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Privacy, traditionally understood as a right applicable only to individuals, often loses in policymaking to "social" interests, such as national security, medical progress, or the freedom of the press. Recent work in the philosophy of privacy has therefore begun to emphasize the societal value of privacy, its contribution to the common good. However, to be secure privacy should be anchored in both the right and the good. Properly delimited, privacy is an absolute right of the individual. It also benefits society in several ways. While not a "public good" in the economists' sense, privacy is in several precise respects constitutive of the common good. As such, it is compatible not just with liberalism but with social democracy and democratic socialism. Moreover, the arrival of the "global information society," with its facilitation of openness and connectedness, offers a new avenue for congruence between privacy and community. The argument draws on the ideas of Green, Rawls, and Regan, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informatization is a term of Japanese provenance denoting major systemic change from the application of information technology. Proposes a theory of post-war informatization focusing on information services in libraries, specifically computerized information retrieval. Describes four electronic epochs: offline, online, CD-ROM, and Internet, and considers effects on British libraries and their patrons. (Author/LRW)

Assesses the present condition of the emerging specialism of information society studies. Topics include the information economy; information technology; the information explosion; the Japanese version of information society; information society as social democracy; sociology and information science; scholarly journals; and the need for conferences. (Contains 57 references.) (Author/LRW)

Daniel Bell (1919–2011) and Manuel Castells (1942–) are the grand theorists of the information age. The article provides a detailed, up-to-date, comparative analysis of their writings. It begins with their methodologies, identifying numerous commonalities in their post-Marxian frameworks. The substance of their theories is then examined, where it is shown that both plausibly explain contemporary social reality in terms of the interplay of three forces: the information technology revolution, the restructuring of capitalism and the innovational role of culture. There are found to be major similarities in their accounts (the Kantian interpretation, social stratification) but also significant divergences (role of science, the fourth world, the normative content of culture). Suitably combined, Bell's and Castells's thought goes a long way towards delivering a persuasive sociological theory of the global information society. However, the article concludes by suggesting that extensive further work is needed to clarify the precise relationships between the three factors and their relative weightings in the equations required to explain recent social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arnaud Sales and Marcel Fournier, eds., Knowledge, Communication and Creativity. SAGE Studies in International Sociology 56. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2007, 192 pp., $US 99.00 hardcover (978-0-7619-4306-8) This ambitious volume--which [...]

The concept of ePunditry is developed as a lens through which to view the important phenomenon of political blogging. Three conceptual frameworks were selected for their relevance to the idea of computer-enhanced commentary: the information society thesis, the notion of the fifth estate and its relationship with the fourth, and the increasingly celebrated ideal of deliberative democracy. The empirical content of the inquiry comprised interviews with 27 political bloggers, ranging from prominent British figures such as Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale to lesser-known practitioners located as far afield as Lebanon and Trinidad. The article evaluates their responses in light of the conceptual frameworks. It deduces that, while not giving rise to a knowledge class or a fifth estate, the new forms of punditry have made a significant contribution to a technologically enabled democratic politics. The conclusion is that ePunditry represents a useful construct for journalism studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including morality, social system, and utilitarianism.

The paper addresses one of the main paradoxes of post-industrial society: information poverty. While digital divides of various types have been extensively theorized and researched, the actual condition of the information poor–those at the wrong end of socioeconomic information-divides–has not received sufficient attention. Yet if advanced nations have ‘informatized’ and thus become, at least in some measure, information societies, the plight of those lacking the definitive resource ought surely to be high on academic and political agendas. The article reviews the scattered multidisciplinary literature on the condition, confirming the iron link between economic poverty and information poverty, while also registering cultural and behavioural dimensions. Building on such work, a focused, up-to-date and, it is believed, original conception is able to be introduced, namely, information poverty as a deficiency in certain taken-for-granted categories of political and cognate information, or normal democratic information (NoDI). The new construct is then trialled in the field, among a sample of severely disadvantaged men in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. The informants are indeed found to be, by and large, wanting in these key categories of information, an epistemic pathology that reflects and reinforces their material malaise. The article concludes that the ‘option for the poor’–the political duty of care for the worst off–in the twenty-first century demands new modes of State action to combat an acute and increasingly salient social problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]