查看文章

Concerns about inequalities deriving from the penetration of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have only recently become a widely debated issue in industrial societies. Until the 1980s the diffusion of ICT was mainly considered a matter of technological innovation regarding selected fields and limited territorial areas (such as the military and academic centers in the US). Gradually, scholars started to point to the rise of an information society based on the production of information as the crucial resource to manage coordination and control of increasingly interconnected organizational systems (Masuda, 1981; Beniger, 1986; Toffler, 1990). The expression offered an alternative to the otherwise negative definitions used by scholars since the 1970s to identify changes occurring in Western democratic societies (‘post-capitalism’,‘post-industrialism’,‘post-materialism’, etc.)(Touraine, 1969; Bell, 1973 …