Futures 33 (2001) 219–223www.elsevier.com/locate/futures

Introduction

Citizenship and ecological modernization in theinformation society

The notions of “information society” and “sustainable development” became themetaphorical catchwords for the idea of progress in the 1990’s. In the broadest sensethey challenge the nihilistic post-modern claim concerning the end of all progress.They also invite us to compose new great stories, or master narratives, for alternativefutures to emerge. On the other extreme of discussion and decision-making, the term“sustainable” has been replaced by “continuing” and the term “development” by“economic growth”. In the same circles, the notion of information society has cometo signify the current means of information and communication technology that sus-tain the continuing economic growth.

But there are several alternative meanings in between these two extremes. Thesemultiple meanings can be found in economical, political, civil society or culturaldiscussions, and they are used for policy formulations and decision-making.

We propose that basically, sustainable development is progressing welfare for allpeople within sustainable boundary conditions of living nature. That is, sustainabledevelopment is basically welfare with ecological sustainability.

In the developing world the first priority problem of sustainable development isthe lack of welfare and the presence of acute poverty. There sustainable developmentis not attainable and not even discussible if poverty is not fought against to beginwith. In the industrialized world, the environmental meaning of the term developmentis dominant, but not quite in the plain ecological sense. In the industrialized world,the first priority is the maximum economic growth instead of environmental issuesper se. It is claimed that continuing economic growth is a necessary condition forsolving the problems of poverty and environmental issues.Sustainable development has been understood also as a development of new business,that is, eco-business. Civil societies and especially young citizens, as well as manyresearchers, prioritise sustainable well being of nature in a broad sense with theinterests of the future generations.

Information society appears in many different disguises as well, ranging from avision of socially constructed network societies of the global world to a view of anew electronic market place, both based on application and innovations of newknowledge and of worldwide information infrastructures. The European view seemsto be more inclined to the first meaning and the American view to the second.

Let us take an example of Finland, which has been recently recognized as a suc-

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cessful infotech society. In his article forFortune [1], Geoffrey Colvin states: “Ifyou want to see what life in the infotech society will be like in a few years, a live-action preview is playing right now”. And he continues. “The real country of thefuture, it now seems clear, is Finland, the most wired—and wireless—nation on earth… Finland is the infotech leader by almost any measure”. He gives us some well-known figures, e.g. Finland’s “share of the world’s Internet users is about 100 timesgreater than its share of the world’s population”, and he also mentions deregulation,low prices, and some social issues to back his view. Another recognition appearedin National Geographic[2] which places Finland, together with USA, on its Millen-nium maps of cultures as a representative of the information age, because Finlandhas most Internet hosts per capita in the world.

However, the infotechnology as such is no longer the issue in advancing the infor-mation society. Market forces and political will can easily solve any problem ofaccess to the ICT-facilities. Neither is the lack of new skills required a real issue ofadvancement of the information society, albeit there are many people who have notacquired these skills and many others whose skills are not quite adequate or up-to-date. Offering training and education is a necessity, but it is only another relativelyeasily solvable task.

The real issue in the making of the information society is building a motivationfor and confidence of ordinary citizens in directions of the development aimed atwith the information technology. This concern for motivation leads us to look at theinformation society and sustainable development together, as a means to an end.

However, the relationship between these two concepts, information society andsustainable development, has not been discussed as thoroughly as it deserves1. Ouraim is to relate the two, their pertinent activities, policies and decisions in order tocultivate the idea of sustainable information society. This is the question tackled inthis special issue ofFutures2.

