WT16 – IT systems in the age of the Internet

In partnership with :

Province de Liège

Workshop presentation

Information has everywhere and always been one of the sources and instruments of power. And the nature of oral, written or electronic channels of information; the extent of flows of information that circulate from top to bottom, from bottom to top, horizontally or in networks, significantly structures the life of society as well as the organisation of the political scene or even the activity of businesses.

The information in our modern States has been inseparable from the invention of writing and then the spread of the printing press. Everything leads us to think that the arrival, just after the Second World War, and then the spread of the computer – which offers previously undreamt-of possibilities for information processing – and then recently the introduction and spread of the Internet represent an evolution whose importance is probably at least equal to that of writing and the printing press.

The circulation of images and information around the whole world presents political authorities and economic regulations with new challenges, such as the impossibility of controlling, on the country scale, the information that circulates, the putting into question of traditional rules of copyright laws and the protection of intellectual property, the emergence of more participative forms of debate stemming from the architecture of Internet in networks, the role of electronic money in exchanges, the emergence of new forms of governance, and the exploitation by organised crime and terrorists of the potentialities of new systems of information and communication, etc.

How, in the long run, are this emergence and this development transforming European society and Chinese society as well as their relations? This is the major question that the workshop will have to try to clarify.