is difficult to do justice to this book in a short indicative review. The text is of considerable interest to any serious analyst of the topic. Although it may bring little comfort to policy‐makers who are aware of the complexity of the issues and the indeterminacy of interventions in the information society, it may cause others who are working to an over‐utopian agenda to pause and reflect.