一个以信息为中心的技术革命,正改变着我们思考、生产、消费、沟通、生活、死亡甚至战争的方式。这一信息技术所带来的革命究竟意味着什么,正是目前许多学者苦思的问题。曼纽尔·卡斯特倾心14年著成《信息时代三部曲:经济、社会与文化》,即《网络社会的兴起》、《认同的力量》、《千年终结》。这个三部曲引起了欧美学界的惊叹,被认为是“一部空前的巨作”、“瞄准了意义最重大的问题”;英国大学者安东尼·吉登斯甚至认为:“此书乃目前描绘全球信息化时代轮廓的最杰出成就”!英国著名《经济学家》杂志称卡斯特为“虚拟世界第一位重要哲学家”。在卡斯特看来,自第二次世界大战以来,信息技术的发展实际上是全球化的核心推动力,尤其在进入80年代之后,信息技术革命和资本主义相结合,构造了一个全面扩展的全球社会新形式,即网络社会。这样一个新的社会组织形式,以其普遍性迅速扩展到全世界,给每个人的生活带来了冲击。全球信息流动所带来的网络社会,其更为根本的革命性质在于,它改变了人们传统的空间和时间感受。简而言之,财富、科技和权力的网络所发动的全球化及信息化,深刻地改变了我们所处世界的面貌,它提升了生产力、文化创造力和传播的潜能。但同时也削弱了社会组织的权威和人际关系纽带。在这样一种“流动的空间、压缩的时间”里,时间节奏突然加快、人际交往抽象化、社 An information-centered technological revolution is changing the way we think, produce, consume, communicate, live, die and even wartime. What exactly the revolution brought about by this information technology is what many scholars think hard about now. For more than 14 years, Manuel Custer has become “Trilogy of the Information Age: Economic, Social and Cultural”, namely “The Rise of Internet Society”, “The Power of Identity” and “The End of the Millennium.” This trilogy has astonished the academic circles in Europe and the United States and is considered to be “an unprecedented masterpiece,” “aimed at the most significant question.” The English university anthropologist Anthony Giddens even thought: “The” This book is currently the most outstanding achievements of the contours of the global information age. “” The famous British “Economist” magazine said that Custer is “the first important virtual world philosopher.” In Custer’s view, since the Second World War, the development of information technology was actually the core driver of globalization. Especially since the 1980s, the combination of the information technology revolution and capitalism has created a comprehensive expansion A new form of global society, the online community. Such a new form of social organization, with its universality and rapid expansion to the rest of the world, has had an impact on everyone’s life. The more fundamental revolutionary nature of the cyber society brought about by the global flow of information is that it has changed people’s traditional feelings of space and time. In short, the globalization and informatization driven by the networks of wealth, technology and power have profoundly changed the face of the world we live in, enhancing the potential of productivity, cultural creativity and communication. But at the same time weakened the authority and interpersonal ties of social organizations. In such a “mobile space, compression time ”, the tempo of a sudden acceleration, interpersonal interaction abstraction, society