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...er-leak damaging information. The politics of scandal takes centre stage in political competition, in close interaction with the media system, and with the co-operation of judges and prosecutors, the new stars of our political soap operas. Politics becomes a horse race, and a tragicomedy motivated by greed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals, and, often, sex and violence – a genre increasingly indistinguishable from TV scripts. As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structure is linked to a rede nition of the material foundations of our life, of time and space, as Giddens (1984), Adam (see chapter below), Lash and Urry (1994), Thrift (1990), and Harvey (1990), among others, have argued. I propose the hypothesis that two emergent social forms of time and space characterize the network society, while coexisting with prior forms of time and space. These are timeless time and the space of ows. In contrast to the rhythm of biological time characteristic of most of human existence, and to clock time characterizing the industrial age, timeless time is de ned by the use of new information/communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time. On the one han...

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..., stimulated and simulated from the electronic hypertext. The body, as proposed by Giddens some time ago, becomes an expression of identity (1991). It is individualized and consumed in sexual networks. At the level of personality, the process of socialization becomes customized, individualized, and made out of composite models. The autonomous ability to reprogramme one’s own personality, in interaction with an environment of networks, becomes the crucial feature for psychological balance, replacing the strengthening of a set personality, embedded in established values. In this ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992), the management of anxiety is the most useful personal skill. Two con icting modes of interpersonal interaction emerge: on the one hand, self-reliant communes, anchored in their non-negotiable sets of beliefs; and on the other hand, networks of ever shifting individuals. These are social networks, not information networks. So, in a way, they are a fundamental part of our societies, but not necessarily a feature of the network society – unless we extend the meaning of the concept beyond what I propose: information networks-based social structure. However, as communication technology, biologic...

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...al competition, in close interaction with the media system, and with the co-operation of judges and prosecutors, the new stars of our political soap operas. Politics becomes a horse race, and a tragicomedy motivated by greed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals, and, often, sex and violence – a genre increasingly indistinguishable from TV scripts. As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structure is linked to a rede nition of the material foundations of our life, of time and space, as Giddens (1984), Adam (see chapter below), Lash and Urry (1994), Thrift (1990), and Harvey (1990), among others, have argued. I propose the hypothesis that two emergent social forms of time and space characterize the network society, while coexisting with prior forms of time and space. These are timeless time and the space of ows. In contrast to the rhythm of biological time characteristic of most of human existence, and to clock time characterizing the industrial age, timeless time is de ned by the use of new information/communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time. On the one hand, time is compressed (as in split second global nancial transactions, or in the...

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...nothing authorizes capitalism as eternal, it is essential to focus on the characteristics of the new economy because it may well outlast the mode of production where it was born, once capitalism comes under decisive challenge and/or plunges into a structural crisis derived from its internal contradictions (after all, statism died from its self-in icted aws). Work and employment are substantially transformed in/by the new economy. But, against a persistent myth, there is no mass unemployment as a consequence of new information technologies. The empirical record is conclusive on this matter (Carnoy 2000). Yet, there is a serious unemployment problem in Europe, unrelated to technology, and there are dramatic problems of underemployment in the developing world, caused by economic and institutional backwardness, including the insuf cient diffusion and inef cient use of information technologies. There is a decisive transformation of work and employment. Induced by globalization, and the network enterprise, and facilitated by information/communication technologies, the most important transformation in employment patterns concerns the development of exible work, as the predominant form of worki...

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...re stage in political competition, in close interaction with the media system, and with the co-operation of judges and prosecutors, the new stars of our political soap operas. Politics becomes a horse race, and a tragicomedy motivated by greed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals, and, often, sex and violence – a genre increasingly indistinguishable from TV scripts. As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structure is linked to a rede nition of the material foundations of our life, of time and space, as Giddens (1984), Adam (see chapter below), Lash and Urry (1994), Thrift (1990), and Harvey (1990), among others, have argued. I propose the hypothesis that two emergent social forms of time and space characterize the network society, while coexisting with prior forms of time and space. These are timeless time and the space of ows. In contrast to the rhythm of biological time characteristic of most of human existence, and to clock time characterizing the industrial age, timeless time is de ned by the use of new information/communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time. On the one hand, time is compressed (as in split second global nancial tran...