Manuel Castells: Trending quotes

“the Internet is the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age: the network.”

Manuel Castells

Opening, The Network is the Message, p. 1
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)

Age

“The Internet culture is characterized by four layer-structure: • The Techno-Meritocratic Culture • The Hacker Culture • The Virtual Communitarian Culture • The Entrepreneurial Culture”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 2, The Culture of the Internet, p. 37

“Internet use enhanced sociability both at a distance and in the local community.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 4, Virtual Communities or Network Society?, p. 122

Communication

“traditional media companies are not generating any profits from their Internet ventures.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 7, Multimedia and the Internet, p. 191

“The Internet is no longer a free realm, but neither has it fulfilled the Orwellian prophecy. It is a contested terrain, where the new, fundamental battle for freedom in the Information Age is being fought.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 6, Privacy and Liberty in Cyberspace, p. 171

Age , Freedom

“"Urban problems" are increasingly becoming a political issue as the socialization of the means of production is accompanied by the increasing socialization of the means of consumption or, if one prefers, from the moment collective facilities begin to play a strategic role in the structure and rhythms of everyday life.”

Manuel Castells

Source: Urban renewal and social conflict in Paris, 1972, p. 93

Life , Problem

“My main statement in that it does not really matter if you believe that this world, or any of its features, is new or not. My analysis stands by itself. This is our world, the world of the Information age. And this is my analysis of this world, which must be understood, used, judged, by itself, by its capacity, or incapacity, to identify and explain the phenomena that we observe and experience, regardless of its newness.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 376 as cited in: Jari Peltola (2006)

Age , World

“The way people think determines the fate of norms and values on which societies are constructed. While coercion and fear are critical sources for imposing the will of the dominants over the dominated, few institutional systems can last long if they are predominantly based on sheer repression.”

Manuel Castells

Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society, 2007

Fate , People , Fear , Way

“Power is based on the control of communication and information, be it the macro-power of the state and media corporations or the micro-power of organizations of all sorts.”

Manuel Castells

Source: Communication Power, 2009, p. 1475

Communication

“Indeed, in 1999, over half the people on the planet had never made or received a telephone call, although this is changing fast.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 9, The Digital Divide in a Global Perspective, p. 247

People , Change

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life , People , Truth , World

“John Chambers, Cisco's CEO and innovator, was, primarily, a salesman, and it shows.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 71

“To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary an approach. For, although one must go beyond the empiricism of geographical description, one runs the very great risk of imagining space as a white page on which the actions of groups and institutions are inscribed, without encountering any other obstacle than the trace of past generations. This is tantamount to conceiving of nature as entirely fashioned by culture, whereas the whole social problematic is born by the indissoluble union of these two terms, through the dialectical process by which a particular biological species (particularly because divided into classes) "man", transforms himself and transforms his struggle for life and for the appropriation of the product of his labour.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 115

Life , Imagination , Fashion , Nature

“Realpolitik does not disappear in the Information Age. But it remains state-centric, in an era organized around networks, including networks of states.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 5, Computer Networks and Civil Society, p. 160

Age

“Internet use is diffusing fast, but this diffusion follows a spatial pattern that fragments its geography according to wealth, technology, and power: it is the new geography of development.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 8, The Geography of the Internet, p. 212

Wealth

“This volume explores the construction of collective identities as they relate to social movements and power struggles in the network society. It also deals with the transformation of the state, politics, and democracy under the conditions of globalization and new communication technologies. The understanding of these processes aims to provide new perspectives for the study of social change in the Information Age.”

Manuel Castells

Preface to the 2010, p. xvii
The Power of Identity (1997)

Age , Democracy , Communication , Understanding

“In the industrial mode of development, the main source of productivity lies in the introduction of new energy sources, and in the ability to decentralize the use of energy throughout the production of circulation processes. In the new informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing and symbolic … what is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity… in a virtuous circle of interaction”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 16-17 as cited in: Andy Hargreaves (2003) Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity. p. 16

Knowledge

“The e-economy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 90

Knowledge , Sea

“In advanced capitalism it expresses the fundamental contradiction between, on the one hand, the increasing socialisation of consumption, and on the other hand, the capitalist logic of the production and distribution of its means of consumption, the outcome of which is a deepening crisis in this sector at the same time as popular protest demands an amelioration of the collective material conditions of daily existence. In an attempt to resolve these contradictions and their resulting conflicts, the state increasingly intervenes in the city; but, as an expression of a class society, the state in practice acts according to the relations of force between classes and social groups, generally in favour of the hegemonic fraction of the dominant classes.”

Manuel Castells

Source: City, Class and Power, 1978, p. 3

Time

“The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customised in an ever-changing pattern.”

Manuel Castells

Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society, 2007

Life , Age , Communication , Change