The Network Society - University of Massachusetts Amherst

Editor’s Preface xxi
analysis of education is another contribution to this chapter where she
stresses the major changes that are occurring in society in the ways in
which we work and interact with each other, focusing on several of the
main characteristics of functioning productively in a knowledge economy
and give some examples of how these characteristics can relate to
transformations in educational processes in the corporate setting, for
ongoing professional education, and in higher education. This chapter
ends with Geoff Mulgan’s account of both international and UK experience
in policy making in the information age and aims to show that
the question of e-government is inseparable from broader questions of
government: how it is evolving, in response to what forces, with what
tools, and taking what shapes. I suggest a framework for assessing
impacts in terms of public value.
Part IV deals with another area of policy, that of media, communication,
wireless and policies in the network society. In this chapter
Jonathan Taplin outlines the critical transition from a media world of
analogue scarcity (a limited number of broadcast channels) to the
coming world of digital abundance where any maker of content (films,
music, video games) could have access to the world’s audience through
a server based on demand media environment. His analysis seeks to
clarify what the new environment would look like and how the transition
to IPTV could aid all of the existing media stakeholders. Taplin
suggests that the new environment would also enable an explosion of
creativity as the distribution bottleneck that has existed for one hundred
years of media history could be unlocked.
Focusing on Identity, another dimension of the media policies,
Imma Tubella suggests that while traditional media, in special television,
play an enormous role in the construction of collective identity,
Internet influences the construction of individual identity, as individuals
increasingly rely on their own resources to construct a coherent
identity for themselves in an open process of self formation as a symbolic
project through the utilization of symbolic materials available to
them. The logic of Internet suggests a definition of self whose key
quality is not so much being closed and isolated as being connected.
Bringing into the discussion the need to address the choices of
technology at the policy level, François Bar and Hernan Galperin
focus on the infrastructure dimension and its social implications while
analyzing the deployment of wireless communication infrastructure,