FACT SHEET: The Network Society And Its Implications
[Compiled by Frances Forde Plude from The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 3 vols, by Manuel Castells, 2nd ed.]
“Toward the end of the second millennium of the Christian era several events of historical significance transformed the social landscape of human life… an (information) technological revolution … globally interdependent economies … social changes like the global decline of patriarchalism… networked social activism… search for identity.” Manuel Castells
Technology Aspects
1. The informational, global economy brings a new organizational logic (the network enterprise) with the new technological paradigm: flexible production, industrial cooperation, global and local social alliances.
2. The current technological transformation (2,700 years after the introduction of the alphabet) is of a similar historical dimension—the formation of a hypertext and a meta-language which integrates written, oral and audiovisual modalities of networked human and data communication.
3. The interactive “technologies of freedom”, cited by Pool, were initiated by governments: French Minitel and the American ARPANET.
4. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) networks present openness in the system that allows constant innovation and accessibility.
Economic Realities
1. Informationalism alters the managerial transformation of labor and production. “Myths” of post-industrialism and the service economy have morphed into the information society, changing employment structures.
2. New technologies allow small businesses to find market niches; this also empowers self-employment and a mixed employment status like flex-time.
3. Foreign direct investment drives globalization more than trade. Intra-firm trade represents the equivalent of about 32 percent of world trade.
4. Information technology replaces work that can be encoded in a programmable sequence, but it enhances work requiring analysis, decision-making, and reprogramming capabilities.
5. There is no systematic structural relationship between the diffusion of information technologies and the evolution of employment levels in the economy as a whole. The specific outcome of the interaction between information technology and employment is largely dependent upon macro-economic factors, economic strategies and sociopolitical contexts.
The Project of the Self
1. Legitimizing identity is introduced by dominant institutions (churches, etc.) and generates a civil society. Identity for resistance constructs forms of collective resistance. Project identity produces subjects (the desire of being an individual with a personal history).
2. Giddens says self-identity is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her/his biography (“the project of the self”). Nation-state, fundamentalisms, and activism by groups are all identity-related.
3. People globally resent the loss of control over their lives, nation and the environment. Examples: al-Qaeda and anti-globalization movements.
4. National identity is kept in the collective memory of groups.
5. One of the most powerful states in the history of humankind (the Soviet Union) was not able, after 74 years, to create a new national identity.
Social Change and Activism
1. In all societies, humankind has existed in, and acted through, a symbolic environment. A key feature of multimedia is that they capture most cultural expressions, in all their diversity.
2. Networks constitute the new social morphology; the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture.
3. Information is the key ingredient of our social organization; flows of messages and images between networks constitute the basic thread of our social structure. Social activism groups are empowered by the Net.
Institutional/Individual Adaptations
1. Time is a scarce resource. There are indications that, in the US, leisure time decreased by 37 percent between 1973 and 1994.
2. Today’s communication system radically transforms space and time, the fundamental dimensions of human life. The “space of flows” and “timeless time” are the material foundations of a new culture.