AT THE beginning of this year Forbairt released the discussion document Ireland the DigitalAge, the Internet. Apparently the new technologies can market Ireland to the world, facilitate new Irish multimedia cultural products, reinvigorate local communities and even allow a more participative democracy.
This optimistic scenario ignores certain problems peculiar to Ireland and some of the issues now emerging at a European level.
Happy teleworkers?
In one sense the new technologies do shrink or even abolish distance: vast amounts of text, sounds and images can be transported instantly as digital data around the globe. A comforting but fallacious conclusion is that therefore the remote areas of the country will soon be filled with happy teleworkers.
Not only has the amount of teleworkers been grotesquely exaggerated, but people who do use the new technologies are disproportionately likely to live in cities. Even more important for Ireland, both usage and facilities are highly concentrated in a very small number of what American scholar Saskia Sassen calls "global cities": Tokyo, London and New York.
Furthermore, the new technologies enable local services to be supplied from a distance. Banks can use computing and information technologies to centralise lending decisions and automate cash handling, so that the small town bank can become as endangered as the village post office. Communication technologies can open up distant areas, but they can also empty them.
Trusting workers?
Information technology allows decisions to be delegated downwards in an organisation. Yet managers will only let this happen if they trust their employees, and my own research shows that Irish employers are - in general - rather unwilling to do this. Consequently, the technology can be used as a way of controlling employees rather than empowering them.
The information society is a learning society: employees' skills need continually upgrading. But Irish employers, like their British colleagues, are all too prone to adopt a "slash and burn" approach to training. The sociologist Paddy McGovern has shown how large employers in Ireland hire newly trained graduates because they are cheap, and then replace them with other new recruits rather than developing existing staff.
Critical spirit?
Irish higher education is good at producing computer specialists, but very few economists, sociologists or political scientists have ever studied technology. Perhaps uniquely in Northern Europe, here in Ireland there is no social study of technology, no tradition of what other countries term "technology assessment". In the academy technology is a thing that just happens, not a process shaped by human intervention.
What alternatives?
Most of our images of the information society, like so much of its hardware and software, originate in the USA. And just as the US information society has been growing, so income differentials in the US have been widening. Equally, Microsoft's Bill Gates has proclaimed that the information society will be that businessman's paradise, the "frictionless market" - the mythical world of the pure market.
In 1994 the Bangemann Report to the European Council took the same stance as Forbairt: the question was how Europe (or Ireland) could use the oncoming information society. From this viewpoint, the information society is like an approaching tidal wave: we can do nothing to change it, all we can do is remember to put on our lifejackets so that hopefully we will swim rather than sink.
Since then, Social Affairs Commissioner Padraig Flynn has been at the centre of attempts to develop a rather different policy approach. In spring this year DGV of the Commission released Building the European Information Society for Us All, the interim report of an expert group set up by the Commissioner. This combines two different concerns: the intellectual tradition that sees technology - including information technology - as socially shaped; and the political strategy that buttresses the European market with a European social policy.
People First?
The Commission's Green Paper People First: Living and Working in the Information Society is the next stage of this new European approach. The Green Paper aims to stimulate debate on "the development of a European Information Society".
In the information society jobs are changing rapidly. If people are to be full citizens in this society, then their right to education can hardly be expected to end at 16 years of age. Equally, if people are going to change jobs more frequently, the right to a job needs to be replaced with the right to employability. If the boundaries of the workplace are becoming blurred and flexible, then the principles of social protection need to be rethought.
These and other issues were discussed at a colloquium on the Green Paper in Dublin earlier this month. Commissioner Flynn again stressed the need to find a "European path to the information society".
One possible route was sketched in an electrifying speech by the British film director Sir David Puttnam. He argued that Europe's humanist values and rich cultural diversity could enable it to become a global power house of educational and cultural production: a society of producers and a polity of citizens, not just a market of consumers.
This stress on the value of diversity and cultural heritage has particular relevance to Ireland. Yet the new European discussion also shows that social and political choices are involved. There is, in other words, more than one possible information society.