Manuel Castells: Information

Manuel Castells is Spanish sociologist (b.1942). Explore interesting quotes on information.
Manuel Castells: 118   quotes 2   likes

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an over-arching conclusion: as an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 500

Age , Time

“Our economy, society, and culture are built on interests, values, institutions, and systems of representation that, by and large, limit collective creativity, confiscate the harvest of information technology, and deviate our energy into self-destructive confrontation. This state of affairs must not be.”

Manuel Castells

Source: End of Millennium, 1998, p. 379

“The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. I think, therefore I produce. In so doing, we will have the leisure to experiment with spirituality, and the opportunity of reconciliation with nature, without sacrificing the material wellbeing of our children. The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 390 as cited in: Jari Peltola (2006)

Children , Age , Dreams , Nature

“This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.”

Manuel Castells

Source: Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society (2000), p. 5

Age , World

“But we are not just witnessing a relativisation of time according to social contexts or alternatively the return to time reversibility as if reality could become entirely captured in cyclical myths. The transformation is more profound: it is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present. I argue that this is happening now not only because capitalism strives to free itself from all constraints, since this has been the capitalist system’s tendency all along, without being able fully to materialize it. Neither is it sufficient to refer to the cultural and social revolts against clock time, since they have characterized the history of the last century without actually reversing its domination, indeed furthering its logic by including clock time distribution of life in the social contract. Capital’s freedom from time and culture’s escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society.
The transformation of time as surveyed in this chapter does not concern all processes, social groupings, and territories in our societies, although it does affect the entire planet. What I call timeless time is only the emerging, dominant form of social time in the network society, as the space of flows does not negate the existence of places. It is precisely my argument that social domination is exercised through the selective inclusion and exclusion of functions and people in different temporal and spatial frames.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 433–434 as quoted in: Wayne Hope (2006) Global Capitalism and the Critique of Real Time http://www.sagepub.com/dicken6/Sociology%20Online%20readings/CH%202%20-%20HOPE.pdf. Sage publications. p. 289

Life , People , Exercises , History

“Technological systems are socially produced. Social production is culturally informed. The Internet is no exception.”

Manuel Castells

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 2, The Culture of the Internet, p. 36