Editorial: Information Polity: an international journal for the information age

Recent data made available to me confirms the gathering strength of Information Polity amongst academics and professionals worldwide. Of particular significance for a journal that sets out to be international in its outreach and content is the interest to be found in the journal in the USA, India, Canada, China as well as in the UK and many other European countries. Such reach will add weight to our application to Thomson/Reuters early next year for indexation into the ISI – the international science index. Following indexation we will then be in a position to announce the official ‘impact factor’ being achieved by IP which, as many readers will be aware, is becoming an adjunct to academic publication deemed to be of the highest importance. The papers in this edition provide further testament to the international standing of Information Polity. This edition contains five papers, authored by academics from five different countries: China, Costa Rica, Slovenia, Norway, and Turkey. In the first of these Weibing Xiao argues that the expansion of ‘information pathways’ in China, brought about by the widespread and growing adoption of new media, has brought the Chinese government into more receptive mode in terms of the adoption and acceptance of ‘freedom of information’. The necessity of releasing information during physical disasters and social and political crises has broadened to a more general acceptance that much more information can and should be made available to Chinese citizens. Citing a number of Confucian aphorisms such as ‘the common people may be made to follow, but may not be made to know’, Weibing Xiao explains the long history of State secrecy in China as a consequence of the influence of the greatest of Chinese philosophers. The movement towards Freedom of Information sat in stark opposition to a philosophical conviction that the common people are best protected from learning about issues of governance including crises. Now in the era of new media uptake, as Weibing Xiao explains, the release of information hitherto kept secret works as a necessary social corrective to what emerges as forms of ‘rumour’. Rumour, it is now argued, is potentially far more damaging to governance of the nation State than more open flows of information. Additionally, and in a more general sense, flows of information are more developed in China now both amongst citizens and between them and government. Thus there is an environment in China that is moving strongly towards the release of information rather than its secretive capture and management. In the second paper presented here Fuat Alican, based in Costa Rica, writes about the possible contribution of information and communications technologies to peace. He does so by taking a case study approach to the region of South East Turkey. As with the first paper, here we have modern media development being attached to high level analysis of a major theme, in this case peace. Fuat Alican explains that whilst Turkey is gradually making progress towards joining the European Union, nonetheless the southeastern region of the country remains underdeveloped when compared to other regions of Turkey. Furthermore, he reveals, this area is characterised by widespread social unrest, a condition believed to be in large measure a consequence of the relative deprivation of this largely Kurdish region.