Chapter Title: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

Chapter Author(s): Manuel Castells

Book Title: Media Studies

Book Subtitle: A Reader
Book Editor(s): Sue Thornham, Caroline Bassett and Paul Marris
Published by: Edinburgh University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrv1h.20

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12

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
INFORMATION AGE
Manuel Castells

In the last decade I was struck, as many have been, by a series of major his-
torical events that have transformed our world/our lives. Just to mention the
most important: the diffusion and deepening of the information technology
revolution, including genetic engineering; the collapse of the Soviet Union,
with the consequent demise of the international Communist movement, and
the end of the Cold War that had marked everything for the last half a century;
the restructuring of capitalism; the process of globalization; emergence of the
Pacific as the most dynamic area of the global economy; the paradoxical com-
bination of a surge in nationalism and the crisis of the sovereign nation-state;
the crisis of democratic politics, shaken by periodic scandals and a crisis of
legitimacy; the rise of feminism and the crisis of patriarchalism; the widespread
diffusion of ecological consciousness; the rise of communalism as sources of
resistance to globalization, taking in many contexts the form of religious fun-
damentalism; last, but not least, the development of a global criminal economy
that is having significant impacts in international economy, national politics,
and local everyday life.
I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the interpretations and theories, cer-
tainly including my own, that the social sciences were using to make sense of
this new world. But I did not give up the rationalist project of understanding
all this, in a coherent manner, that could be somewhat empirically grounded
and as much as possible theoretically oriented. Thus, for the last 12 years I

From City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 2:7 (1997) pp. 6-16.
Originally an address to the conference on 'Information and the City' held at Oxford University,
March 1996.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

undertook the task of researching and understanding this wide array of social
trends, working in and on the United States, Western Europe, Russia, Asian
Pacific, and Latin America. Along the way, I found plenty of company, as
researchers from all horizons are converging in this collective endeavour.
My personal contribution to this understanding is the book in three volumes
that I have now completed, The Information Age. [. . .] The first volume analy-
ses the new social structure, the network society. The second volume studies
social movements and political processes, in the framework of and in interac-
tion with the network society. The third volume attempts an interpretation
of macro-social processes, as a result of the interaction between the power of
networks and the power of identity, focusing on themes such as the collapse
of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the Pacific, or the ongoing process of
global social exclusion and polarization. It also proposes a general theoretical
synthesis.
I will take this opportunity to share with you the main lines of my argument,
hoping that this will help a debate that I see emerging from all directions in the
whole world.

[. . .] I will follow a schematic format. I will focus on identifying the main

features of what I consider to be the emerging, dominant social structure, the
network society, that I find characteristic of informational capitalism, as con-
stituted throughout the world. I will not indulge in futurology: everything I say
is based on what I have perceived, rightly or wrongly, already at work in our
societies. I will organize my lecture in one disclaimer, nine hypotheses, and one
conclusion.

DISCLAIMER

I shall focus on the structure/dynamics of the network society, not on its

historical genesis, that is how and why it came about, although in my book I
propose a few hints about it. For the record: in my view, it resulted from the
historical convergence of three independent processes, from whose interaction
emerged the network society:

• The Information Technology Revolution, constituted as a paradigm

in the 1970s.
• The restructuring of capitalism and of statism in the 1980s, aimed at
superseding their contradictions, with sharply different outcomes.
• The cultural social movements of the 1960s, and their 1970s aftermath
(particularly feminism and ecologism).

The Information Technology Revolution did not create the network society.
But without Information Technology, the Network Society would not exist.

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MANUEL CASTELLS

Rather than providing an abstract categorization of what this Network

Society is, let me summarize its main features and processes, before attempting
a synthesis of its embedded logic in the diversity of its cultural/institutional
variations. There is no implicit hierarchy in the sequence of presentation of
these features. They all interact in, guess what, a network.

I AN INFORMATIONAL E C O N O M Y

It is an economy in which sources of productivity and competitiveness for

firms, regions, countries, depend, more than ever, on knowledge, information,
and the technology of their processing including the technology of manage-
ment, and the management of technology. This is not the same as a service
economy. There is informational agriculture, informational manufacturing,
and different types of informational services, while a large number of service
activities, e.g. in the developing world, are not informational at all.
The informational economy opens up an extraordinary potential for solving
our problems, but, because of its dynamism and creativity, it is potentially
more exclusionary than the industrial economy if social controls do not check
the forces of unfettered market logic.

