Volume
7 Number 1, Winter 2000:
Special
Issue on:
How
best may Information Society Technology
contribute
to Sustainable Development?
What
does this mean for the Future of Telework?
We are at a turning point, a
paradigm shift, as we enter the 21st century.
The last century was the century of information; the new century will be
the century of networking. Information
can only take us so far. At its limit
it reinforces mind-body dualism and strengthens the elitism that can be implied
by this split.
We are in the middle of
leapfrog from a desk-based mind society to a society of embodied minds
networked through mobile technologies.
By joining up mind and body we are simply following what the
neurosciences are now telling us about thinking; that it is a multilayered
process framed by the body and driven by the emotions of the body.
E-Mail and its successors will
be accessible to every 3 year old, adding excitement to the process of learning
to read. Books were a less attractive carrot in the past, encouraging only a
small fraction of children to learn to read before school. The PC is already
delivering a far more substantial pay-back.
The e-mail from a 3 year old on the other side of the world has far more
impact than even the very best children’s story.
We may be standing in the way
of global sustainability by focusing on the progressive dematerialisation of
the industrial processes that are
supporting our current lifestyle while ignoring the benefits of culture
change. Already the third world is
developing a less material culture than we passed through in the last two
centuries, with little in the way of
coal and steel, nothing in the way of
steam engines. Even the telephone does not
require massive numbers of twisted pairs and amplifiers, only a few aerials and
inexpensive mobile telephones.
Dematerialisation of products is the rust belt solution;
immaterialisation of demand is the IST solution. That culture change has already started; first and third world 3
year olds are already communicating.
Planetary sustainability can
be achieved by using Information Society Technologies to achieve the
immaterialisation of lifestyles and more equitable global frameworks. The
emerging global network infrastructure is already creating an ecology of
networked individuals that is complementing the ecology of the planet; perhaps
Gaia is being superseded by CyberGaia?
The emerging Network Society
is one in which each person may belong to a number of communities, some local,
some global, but all intertwined to such an extent that polarisation into
friend and foe can only be achieved in the adrenalin driven myths of the
network society such as real, and virtual, football.
This special issue of EJT is
published to coincide with the conference “Towards a Sustainable Information
Society”, in the belief that the future of telework is inseparable from the
creation of the Sustainable Information Society.
David Leevers
Volume 7 Number 1, Winter 2000:
CONTENTS
Immaterialisation A discussion of the key term in IST’s contribution to Sustainable
Development
Consumption
Substitution The effect of
immaterialisation on material consumption and thus on Sustainable Development
Building
the Future Creating the new
non-material satisfiers for consumption substitution
Conference
Announcement Towards a Sustainable
Information Society
The
Research Agenda What needs
to be done to make the IST contribution
real
The European Journal of Telework can be ordered
from:
Addico Cornix Ltd,
70 Causewayhead, Penzance
Cornwall, TR18 2SR
Tel +44 1736 332 736
Fax +44 1736 334 702
E-mail: srs@cornix.co.uk