Petra Jedličková: Summary
Summary of the Literature !
CASTELLS, Manuel. The information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. I, The rise of the network society. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 2nd Ed. 594 p. ISBN: 0-63122140-9. o hereafter CASTELLS1
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CASTELLS, Manuel. The information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. II, The power of identity. Malden: Blackwell, 1997. 461 p. ISBN: 1-55786-874-3. o hereafter CASTELLS2
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CASTELLS, Manuel. The information age: Economy, society and culture. Vol. III, End of Millenium. Malden: Blackwell, 2000. 2nd Ed. 448 p. ISBN: 0-631-22139-5. o hereafter CASTELLS3
Prologue: the Net and the Self in CASTELLS1 (p. 1-27) Conclusion: the Network Society in CASTELLS1 (p. 500-509) In the introduction to his trilogy, Manuel Castells emphasises significant historical events in order to demonstrate their interlinks and interdependency: technological revolution, restructuring of capitalism, decline of labour movements on the one side and the rise of individualistic issue-oriented politics on the other, rise of Asian Pacific, fall of communist block in Europe and Russia, and resurrected religiosity. Based on this historical intro he shows the growing importance of identity1 in a globalised world. In his own words “[i]n a world of global flows of wealth, power, and images, the search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed, becomes the fundamental source of social meaning. This is not a new trend … [but now] identity is becoming the main and sometimes the only source of meaning. … People … organize their meaning not around what they do but on the basis of what they are, or believe they are. Global networks … selectively switch on and off individuals, groups, regions, and even countries, according to their relevance in fulfilling the goals processed in the network. …Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self.”2 In the following paragraphs he introduces twisted relationship between technology, society, and history. He claims that neither technology determines society nor does society script the course of technological change3. Castells introduces several historical examples of interaction between history, society and technologies: a birth of the Internet, increase and decrease of Chinese technological innovation and domination over the rest of the world, inability of Soviet statism4 to master ICT, and Japanese delayed but even faster progression in advanced technologies. Based on this historical evidence, Castells concludes that “… the role of the state, by either stalling, unleashing, or leading technological innovation, is a decisive factor in the overall process, as it expresses and organizes the social and cultural forces that dominate given space and time.”5 In the first 1 Castells understands by identity „the process by which a social actor recognizes itself and constructs meaning primarily on the basis of a given cultural attribute or set of attributes, to the exclusion of a broader reference to other social structures. “ (CASTELLS1, p. 22) 2 Castells (2000a: 3). 3 Ibid. p. 5. 4 Statism, in Castells´s own definition, is one two predominant modes of production of the 20th century, the second one is the capitalism. While capitalism is oriented toward profit-maximizing, statism focuses on powermaximizing. 5 Ibid. p. 12.
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
chapter of this volume (see chapter 1 in CASTELLS1) he elaborates this complexity of the development of technologies in socio-historical frame. In the Prologue, Castells explains analytical distinction between the notions of “information society”, “informational society”, “network society”, and “information age”. By using the expression information society one emphasises the role of information in the society, and it is evident, that information has always been critical in all societies across centuries. Therefore, the term informational society is adequate, since it “indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing, and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period.”6 In his inquiry, Manuel Castells often uses an expression “network society” as an equivalent of the society of the Information Age which organizes its dominant functions and processes around intertwined networks7. In his analyses in the first volume of the trilogy, Castells links up fundamental features of the network society: networks are appropriate instruments for a capitalist economy based on innovation, globalization, and decentralized concentration, therefore, the new economy is organized around global networks of management, capital, and information. Castells describes increasing interdependency of financial capital and industrial capital (high technology); financial capital relies on knowledge and information generated and enhanced by ICT, thus technology and information are decisive tools in generating profits. On the other hand, high technology producers and developers depend on financial resources. The network society is also characterized by diversity in what we are used to call “labour force”. Diffusion of ICT will displace workers and eliminate certain types of jobs, but certainly not it will result in mass unemployment8. “Labor loses its collective identity, becomes increasingly individualised in its capacities, in its working conditions, and in its interests and projects”9. Transformation toward network society affects culture and power. Because information and communication circulate through media system, politics is taking place in the space of media, thus organization and goals of the political processes, political actors, and political institutions are influenced by the framing of the politics in the media10. These are the critical components of the new society, the network society. While this terminology follows the same pattern as the terminology we use for industrial society, the distinction between industry and industrial, the overall title of his trilogy rather turns aside this logic. As Manuel Castells himself explains, the title The Information Age is user-friendly, clear for readers, worded in a fashion of an established reference to the topic11 covering its complexity as it does an expression “Steam Age” for the preceding industrial society.
