Towards a Global Sustainable Information Society: A European Perspective

We examine the challenge of identifying a route towards a sustainable global Information Society: a society that adequately meets economic, social, cultural and environmental concerns of the world, with a long-term perspective. Clearly, a model of development which simply extends the current resource-intensive lifestyles of the OECD to the entire population of the world would threaten both global ecological stability and many local cultures, eventually posing a threat to social harmony in Europe. The present patterns of economic globalization are forcing ever more deregulation, increasingly short-term orientation and an ever faster rate of change, which makes sustainability increasingly hard to attain. However, European experience can make a valuable contribution to developing a global sustainable Information Society, and to the work of policy-making bodies around the world.