2 GLOBAL ECONOMY

This is not the same as a world economy. That has existed, in the West, at
least since the sixteenth century. The global economy is a new reality: it is an
economy whose core, strategically dominant activities have the potential of
working as a unit in real time on a planetary scale. This is so for financial and
currency markets, advanced business services, technological innovation, high
technology manufacturing, media communication.
Most economic activity in the world, and most employment are not only
national but regional or local. But, except for subsistence economies, the fate
of these activities, and of their jobs, depends ultimately on the dynamics of the
global economy, to which they are connected through networks and markets.
Indeed, if labour tends to be local, capital is by and large globalized - not a
small detail in a capitalist economy. This globalization has developed as a
fully fledged system only in the last two decades, on the basis of information/
communication technologies that were previously not available.
The global economy reaches out to the whole planet, but it is not planetary,
it does not include the whole planet. In fact, it excludes probably a majority
of the population. It is characterized by an extremely uneven geography. It
scans the whole world, and links up valuable inputs, markets, and individuals,
while switching off unskilled labour and poor markets. For a significant part of
people around the world, there is a shift, from the point of view of dominant
systemic interests, from exploitation to structural irrelevance.
This is different from the traditional First World/Third World opposition,

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

because the Third World has become increasingly diversified, internally, and the
First World has generated social exclusion, albeit in lesser proportion, within its
own boundaries. Thus, I propose the notion of the emergence of a Fourth World
of exclusion, made up not only of most of Africa, and rural Asia, and of Latin
American shanties, but also of the South Bronx, La Courneuve, Kamagasaki, or
Tower Hamlets of this world. A fourth world that, as I document extensively in
volume three, is predominantly populated by women and children.

3 T H E NETWORK ENTERPRISE

At the heart of the connectivity of the global economy and of the flexibility of
informational capitalism, there is a new form of organization, characteristic of
economic activity, but gradually extending its logic to other domains and organi-
zations: the network enterprise. This is not the same as a network of enterprises.
It is a network made either from firms or segments of firms, or from internal
segmentation of firms. Multinational corporations, with their internal decen-
tralization, and their links with a web of subsidiaries and suppliers throughout
the world, are but one of the forms of this network enterprise. But others include
strategic alliances between corporations, networks of small and medium busi-
nesses (such as in Northern Italy or Hong Kong), and link-ups between corpora-
tions and networks of small businesses through subcontracting and outsourcing.

4 T H E T R A N S F O R M A T I O N O F W O R K AND E M P L O Y M E N T : T H E F L E X I - W O R K E R S

Work is at the heart of all historical transformations. And there is no exception

to this. But the coming of the Information Age is full of myths about the fate
of work and employment.
With the exception, and an important one, of Western Europe, there is no
major surge of unemployment in the world after two decades of diffusion
in information technology. Indeed, there is much higher unemployment in
technologically laggard countries, regions, and sectors.
All evidence and analysis points to the variable impact of technology on
jobs depending on a much broader set of factors, mainly firms' strategies and
governments' policies. Indeed, the two most technologically advanced econo-
mies, the US and Japan, both display a low rate of unemployment. In the US
in the last four years there is a net balance of 10 million new jobs, and the
educational content for these new jobs is significantly higher than that of the
pre-existing social structure: many more information-intensive jobs than ham-
burger flippers jobs have been created. Even manufacturing jobs are at an all
time high on a global perspective: between 1970 and 1989, manufacturing jobs
in the world increased by 72 per cent, even if OECD countries, particularly the
US and the UK, have indeed deindustrialized.

