Affiliations: [a] Professor Emeritus of Government and Information
Management, Caledonian Business School, Glasgow, UK, Honorary Professor,
University of Nottingham, UK. E-mail: [email protected]
| School of Governance, Utrecht University, The Netherlands | Department of Statistics, Trinity College, Ireland | Department of Public Administration, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Abstract: The overarching argument here is that only a `whole polity'
perspective, an `information polity' perspective, can be satisfactory as both a
starting and finishing point for the predictive endeavour being set out in this
special edition. The organising image is one of seeing two trajectories at work
in the polity, trajectories that hitherto have too often been treated as
separate but which are ineluctably intertwined. The first of these trajectories
is that of information intensifying government/governance and the second, the
trajectory associated with communications intensifying democratic character of
the polity as both formally initiated in experimentation and innovation and in
the informal, spontaneous democratic impulses that have emerged from the era of
social networking, or 'web 2.0'. Drawn together these trajectories make up the
wider polity, an information- and communications-intensive polity. Separating
them for analytical purposes allows examination of the different paces of
change in each of these trajectories, enabling speculative conclusions to be
drawn, perhaps more accurately than otherwise, about what to expect in this
century's third decade.
Keywords: Polity, information-intensity, government, governance, democracy, the future
