Information:1. action of informing (form, mould, train esp. the mind), training instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge;2. action of informing (impart knowledge of some particular fact or occurrence (to a person));3. knowledge communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; intelligence, news [OED].

• Information – objective, measurable (bits, informatics, cybernetics) or subjective interpretation (sign, semiotics, hermeneutics)?

• Politics of information (value, use, power): hackers, libertarians, control freaks and “sharks”?

• Political economy of the “information society” (transformations of the economic base and ideological superstructure?)

• ICT – a new “epoch” (epistemē) within the history of humanity or “hype”? Break (Castells: “informational revolution”, “network society”), gradual transformation (“informatisation”, “digitalization”, “acceleration”) or continuity?

Major technological and social changes (technological determinism vs. cultural pessimism):

• emerging global information economy (Castells: “global informational capitalism”) and “knowledge society” (Lyotard); virtual capital and “instantaneity”

• transformation of practices relating to processing, storing and transmitting of “information”; from industrial to informational mode of development; knowledge-based production (action of knowledge upon knowledge): networkers, flexitimers and jobless (neoliberalism: de-unionization, casualisation, marketization)

• cultural changes (Castells: “Network culture”) through electronically networked media: “scapes”, “nodes” and “flows” (of information, money, materials, people…): experience of time and space, fluidity of identity (Castells: “Networked self” and “virtual communities as me-centred networks”, “prosumers”), decentralized social structures (urbanization, technopoles, networked or “cyborg” global cities), “hyperreality” (“desequencing”, media saturation, simulacra, (Baudrillard), “instant wars”, VR and “real virtuality”; “timelessness”, presentism and retrofuturism); (local or regional) cultural resistance (cf. fundamentalisms) vs. new transnational and cosmopolitan financial and managerial elite (glocalisation)

• media convergence through digitalization and networking: interactivity (interacting versus interacted), new patterns of consumption (blurring of genres, edutainment, infomercials, tabloidization of culture, hybridization), “narrowcasting” (micro-media, one-to-one and many-to-many streams, platforms and devices, open source); internet and “global hypertext”; surveillance; geneticism; posthumanism

How to be “critical” in an “information society”? (Lash:

“informationcritique” (immanence) versus Ideologiekritik) • information overload (info-besity) and “disinformation” in

the “media(ted) society” with its “machinic interfaces”• the medium is the message and the self-legitimation of

“real time”• from narrative & discursive to informational power• informationalisation is driving commodification (canceling

out distinction between use value and exchange value), attached to intellectual property

• from exploitation to exclusion: privileged mobile human-machine interfaces connected by lines of communication (loop of networks) in global informational exchange; technological forms of life

• demand for a mobile, diasporic, transnational, “post-colonial” critique “without transcendentals”.

Who controls digital culture? (Poster)

• “the digital” raises questions about the relation between new technologies and cultural democracy (“transculture in an age of globalization”, “long-term relation of human beings to information machines (humachines)”)

• who “controls” (digital) cultural objects – the case of peer-to-peer file sharing and the culture industries (p2p and the potential for elevating consumption into creativity, crossing the border between production and consumption, introducing the possibility of a democratic culture)

• digital “ambivalence” in relation to control: enhances ability of large institutions to extend the reach of their information and management of the population; also empowers individuals to have positions of speech that are difficult to monitor, to transform and disseminate cultural objects not possible in analog form (p. 192); ethical problems of digitalization: who benefits? (p. 207, 209-10)

• “fixed” and “variable cultural objects” (pp. 194-6)• the cultural effects of copyright law (pp. 196-8)• authority versus innovation and creativity? (pp. 198-201)

Information Society Statistics

• http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/information_society/introduction/

• http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/publications/digitalife/docs/digital.life_world-map-information-society-statistics.pdf

• http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Information_society_statistics

• http://www.unesco-ci.org/cgi-bin/portals/information-society/page.cgi?d=1&g=2641

• http://www.oecd.org/document/23/0,3343,en_2649_34449_33987543_1_1_1_1,00.html