10 Big Pieces: Castells, The Rise of the Network Society

The Rise of the Network Society (2^nd ed.)
Manuel Castells
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Oxford, UK 2000

Summary

Castells argues that “Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the self.” (emphasis in original, 3) This opposition is the product of a “fundamental split between abstract, universal instrumentalism, and historically rooted, particularistic identities. (3)

This is because “elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.” “The more a society is democratic in its institutions, the more the elites have to become clearly distinct from the populace, so avoiding the excessive penetration of political representatives into the inner world of strategic decisionmaking.” (446) Phrased another way, “capital is global. As a rule, labor is local.” (506)

In proposing that a multitude of social and political changes are linked by one common thread, and seeking to examine that thread, “we must treat technology seriously, using it as the point of departure of this inquiry; we need to locate the process of revolutionary technological change in the social context in which it takes place and by which it is being shaped; and we should keep in mind that the search for identity is as powerful as techno-economic change in charting the new history.” (4)

Even more, “technology is society, and society cannot be understood or represented without its technological tools.” “Yet, if society does not determine technology, it can, mainly through the state, suffocate its development. Or alternatively, again mainly by state intervention, it can embark on an accelerated process of technological modernization able to change the fate of economies, military power and social well-being in a few years.” (5)

The informational economy “is characterized by its specific culture and institutions,” but these have arisen “in very different cultural/national contexts.” Cultures “manifest themselves fundamentally through their embeddedness in institutions and organizations,” and the culture that matters for a given economic system is “the one that materializes in organizational logics,” the “ideational bases for institutionalized authority relations.”

Thus, he argues that “the rise of the informational, global economy is characterized by the development of a new organizational logic which is related to the current process of technological change, but not dependent upon it. It is the convergence and interaction between a new technological paradigm and a new organizational logic that constitutes the historical foundation of the informational economy.” (163-4)

Castells distinguishes bureaucracy, the organizational logic of the industrial era, from the network, that of the new era. The network enterprise is “that specific form of enterprise whose system of means is constituted by the intersection of segments of autonomous systems of goals,” and its performance depends on “two fundamental attributes of the network: its connectedness, that is, ist structural ability to facilitate noise-free communication between its components; and its consistency, that is, the extent to which there is a sharing of interests between the network’s goals and the goals of its components.” (emphasis in original, 187)

He describes a “culture of real virtuality,” in which “we are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed.” (emphasis in original, 370) This is a hallmark of an era in which “history is just beginning, if by history we understand the moment when, after millenniums of a prehistoric battle with nature, first to survive, then to conquer it, our species has reached the level of knowledge and social organization that will allow us to live in a predominantly social world.” (508-9)

Critique and Analysis

Attempting a coherent hundred-word critique of Castell’s magisterial effort is beyond even my level of chutzpah. My interests in his work may lay more with the second volume, The Power of Identity; however, I have used the first volume as proxy for the trilogy to manage the sheer weight of the work.

It is also hard to separate Castells’ ideas from Tom Friedman’s popularization of them, especially in a short work. However, I am currently unconvinced that framing identity as a local-cultural phenomenon in opposition to the global-cultural network is quite right. Certainly the local and the network are in opposition at some levels. Yet, some of the most effective uses of the network globally have been by opponents of Western media/political culture: Al Quaeda and Al Jazeera spring to mind.

Similarly, my interests lie at the farthest reaches of network culture, in the places where the network enables the construction of identity by freeing it from the limitations of chance, matter and location (though emphatically not from embodiment, a place where I part ways with many transhumanists).

I offer those not as formed critiques, but as issues for further inquiry.

Utility

Castells’ trilogy documents the state of socio-technical change at the turn of the millennium, with a deep analysis across economics, politics, architecture, information technology and culture. This is a solid underpinning for inquiry into the nature of socio-technical change over the next 25 years, the focus of my efforts in modeling anticipatory governance of emerging technologies.

His notion of organizational logics is rich for simulation purposes: it closely parallels Bogost’s notion of procedural rhetoric, suggesting that the use of games to model changes in the network society is natural, and likely rich in results.

Again, as with many of the works on the list, the question is raised of how one might use a network to build a game to model networks. Unlike Sclove and Gee, who suggest specific rule-sets, Castells is strong in suggesting evaluation criteria, for measuring network success. As this list neglects evaluation, an unfortunate and now glaring oversight, using Castells to raise the question points to needed work in filling that gap.