The articles deal with multiple aspects of the sustainable information society, high-lighting both the sustainability issues as well as the age of information. The commonperspective shared by all of the authors is the futures approach. Each individualcontribution addresses the theme of sustainable information society from the view-point of the futures research. The issues dealt with in this collection include: Whatwill happen to the idea of progress in the world where less is more? What kinds ofcommunications abilities and learning strategies will be required of us? Are the insti-tutions of democracy and education better or worse off in the coming age of infor-

1 Organizing a strategic alliance of enterprises and other actors for sustainable information societydevelopment has been going on for some time with a European Commission undertaking called the ASISproject. Cooperation with ASIS project is recognized here with appreciation for cooperation. ASIS standsfor the Alliance for a Sustainable Information Society, and the project belongs to the Advanced Communi-cations Technologies and Services Programme of the European Commission. Its very aim is to demon-strate how the objectives of sustainability can best be supported by an appropriate development of theInformation Society.

2 The articles collected here stem from the research projectCitizenship and ecological modernizationin the information society: the futures approach, a three-year project funded by the Academy of Finland.

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mation? What kinds of novel risk landscapes will emerge in the course of socialtransition? Will ecology occupy a prominent role in the information society? Inaddition to these themes, the general contours of the information age as well as thepromise of futures approach will be examined.

In “A Futures Research Outline of a Post-Modern Idea of Progress”, Pentti Mala-ska deconstructs the idea of progress embedded in the ideological basis of modernity.He claims that the futures approach should not settle with just dismantling the notionof progress, but should develop tools for visioning the possible and desirable coursesof future events. The notion of progress, when deconstructed, has worthy componentsas well as constituents that should be critically scrutinized and perhaps discarded.The prevailing ethos of modernity was and still is that progress equals materialgrowth. The post-modern, yet still constructive view of progress, is the one thatsubstitutes human and social innovations for material growth. The sustainable infor-mation society requires this kind of progress in order to become a reality.

In their article, “Communication Capability as an Intrinsic Determinant for Infor-mation Age”, authors Marja-Liisa Vihera¨ and Juha Nurmela guide us to the futuresociety, where the technological environments composed of information and com-munication gadgets challenge the skills of human users. Their exploration of thefuture society is based on solid empirical material stemming from the contemporaryFinnish society. They look at the meeting point of the human users and the newtechnological environments through a conceptualization that draws a distinctionbetween access point, competence and motivation. Successful integration into infor-mation and communication technologies requires that all three components are inorder. Furthermore, the authors provide a state-of-the-art view concerning the useof different information related appliances in Finnish households. Of theseappliances, mobile phones appear to spread evenly, whereas computers tend to leaveelder citizens in a marginal position. There is a possibility that the spread of infor-mation and communication technologies will become ever more driven by marketsand employers—accordingly the needs of the civil society should be consciouslyattended.

Hannu Linturi and Anita Rubin investigate the new challenges of education in“Transition in the Making: The Images of the Future in Education and Decision-Making”. The profession of the teacher will undergo radical changes in the futureinformation society, where there will be ever greater need for general tools of under-standing the students. One such tool is the image of the future, by means of whichthe teacher and the educator can relate to the students’ worldviews and also to thechanging world itself. Moreover, the social transition currently taking place is firstand foremost reflected in the images of the future, and therefore the tools of under-standing the transition should include tools of grasping these images. Linturi andRubin highlight the major indicators of social transition and develop tools forassessing and understanding these indicators.

In “Risk Landscapes in the Era of Social Transition”, Matti Kamppinen andMarkku Wilenius examine the risks associated with future worlds. The notion ofrisk landscape refers to the experienced features of the world. Risk landscapes changein time and different social groups possess different landscapes. Thinking in terms

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of risks has some advantages when compared with traditional futures thinking. Thetheory of risk brings in precise concepts for the purpose of assessing the futurecourses of events. The authors discuss the cognitive and cultural formation mech-anisms lying behind the risk landscape, and proceed to look at particular features ofthe information society, which is assumed to have a particular risk landscape charac-teristic of the era of social transition. As an experimental case the authors investigatethe risk landscape of climate change.

