The Network Society - University of Massachusetts Amherst

Societies in Transition to the Network Society 25
tion levels are still quite low. However, different studies conducted in
different societies (Cole 2005) demonstrate that that is a reality that is
not directly linked with the character of transition or affirmation as an
information society, but with variables such as the education and generation
dimensions.
Nevertheless, there is something in societies in transition that
accentuates the differences more. In other words, in societies in transition,
the divisions between those who use and those who do not use
technologies such as the Internet are greater and tend to make utilization
of them more a question of the generation to which one belongs:
the younger the generation the greater the use and the higher the
education level the greater the use.
If it is a recognized fact that societies such as the United States,
Finland and Singapore can be classified as “informational societies”
(Castells and Himanen 2002), how can we define those societies in
transition towards the information society? In other words, societies
in which the mark of networked social organization already asserts
itself in broad segments of society?
In order to answer that question, we require a more in-depth analysis
of a society whose characteristics, though profoundly European,
also reveal similarities in terms of relations and values to countries of
the American continent: Portugal.
The argument for the choice of Portugal as a typical example of a
society in transition towards the network society is that Portugal is a
country that shares, to varying degrees, development characteristics
and historico-political values and conditioning factors with a group of
other societies, for which the common denominator is the fact that
they all experienced, in the last three decades, the democratization of
their societies and, at the same time, have similar informational development
rankings.
All of these societies are classified by different digitalization indexes
(ITU 2003) in one and the same group: the high digital access countries.
In the concrete case of the DAI (ITU 2003), the group is led by
Spain, with Brazil bringing up the rear. It includes, amongst others,
the countries we have chosen to study herein, i.e. those that were protagonists
of waves of democratization in the last 30 years (Huntington