This book is a tool for those to get a better understanding and scope for reflection as David Bell introduces the key concepts and ideas of cultures of cyberspace, further discussing the works of Castells and Haraway in detail, and outlining the development of cyberculture studies as a field.
Every concept is substantiated for further reading, criticized and appraised with the authors own reflection. Thus, allows the reader also to reflect.
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Duke University Press. Fharhan Dacula. Alyne Costa. Timothy Morton. Davis Hill. Bruno Jankovic. Pastor Ignacio Lozano Higa. Cadu Mello. Bogdan C. Viviane Nogueira. Valentina Uribe Restrepo. Muhammad Adek. Daniel Tapia. Nick Axel - Transcending the Elements of Circumstance.
Nick Axel. Lainnya Dari Subin John Mathew. Subin John Mathew. James Liturgy as Unifying and Ecumenical Worship. Populer di Science. Ka Sh. Naimah Lindao. Abigail Laus. Queciana Walton. Chun-hsiung Chen. John Byde. Tonatiuh Hernandez Larios. Yet, Castells is conspicuously silent on the supplier of his research labour force, namely, the university, an institution that Bell placed at the centre of the post-industrial revolution. I shall return to the significance of these differences in the course of this review.
The plot structure of the pages under review is framed in terms of a dialectic that encapsulates 'informationalism,' which Castells defines as capitalism's final frontier. Volumes 1 and 2 of the trilogy usefully separate the 'thesis' and 'antithesis' -- 'network' versus 'identity' -- while Volume 3 offers less a resolution than a recapitulation and update of this tension.
The prehistory of the dialectic consists of the efforts taken by the major nation-states at the height of the Cold War to increase their surveillance and military capabilities. They constructed vast electronic information and communication networks, which with the decline of superpower hostilities have unwittingly provided the means to enable large corporations and, increasingly, special interest groups and private individuals to destabilize and even dismantle both state power and the norms of civil society.
The breakdown of the Roman Empire into feudal fiefdoms and free cities comes to mind as a historical precedent. However, this electronic subversion of the social order has exacted its own toll from the subversives. Basically, the network mentality strips both firms and individuals of any secure sense of identity. Thus, we see the decline of career employment and the conversion of corporations to investment companies.
Nothing can get done unless you become a node in a network, but once the job is done, new jobs force the nodes into new network configurations. Both human and corporate life thus come to defined by the 'project'.
The only way to check this reduced sense of identity is to extend the life of the project indefinitely, which serves to revive the fortunes of social movements that are fueled by a non-negotiable sense of resistance or 'identity politics'. The various fundamentalisms, insurgencies, and lifestyles that pepper the political landscape of our times take full advantage of the network's flexible infrastructure to combat their oppressors, both real and virtual.
But unlike culture-based resistance to global capitalism in the 19th century, these movements do not aim for territorial sovereignty backed by a strong state. Such a prospect is seen as undesirable as a future of force-fed McDonaldization.
The communities defined by identity politics exist in virtual space and online time. Their presence is felt mainly in their ability to shape the code through which all network transactions occur. For, whereas the informational capitalists treat the network in purely strategic and instrumental terms, the new social movements rely on the network for their sense of solidarity and hence may turn out to be the gatekeepers of the network's democratic potential.
This brings us to the end of Volume 2. Readers of Castells's last major work, The Informational City , may justifiably wonder what The Network Society adds beyond some updating of sources. However, The Power of Identity does break new ground. Castells's deisgnation of the Mexican Zapatistas as an 'informational guerilla movement' Vol. McNaughten and J. Urry , Contested Natures , After all, the Zapatista strategy of winning the war of global public opinion by the internet -- and that victory affecting the outcome of the flesh-and-blood war at home -- goes a good way toward remediating Jean Baudrillard's remarks about the 'simulated' character of the Persian Gulf War.
But a more significant feature of this volume is Castells's remarkably even-handed treatment of 'new social movements'. For such social theorists du jour as Ulrich Beck, these movements constitute the locally fragmented successors of world socialism. In contrast, Castells readily includes fundamentalist Islam and Christianity in their number, thereby complicating the political implications of the resistance to global informationalism.
Instead of reducing fundamentalism to traditionalism, Castells , to his credit, highlights how the tools of the putative oppressors can be used for liberatory ends. However, the ease with which Castells removes the distinctly ideological character of these movements from his analysis -- by defining them in terms of their common relationship to information technology -- suggests a level of detachment that may have dulled his political sensibility.
This point turns out to have a special poignancy, given Castells's own recent efforts at advising policymakers. Having read the first two volumes of The Information Age six months before the third, I did not expect Castells to conclude the trilogy on a downbeat note.
Rather, I supposed that he would continue to sustain the dialectic between network and identity, perhaps blandly predicting that pockets of resistance would thrive in the midst of global capital expansion. However, any whiff of 'have your cake and eat it' is quickly dispelled in the Introduction to End of Millennium. Here Castells makes clear that he originally underestimated the ability of a globally networked criminal economy to pick up the slack left by a downsized and debilitated system of nation-states.