6
Ibid. p. 21, footnote. Ibid. p. 500. 8 This argument is elaborated in the general conclusion of the Castells´s trilogy: Conclusion: Making Sense of our World in CASTELLS3 (p. 366-391). 9 Ibid. p. 506. 10 For comprehensive description see the summary of the Chapter 5 in CASTELLS1: The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of Interactive Networks (p. 355-406). 11 Ibid. p. 21, footnote. 7
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
Chapter 1 in CASTELLS1: The Information Technology Revolution (p. 28-76) In this introductory chapter Castells explains the nature of the information technology revolution. The revolutionary aspect is by him seen in the interactivity between ICT and the society, where new information technologies are not simply tools to be applied, but processes to be developed. Knowledge and information are not becoming more important than in the past, but knowledge and information are now applied to generate knowledge, and information processing devices. Pervasiveness of ICT induces on one hand its penetration without geographical limits; on the other hand differential timing in access to the power of these technologies for individuals, groups, regions, and states is a critical source of inequality in our society. The true core of information technology revolution lies in the major technological breakthroughs: the transistor (invented in 1947) and the microprocessor (1971), the development of a software to operate microcomputers, and increasing memory and processing capacity which shifted computer world from centralized data storage and processing to networked, interactive power-sharing12. The most revolutionary invention in the technological revolution was the creation of the Internet, which was based on the convergence of electronic technologies, such as transmission devices and protocols (TCP/IP) and switching and routing architectures (ATM). Exhaustive socio-historical overview of inventions, developments and trends in the information technologies leads Castells to regard information technology revolution, as revolution borned in 1970s since it is an era of essential discoveries in information technology: the microprocessor, the microcomputer, Microsoft OS, a digital switching, an optic fibre, VCR machines, and computer network ARPANET together with TCP/IP protocol, a basis for future Internet. Therefore, Castells raises a question, why these discoveries were clustered in the 1970s and predominantly in the United States. His colourful description of models, actors, and sites of the information technology revolution leads him to the conclusion, that: 1) “the development of the information technology revolution contributed to the formation of the milieux of innovation where discoveries and applications would interact, and be tested, in a recurrent process of trial and error, of learning by doing; these milieux required … the spatial concentration of research centres, higher-education institutions, advanced-technology companies, a network of ancillary suppliers of goods and services, and business networks of venture capital to finance start-ups; [2)] once a milieu is consolidated … it tends to generate its own dynamics, and to attract knowledge, investment, and talent from around the world.”13 In short, crucial ingredients in the development of information technology revolution are: clustering of scientific/technical knowledge, and its ability to generate synergy which is directly related to industrial production and commercial applications. However, commercial interests, commutation of knowledge and experience, and innovative enthusiasts were not the only players; it was mainly generous direct or indirect founding of the governments, which initiated the information technology revolution. Fact that the main centres of innovation are large old metropolitan areas demystifies the notion of placelessness of innovation in the Information Age14. Castells then introduces major features that constitute the information technology paradigm: 1) technologies are acting on information, not just that information are acting on technologies; 2) effects of new technologies are pervasive; 3) networking logic of systems based on these technologies leads to their flexibility, adaptability and versatility, but at the same time, the penalty for being outside the network increases with the network’s growth; 4) flexibility, which could be a liberation force, but also repressive tendency; and 5) a growing convergence of specific technologies into a highly integrated system (as a model is mentioned convergence between biological engineering and microelectronics). 12 13 14
Ibid. p. 43. Ibid. p. 65. Ibid. p. 67.