The issues of ecological sustainability are explored by Sirkka Heinonen, PekkaJokinen and Jari Kaivo-oja in “The Ecological Transparency of Information Society”.They propose that while the new information and communication technologies willprovide us with more efficient production systems and more efficient means of moni-toring the material flows, the new technologies themselves should be assessed interms of their ecological impacts. The previous societal forms where the impacts oftechnology have been contained by means of more technology, should be overcomeand an ecologically transparent society should be pursued. The authors develop aset of criteria for that purpose and also suggest some methods of measuring theecological sustainalibity of the information society.

Finally, in the Symposium organised by Auli Keskinen, Ted Becker, Tomas Ohlin,Christa Slaton and Marcus Schmidt tackle the issues of citizen participation in infor-mation society. One of the major promises of the future information society is thatthe citizens will be able to participate in the political decision-making more directly.A society where decision-making is faster and takes place closer to the grass-rootslevel is also more sustainable. In some experimental settings it has already beenexamined how information and communication technology can be applied in advanc-ing participatory democracy. The contributors to the Symposium outline the majorfeatures of so-called technology assisted democracy and present case studies fromdifferent experimental arenas. Whether the application of information and communi-cations technology will lead to more participatory and sustainable democracy,remains to be seen. But the current indications are encouraging.

To sum up, what we hope will emerge from this wide range of topics treated inthis special issue ofFutures is our assumption that more than anything else, thedebate over future direction of our societies will be dominated by three central topics:informational mode of development simply called “information society”, social andecological goals related to the idea of sustainable development and the aspirationsattached to the idea of democracy. Indeed, it is our firm belief, that in order to makefutures studies more insightful and able to penetrate the core issues encountered byhumanity in the third millennium, the interconnectedness of these topics should bemore clearly manifested than is currently the case. By observing these developments,we are able to highlight the issues that are critical for our social systems to functionadequately, such as the role of education and ways to navigate a world loadedwith risks.

Our aim has not been to advocate and prolong the myths often related to thesesubjects but to provide a critical account that reveals the real challenges we arefacing. This is particularly true since both “information society” and “sustainabledevelopment” are today widely used in various political circles and for various polit-

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ical purposes and there is a real danger that the most critical and substantial issuesrelated to these subjects are disguised under the spell of political rhetorics. Further-more, as always when we deal with the future, we talk about the issues largelydependent on human will and thus the values attached to various social agendas hasto be considered.

The central message embodied in this volume goes as follows: information tech-nology and its derivatives will be a constituent part of our social systems in thecoming century. However, we must keep in mind that technology is “only” a partof society and not something outside it, and technological development itself shouldnever be considered as social goal per se. For this purpose we need other humanaspirations. It is our conviction that by necessity as well as by virtue, these aspirationsshould be related to the framework of sustainable development, decomposed to socialagenda that would ensure the well-being of human and natural systems.

Thus, while we admit the rather heterogeneous nature of this collection of articles,we wish to argue that it reflects the true complexity of the world itself. This viewhas been fostered in our three-year study project “Citizenship and Ecomodernisationin the Information Society” that has formed the source of intellectual inspiration ofthe most articles present in this volume. It is our hope that the readers will be ableto trace our “leitmotiv” through the individual articles and use it fruitfully for her/hispurposes in struggling to understand the world and its futures.

Matti Kamppinen*

Finland Futures Research Centre,Turku School of Economics and Business Administration; P.O. Box 110, FIN-20521

Turku, FinlandE-mail address:matti.kamppinen@tukkk.fi

Pentti MalaskaFinland Futures Research Centre,

Turku School of Economics and Business Administration; P.O. Box 110, FIN-20521Turku, Finland

E-mail address:pentti.malaska@pp.inet.fi

Markku WileniusFinland Futures Research Centre,

Turku School of Economics and Business Administration; P.O. Box 110, FIN-20521Turku, Finland

E-mail address:markku.wilenius@tukkk.fi

References

[1] Fortune, August 16 1999, p.83.[2] National Geographic Vol. 196, No 2, August 1999.

* Corresponding author. Tel.:+358 2 338 3599; fax:+358 2 233 0755.