Towards a sustainable information society : deconstructing WSIS

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.