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
Chapter 5 in CASTELLS1: The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of Interactive Networks (p. 355-406) Significant portion of his trilogy Manuel Castells dedicates to the developments of modalities of human communication and their socio-historical reflexions. In this chapter he argues, that the widespread of the printing press “separated written communication from the audiovisual system of symbols and perceptions”15. Than the tension between “noble”, printed culture and a sensorial, nonreflective communication, underlines furious critique of mass media, especially television16. For Castells TV represents the end of Gutenberg Galaxy17 and a rise of McLuhan Galaxy, that is, a system dominated by “inferior” audiovisual communication. Since the content and format of messages emitted from few centralized senders18 to an audience of millions of receivers was tailored to a homogenous mass, a mass culture has been raised. However, Castells later in this chapter questions the nature of “massiveness” in this culture, since it is not based on onway communication model. Indeed, the notion of mass media refers rather to a technological system (characterized among others by accumulation and centralization of power around oligopolies), since the audience interact with TV through individual interpretation of media products, through collective interpretation of media, and through collective political action19. Process of formation of a hypertext and meta-languages in 1990s which, for the first time in history, integrated into the same system the written, oral, and audiovisual contents, prepared the formation of multimedia, interactive systems of communication. The new media determine a segmented, differentiated audience that, although massive in terms of quantity, is no longer a mass audience in terms of simultaneity and uniformity of the message it receives20. Thus Castells concludes that “we are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed”21. Key aspects of the computer-mediated communication, which shapes nowadays media culture, are being discussed in the last part of the chapter: unequal arrival time of societies into the Internet22, development of virtual communities, communication patterns, and convergence of previously separated domains of activity. Castells comes to the conclusion that multimedia support a socio-cultural patterns characterized by a) widespread social and cultural differentiation, b) increasing social stratification among users, c) integration of all messages in a common cognitive pattern and d) ending distinction between audiovisual and printed media, popular and learned culture, entertainment and information, education and persuasion23. Multimedia make virtuality our reality24, where “reality itself … is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, … in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience”25.
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Castells (2000a: 356). Ibid. p. 356. 17 Ibid. p. 360. 18 Later in this chapter Castells describes the level and consequences of concentration and interlinkages of world media groups. 19 Ibid. p. 363. 20 Ibid. p. 368. 21 Ibid. p. 370. 22 Ibid. p. 382. 23 Ibid. p. 401-403. 24 Ibid. p. 403. 25 Ibid. p. 404. 16
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
Chapter 6 in CASTELL2: Informational Politics and the Crisis of Democracy (p. 307-353) Conclusion: Social Change in the Network Society (p. 354-362) Manuel Castells argues that new information technologies induces new rules of the game that, in the context of social, cultural, and political transformations as presented in his trilogy, dramatically affect the substance of politics26. Political communication and information are essentially captured in the space of the electronic media, although concerning the actual impact of messages, the interaction between the media and their audience is a two-way process as it was argued in above chapter. However, electronic media, i.e. radio, TV, newspapers and Internet, have become privileged space of politics27. It doesn’t mean that all politics can be reduced to images, texts and sounds communicated via media, but without media, there is no chance of winning or exercising power. “… Without an active presence in the media, political proposals or candidates do not stand a chance of gathering broad support. … Politics is fundamentally framed, in its substance, organization, process and leadership, by the inherent logic of the media system, particularly by the new electronic media.28” This process impacts not only elections, but political organization, decision-making, and governance29. The outcome of the twisted interconnection between media, politics, and the electorate, an information politics as Castells calls this phenomenon, could be characterized by dominance of television leading to simplification, personalization, and negativism of messages, computerized political marketing linked in real-time with the media system and navigated by instant, strategic polling30, professional advertising and image-making, character assassination as political strategy, and others. With the help of presented evidence and examples Castells shows, how current political systems become challenged by their own dependency on flows of information, a fundamental source of ongoing crisis of democracy in the Information Age. Castells explanation how media have become a space of politics goes as follows: media are the most credible