The Information Age: Economy, Society, and
Culture: Volume I, The Rise of the Network
Society, by Manuel
Castells. Blackwell, 1996
It is so sweeping, so fully researched, and yet, in parts, so
very personal, that this review can do no more than help you decide
whether you want to spend time struggling with an illuminating
but detailed work about the effects of networks and information
technology on modern society and the economy. The concepts are
important, no matter what your personal or political beliefs about
computers and networks and globalization.
He sees our societies polarized between the quest for personal
or collective identity as our culture and organizations and institutions
lose relevance because of the inexorable processes of the global
Net. By Net he does not only mean the Internet but a myriad of
"flows" between cities, regions, financial institutions,
entertainment complexes, consumers, and governments. Castells
alerts the reader that he is not approaching this in a nihilistic
or cynical way, and even after a careful reading of the 480 pages
of this first volume, it is hard to place him firmly on the political
spectrum, though he is explicit in his personal credo. He is multi-lingual
(Spanish by birth) and has taught or studied or consulted in many
countries (Brazil, France, Russia) and he speaks with authority
about new developments in China, the marginalization of Africa,
urban architecture, and the implications of Multimedia Gulch in
San Francisco.
Much of the book is a description of the globalization process,
how this affects all countries, even those left out of the process.
While he does not advocate large state-run technological projects,
he does assert the continued importance of the nation-state in
protecting its economic constituents, and he says, "the state,
not the innovative entrepreneur in his garage, both in America
and throughout the world, was the initiator of the Information
Technology Revolution." He also believes that the new media
producers may be the ones to make sense of all the forces he describes
in this book.
The most power, however, he ascribes to transaction flows, especially
of financial data tied to currency trading, but also other information
and interpersonal communications. He recognizes the importance
of all the so-called virtual communities that flourish and later
mutate or stagnate. These are a revolution "developing in
concentric waves, starting from the higher levels of education
and wealth, and probably unable to reach large segments of the
uneducated masses and poor countries." This kind of communication
is different from others in history, he asserts, it is one where
people's material/symbolic existence "is entirely captured,
fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make
believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through
which experience is communicated, but they become the experience."
This he calls Real Virtuality. The example he gives is the debate
between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown over traditional family values.
Quayle criticized the life style of a TV image. The program's
ratings went up, and the star, Candice Bergen, used the program
to talk back to the vice presidential candidate.
Castells introduces a more difficult concept toward the end of
the book, the Space of Flows as opposed to the Space of Places.
He presents some of the usual evidence about the compression or
shifting of time by new information technology as well as the
porosity in the idea of place. The advanced communications services
and information flows have resulted in both a concentration and
dispersal of command and control centers for these global forces.
He cites both the centrality of the financial axis of London,
New York, and Tokyo, while citing studies showing the increasing
importance of other regional capitals and the new "Edge Cities"
throughout the world. Links to the hinterlands are much fewer,
and workers will continue to be attracted to these centers of
activity, thus increasing the transportation and other urban support
problems that many of us tolerate every day. "Places do not
disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in
the network." Places cannot exist outside of these flows
of information, transactions, people, and goods.
Castells spends the last part of the book describing the lives
of the elites who inhabit and make use of these flows, as well
as the architecture of new buildings (the Barcelona airport, a
New York architecture firm) in this environment: "nudity:
so neutral, so pure, so diaphonous, that they do not pretend to
say anything."
In the new information society the dominant form of social time
is what he calls timeless time, "the annihilation and manipulation
of time by electronically managed global capital markets"
where trillions of dollars are moved each day and the control
of the central banks is diminished as the communications infrastructure
improves. Also, the hours in the work week for European and North
American workers has been dropping steeply, as well as the total
number of hours worked over the course of a lifetime, at the same
time that the biological longevity is increasing (except in Russia).
The reactions to this globalization, this seeming tyranny of flows
is manifested in many people's desires for places that are more
self-contained, that hark back to times of more stability and
tradition. Disney's neo-traditional Celebration, Florida, development
is a prime example. So, too, is the environmental movement, where
nature is reconstructed as an ideal cultural form. In the subsequent
volumes he describes many manifestations of the local and social
reactions to the information environment so thoroughly described
in this volume. The new sections may be similar to the themes
in Benjamin Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld and Robert Kaplan's The
Ends of the Earth, two other tomes for those of us tracking the
vectors of millenium fever. However, Castells' new works, like
McLuhan's before him, may be destined to be cited and explicated
by many, but read only by academics and those with a tolerance
for dense footnotes, graphs, and tables. If you don't have Attention
Deficit Disorder from too much web time, I recommend you request
a copy from your library or pick up a copy online or at a bookstore.
Book reviewed by Steve Cisler,
1997 (cisler@pobox.com) (The photo below is of Steve at the
1997 CTCNet conference)
As an undergraduate, I had a professor who taught in five different
academic departments. This renaissance man, Erich Heller, once
spent two weeks explaining the social and cultural history of
Europe implicit in ten lines of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies.
I remembered this broad sweeping scholarship when I finished the
first volume of The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.
It is a Magnum Opus, a first movement. Writers used to aspire
to the great American novel. Manuel Castells, a University of
California sociologist, has instead written a great global work
for the age of information. Blackwell has issued the first volume,
and the other two are coming out later in 1997.
Community Technology Center Review, January 1998
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