Abstract
Social modernisation processes have led to immense processes of change at all levels of social life. The economy, politics, education, etc. are affected as overall systems, as are the institutions and organisations that operate within them. Stehr (2000, p. 17) speaks of the fact that we are in a "transitional stage between two social formations", referring to the transition from the "industrial society" to the "knowledge society", in which knowledge is constitutive for the social formation. The growing importance of the resource "knowledge" is accompanied by processes of advancing social differentiation. As different as the social science analyses of the formation of society and the theoretical constructs derived from them may be (cf. e.g. Beck 1986, Castells 2001, Gross 1994, Schulze 1993), the development of technology, especially information and communication technologies (hereafter: new media), is seen as an important motor of the processes of social change. Castells (2001) in particular has impressively elaborated the social, cultural and economic significance of the new media in his study on the network society.