source of news. If the decision-makers and the others intend to present their programmes, they simply have to stage the person or the message in the media. Since we live in a world which is increasingly saturated by information, the most effective messages are the most simple ones, presented in dichotomous terms: good and bad. News media, both state and private, depend on audience ratings in competition with entertainment shows and sport events, and, in the same time, news have to reach and keep possible highest credibility which can only be ensured by their detachment from politics31. Therefore, news media require drama, a race with its winners and losers, concentration on negative messages as the ones which are much more likely to be retained, and to influence political opinion32, and personalization of events. Another interesting link between media and politics presents the politics of scandal. Castells argues that as media become ground for power struggles on one hand, and media politics is increasingly expensive operation on the other, political actors - in order to cover necessary expenses – have to search for financial support outside legal possibilities33. This is how corruption becomes widespread. But it is unlikely that use and abuse of power for personal benefit is at its highpoint as something characteristic for informational politics, it is rather a feature which always was here. But what really matters is the “use of scandal politics in and by the media” (flourishing thanks to 26
Castells (1997: 311). Ibid. p. 311. 28 Ibid. p. 317. 29 Ibid. p. 312. 30 Political messages, strategies and personas are (re)designed according to outcomes from public polls and feed-back systems. 31 Ibid. p. 321. 32 Ibid. p. 322. 33 Ibid. p. 333-342. 27
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
personalization of politics focusing attention on leaders and their character) “as the fundamental weapon utilized by political actors, business interests, and social groups to fight one another”34. Reconstruction of democracy and forming of informational politics leads to the growing fragmentation of the political system. This fragmentation is a consequence of the blurring of the party system based on left-right dichotomy on one side, and the rise of single-issue mobilizations, localism, referendum politics, and, above all, ad hoc support for personalized leadership on the other35. For the future of informational politics three trends are particularly relevant: 1) re-creation of the local state in terms of increased citizen participation in local government made possible by new technologies, 2) use of ICT to enhance political participation and horizontal communication among citizens, and empowerment of grassroots groups (with all its positives and negatives: elimination of the manipulation via media versus increase of inequality in the society), and 3) development of issue-oriented political mobilization around non-political causes, such as humanitarian, feminist or environmental issues. As Castells himself concludes, “power is no longer concentrated in institutions (the state), organizations (capitalist firms), or symbolic controllers (corporate media, churches)“, … “[t]he new power lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation around which societies organize their institutions, and people build their lives, and decide their behaviour. The sites of this power are people’s minds.”36
Conclusion: Making Sense of our World in CASTELLS3 (p. 366-391) Chapter 4 in CASTELLS2: The End of Patriarchalism: Social Movements, Family, and Sexuality in the Information Age. Parts “The crisis of the Patriarchal Family”, “Women at Work”, and “Family, Sexuality, and Personality in the Crisis of Patriarchalism” (p. 134-175 and 220-242) The Information Age originated in the three independent processes which coincidently appeared around late 1960s and mid 1970s: 1) the information technology revolution; 2) the economic crisis of both capitalism and statism, and their subsequent restructuring; and 3) the rise of cultural and social movements, such as libertarianism, human rights, feminism, and environmentalism. The interaction between these processes and its consequences constituted a new social structure, the network society; a new economy, the information/global economy; and a new culture, the culture of real virtuality37. A new society, the network society, emerges when and if a structural transformation can be observed in the relationships of production, power, and experience38. As concerns relationships of production, Castells analyses redefinition of labour through the three-layered process of profit-appreciating. Castells distinguishes between generic labour versus self-programmed labour, while the critical quality in distinguishing these two kinds of labour is education, that is, ability to “constantly redefine the necessary skills for a given task, and to access the sources for learning these skills”39. The profit appreciation, the capitalists, could be traced under three layers, while only the third one specifically refers to the Information Age: 1) the holders of property rights, 2) the managerial class, and 3) global financial markets, which thanks to its information and communication abilities scans entire planet for investment possibilities, brinks capital into constant movement, and merges it.
34 35 36 37 38 39
Ibid. p. 341. Ibid. p. 349. CASTELLS2: Conclusion: Social Change in the Network Society. p. 359. Castells (2000: 367). Ibid. p. 371. Ibid. p. 372.