The breakdown of law and order in the former Soviet Union is his personal case in point, which returns us to the advice that Castells and his colleagues gave Yeltsin in Unfortunately, this crucial point for understanding the trilogy's normative orientation is buried in Chapter 3, footnote Here we learn that Castells told Yeltsin that if legal and other institutional safeguards were not first put in place, a privatized economy would return Russia to a veritable state of nature.
But because Yeltsin's economic advisors seemed to associate such safeguards with a continuation of the dreaded socialist regime, they unintentionally opened the door to the mafia culture that currently holds Russia in its grip, typically with help from abroad.
And this may be only the beginning. Much of Volume 3 is spent conjuring up the intriguing, albeit horrific, spectre of information technology enabling the coordination of criminal cartels that shadow, penetrate and ultimately elude the regulation of capital flows, to which everything else is becoming connected.
The resulting picture looks very much like the Manichaean struggle between the Forces of Good and Evil that have framed so many action-hero plots since the Great Depression. The likes of Batman rarely battled an alternative regime, but rather an anti-regime that thrived on disorder. However, the 21st century Batperson will need to be more than a hacker with extraordinary cryptographic and computational skills; he or she will also require considerable political skills, since the decline of welfare provision will remove any overriding reason for those left behind by the informational revolution to support existing governments.
This emerging 'fourth world', in Castells's terms, is the wild card that holds the fate of the next century.
I find this picture quite compelling, but it would be easy to see how a reader of just The Network Society could be left with the impression that Castells endorses the illusory neoliberal future that Yeltsin's advisors embraced. For, while Castells says early on Vol. Moreover, since Castells manages to tie changes in virtually every dimension of social life -- from intimate relations to financial flows - - to the innovation and diffusion of information technology, his self-styled 'circumspection' Vol.
Indeed, he even claims that the specific origins of the latest wave of the IT revolution in Silicon Valley, California, has anchored the revolution's subsequent development Vol. This last point reveals the rhetorical bind in which Castells finds himself. Whereas most forms of technological determinism support the planning impulse, innovations in microprocessing have tended to subvert it. This is probably the clearest infrastructural change that has occurred since The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
The benchmark figure here is Jean-Francois Lyotard. In The Postmodern Condition , Lyotard reversed Bell's generally Keynesian economic vision, which had situated computers in an increasingly observant administrative state designed to curb the excesses of advanced capitalism.
In contrast, Lyotard presented such panoptical surveillance as disruptive of what he envisaged as knowledge's naturally fragmented and fluctuating state. Indeed, the dominant image of this revised 'knowledge society' soon became the market, or a 'parallel distributing processing unit', to quote the corresponding model of the brain. Thus, computers are themselves envisioned as many personal terminals connected together in a network rather than all to one mainframe generator.
Indeed, Lyotard predicted that even computer languages would be valued less for their algorithmic powers than for the conceptual spaces left open by their 'incompleteness' or 'undecidability'. The significance that Castells assigns to Silicon Valley in his narrative is not unreasonably seen as supplying the material substratum for the conceptual space originally charted by Lyotard. But if Castells pays lip service to Bell, he is completely silent about Lyotard.
Indeed, these omissions are deliberate, as Castells explains at the very start of The Network Society that he wishes to return to the phenomenon of informationalism without writing a 'book about books' that would wrestle with all the ideologues who have mediated the public's understanding of the emerging information age.
No doubt some readers will welcome Castells's independent- mindedness, while others such as myself regret that he did not engage more directly with what Alvin Gouldner called 'the dialectic of ideology and technology'. The most immediately striking feature of Castells's decision is the fact that he was in a position to make it. This testifies not only to his own eminence but, of equal importance, to the resources at his disposal that allow him to add analytic and synthetic value to the empirical work of others.
In the grand 19th century tradition of social theory, Castells's own output consists largely of summarizing, rearranging, and labelling large bodies of research. Castells's advantage over his classical forebears is that much of the original work he cites was done by his own students and colleagues, which presumably permits him some first-hand knowledge of how the data is collected and reported.
In that sense, Castells literally has a better sense of what he is talking about than Marx, Weber and Durkheim, who went on little more than intuition when deciding whether to trust the testimony of their sources. However, there is a cost to Castells's comprehensiveness that some may associate with the sin of hubris. Although Castells may be in a position to ignore prior theorists and confront informationalism 'in itself,' his readers may not enjoy that luxury.
Their views may be an alloy of ideology and fact, as far as Castells is concerned, but unless he takes that into account, his pristine vision of things is bound to be misinterpreted -- as it probably was by Yeltsin's advisors.
Castells's reliance on the concept of networks hardly helps matters here. Castells stresses informationalism's tendency to reduce social norms to a recognition that several parties may realize their goals by temporarily acting in a concerted fashion, which in turn defines a specific network Vol.
But stripped of tables and jargon, this sounds like the definition of normativity put forward by the Austrian school of economics which provides the intellectual foundation of contemporary neoliberalism.
Such Austrians as Friedrich von Hayek and Fritz Machlup drew a sharp distinction between dispersed and divided labour, the former varying across spacetime and the latter not. According to Austrian thinking, the idea that labour is optimally 'divided' makes sense only if the design of a factory is projected on society at large i.
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