Computers and Networks in the Age of Globalization

In modernity, an individual identity was constituted from civil society, while in a globalized network society, human identity, if it develops at all, must grow from communal resistance. A communal resistance to an abstract conceptualized world, where there is no possibility for perception and experience of power and therefore no possibility for human choice and action, is of utmost importance for the constituting of human choosers and actors. This book therefore sets focus on those human choosers and actors wishing to read and enjoy the papers as they are actually perceiving and experiencing their lives in a diversity of social and cultural contexts. In so doing, the book tries to imagine in what kind of networks humans may choose and act based on the knowledge and empirical evidence presented in the papers. The topics covered in the book include: people and their changing values; citizens in a network society; the individual and knowledge-based organizations; human responsibility and technology; and exclusion and regeneration.This volume contains the edited proceedings of the Fifth World Conference on Human Choice and Computers (HCC-5), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Geneva, Switzerland in August 1998. Since the first HCC conference in 1974, IFIP's Technical Committee 9 has endeavoured to set the agenda for human choices and human actions vis-a-vis computers.