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
These developments have profound impact on social class relationships. Castells distinguishes between three different approaches to the meaning and nature of these impacts: social inequality, social exclusion, and division between producers and appreciators of their work. The first approach leads to the conclusion, that new system is characterized by increasing social inequality and polarization, as a consequence of fundamental difference between generic and self-programmed labour, the individualization of labour weakening its collectivism, and the demise of welfare state and removing of the safety net for people who cannot be individually well off40. As concerns the second approach, Castells emphasises the consequences of the social exclusion; when generic labour become unstable on the labour market, circulating in occasional jobs with high level of discontinuity, this evidently leads to a higher level of incidence of major crises in their private life, which might induce downward spiral of social exclusion. Castells argues that this process of social exclusion does not only affect the “truly disadvantaged”, but those individuals and social categories that cannot follow the constant updating of skills. A third way of understanding class relationships is concerned with who the producers are and who appreciates the products of their labour. Castells answers that the new “producers of informational capitalism are those knowledge generators and information processors whose contribution is most valuable to the firm, the region, and the national economy”41. Since the innovation doesn’t happen in isolation, this category represents producers unit made up of cooperation between managers, professionals, and technicians. Definition of who appropriates a share of these “collective workers “ work is even more complicated, because segmentation of labour, individualization of work, and diffusion of capital in the circuits of global finance have jointly induced the gradual fading away of the class structure of precedent industrial society. However, exploitation of labour and powerful social conflicts still exist. The main transformation of power relations concerns the crisis of the nation-state as a sovereign entity, and the related crisis of political democracy. “Cultural battles are power battles of the Information Age. They are primarily fought in and by the media, but the media are not the power holders. Power, as the capacity to impose behaviour, lies in the networks of information exchange and symbol manipulation, which relate social actors, institutions, and cultural movements, through icons, spokespersons, and intellectual amplifiers”42. The third feature of the network society, the transformation of relationships of experience revolves primarily around the crisis of patriarchalism, at the root of a profound redefinition of family, gender relationships, sexuality, and, thus, personality43. The patriarchal family, the cornerstone of patriarchalism being a founding structure of all contemporary societies, is challenged by the inseparably related processes of the transformation of women’s work and the transformation of women’s consciousness44. Driving forces behind these processes are technological revolution, transformation of the economy, labour market and opening of educational opportunities to women, developments in biology, pharmacology, and medicine that allowed a growing control over the timing and frequency of child bearing, and women’s and feminist movements45. Gay and lesbian liberation movements contributed to the crisis of the dominant patriarchal model as well. Patriarchal family is in deep crisis while it can only survive under the protection of authoritarian states or religious fundamentalism. However, new family and partnership arrangements are still struggling against inertia, prejudices, and biases in the society.
40 41 42 43 44 45
Ibid. p. 375. Ibid. p. 376. Ibid. p. 379. Ibid. p. 379. Castells (1997: 134-135). Ibid. p. 135-136.
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Petra Jedličková: Summary
At the end of his trilogy, Manuel Castells evaluates the most important challenges of the new society. As he does many times in his analyses, he questions the positive outcomes of the genetic engineering, mainly its ability to manipulate living matter, own “copyright” of the DNA codes, especially if applicable regulations are out-to-date, weak, or missing. Castells also stresses the ongoing segmentation of the planet connected with the growing social exclusion. He warns of another possible reaction to the social exclusion: the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded46. In fact, Manuel Castells, in the year of 2000, when developing this argument, describes exactly what happened in the U.S. September 11th, 2001. When he talks about security issues concerning the Information Age, he warns of the new forms of warfare that will be used by “individuals, organizations, and states, strong in their convictions, weak in their military means, but able to access new technologies of destruction, as well as find the vulnerable spots of our societies”47. Castells explains what these vulnerable spots could be: “…the infrastructure of our everyday life, from energy to transportation to water supply, [which] has become so complex, and so intertwined, that its vulnerability has increased exponentially.”48 While new technologies help to enhance our security systems, they also make our daily life more exposed. Castells´s trilogy devoted to process of global social change in the new age of information should be used by its readers as a means for understanding dynamics of our world. It is the outcome of the 12 years of research effort to elaborate an empirically grounded, cross-cultural (Castells conducted research in the USA, Latin America, Asia, and Europe), sociological theory of the Information Age. His substantial contribution to the academic cross-disciplinary debates leaves an open challenge: how will we cope with “an extraordinary gap between our technological overdevelopment and our social underdevelopment”49?
46 47 48 49
Castells (2000: 386). Ibid. p. 387. Ibid. p. 387. Ibid. p. 390.
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