The Network Society - University of Massachusetts Amherst

26 The Network Society
1991, Altman 2002) in Europe and South America 1 : Spain, the Czech
Republic, Greece, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Chile,
Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil.
However, because it is necessary to compare this group of countries
with a group of more informationally developed countries, we have
also chosen to conduct a comparative analysis herein of Finland, the
USA and Singapore. Finally, we will also analyse the case of Italy in
this transition context, for, although it is a member of the G7, Italy
has a proto-information model (Castells 2002) that is closer, on various
levels, to a society in transition than a full informational society.
We will look at Portugal as a paradigmatic example of transition in
progress, but at the same time we will seek to identify the characteristics
that make societies that differ so much as Spain, Greece, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, and also Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay and Brazil, societies in transition towards the network society.
Societies in Transition in the Global Network
An analysis of the different information society models can have as
its starting point the individualization of four dimensions (technology,
economy, social well-being and values), through which one can better
understand what each society’s position is in relation to the global
information society panorama (Castells and Himanen, 2001). On this
basis one can consider that a society is an informational society if it
possesses a solid information technology: infrastructure, production
and knowledge (Castells and Himanen, 2001).
1 Huntington suggests that, during the 1970s and 1980s there were transitions from nondemocratic
political systems to democratic systems and that those changes can be seen in
the context of a greater trend towards transition to democracy. Without going into the
various premises put forward by Huntington in more detail, I think that his contribution is
of interest for the analysis of the societies in transition to the network society due to the
fact that he establishes a link between different geographic zones and societies at the values
level. In other words, all the societies studied herein have shared one common value in
the last three decades—the search for democracy—and seek today integration in the global
economy as informational societies, with most of the indicators placing them in a transition
zone. Almost all of the countries analysed here as being in transition to the network
society are referred to by Huntington as common examples of transition to democracy.
Huntington defines three types of transition, which include all the countries analysed
here: 1) transformation (for example, Spain, Hungary and Brazil), where elites in power
took on the leadership of the transition processes; 2) substitution (as in Portugal and
Argentina), where opposition groups led the democratization process; 3) transplacements
(as in Poland and Czechoslovakia), where democratization occurred from joint action by
government and opposition groups.