Human Rights in the Information Society: Utopias, Dystopias and Human Values

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are bringing about a pervasive economic, social and anthropological transformation. They are changing productive processes, substituting the production of physical commodities by mean of other physical commodities with the production of information by means of information, i.e. new productive processes where information is both the rough stuff and the outcome (consider for instance, the creation of software, digital goods, and web services such as searching, mining, filtering, aggregating, hosting and organizing data, etc.) ICTs involve new ways of organising economic activities: distances become largely irrelevant, flexible organization is enabled by the adaptable information infrastructures, the enhanced capacity to produce and communicate favours new forms of cooperation. They support the integration between industry and culture, production and socialization, in the interlocked development of software and digital contents, though commercial firms, individual endeavours, or peer-based networks. ICTs drive the convergence between different technologies, pertaining to hardware, software, telecommunication, electronics, biotechnology, etc. Being based on knowledge, ICT provide the environment for producing new knowledge, in all other domains of culture, science and technology, including first of all ICTs themselves.