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MANUEL CASTELLS

There is indeed a serious unemployment problem in the inner cities of

America, England, or France, among the uneducated and switched off popu-
lations, or in low technology countries around the world, particularly in the
rural areas.
For the majority of people in America, for instance, unemployment is not
a problem. And yet, there is tremendous anxiety and discontent about work.
There is a real base for this concern:
(a) There is the transformation of power relationships between capital and
labour in favour of capital, through the process of socio-economic restructur-
ing that took place in the 1980s, both in a conservative environment (Reagan,
Thatcher), and, to a lesser but real extent, in a less conservative environment
(Spain, France). In this sense, new technologies allowed business to either auto-
mate or shift production offshore or outsource supplies or to subcontract to
smaller firms or to obtain concessions from labour or all the above.
(b) The development of the network enterprise translates into downsizing,
subcontracting, and networking of labour, inducing flexibility of both busi-
ness and labour, and individualization of contractual arrangements between
management and labour. So, instead of layoffs what we often have are layoffs
followed by subcontracting of services on an ad hoc, consulting basis, for the
time and task to be performed, without job tenure and without social benefits
provided by the firm.
This is indeed the general trend, exemplified by the rapid growth in all
countries of self-employment, temporary work, and part-time, particularly
for women. In England, between 40 and 45 per cent of the labour force seems
to be already in these categories, as opposed to full-time, regularly salaried
employment, and is growing. Some studies in Germany project that in 2015,
about 50 per cent of the labour force would be out of stable employment. And
in the most dynamic region in the world, Silicon Valley, a study we have just
completed shows that, in the midst of a job creation explosion, in the last ten
years, between 50 per cent and 90 per cent of new jobs, most of them highly
paid, are of this kind of nonstandard labour arrangements.
The most significant change in work in the information age is the reversal
of the socialization/salarization of labour that characterized the industrial age.
The 'organization man' is out, the 'flexible woman' is in. The individualiza-
tion of work, and therefore of labour's bargaining power, is the major feature
characterizing employment in the network society.

5 S O C I A L P O L A R I Z A T I O N AND S O C I A L E X C L U S I O N

The processes of globalization, business networking, and individualization of

labour weaken social organizations and institutions that represented/protected
workers in the information age, particularly labour unions and the welfare

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

state. Accordingly, workers are increasingly left to themselves in their differen-

tial relationship to management, and to the market place.
Skills and education, in a constant redefinition of these skills, become critical
in valorizing or devaluing people in their work. But even valuable workers may
fall down for reasons of health, age, gender discrimination, or lack of capacity
to adapt to a given task or position.
As a result of these trends, most societies in the world, and certainly OECD
countries, with the US and the UK at the top of the scale, present powerful
trends towards increasing inequality, social polarization and social exclusion.
There is increasing accumulation of wealth at the top, and of poverty at the
bottom.

The Information Age does not have to be the age of stepped-up inequality,
polarization and social exclusion. But for the moment it is.

6 T H E CULTURE OF R E A L VIRTUALITY

Shifting to the cultural realm, we see the emergence of a similar pattern of

networking, flexibility, and ephemeral symbolic communication, in a culture
organized around electronic media, including in this communication system
the computer-mediated communication networks. Cultural expressions of all
kinds are increasingly enclosed in or shaped by this world of electronic media.
But the new media system is not characterized by the one-way, undifferenti-
ated messages through a limited number of channels that constituted the world
of mass media. And it is not a global village.
Media are extraordinarily diverse, and send targeted messages to specific
segments of audiences and to specific moods of the audiences. They are increas-
ingly inclusive, bridging from one to another, from network TV to cable or
satellite TV, radio, VCR, musical video, walkman type of devices, connected
throughout the globe, and yet diversified by cultures, constituting a hypertext
with extraordinary inclusive capacity. Furthermore, slowly but surely, this new
media system is moving towards interactivity, particularly if we include CMC
networks, and their access to text, images, sounds, and will eventually link up
with the current media system.
Instead of a global village we are moving towards mass production of cus-
tomized cottages. While there is oligopolistic concentration of multimedia
groups around the world, there is at the same time, market segmentation,
and increasing interaction by and among the individuals that break up the
uniformity of a mass audience. These processes induce the formation of what I
call the culture of real virtuality. It is so, and not virtual reality, because when
our symbolic environment is, by and large, structured in this inclusive, flexible,
diversified hypertext, in which we navigate every day, the virtuality of this text
is in fact our reality, the symbols from which we live and communicate.

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7 POLITICS

This enclosure of communication in the space of flexible media does not only
concern culture. It has a fundamental effect on politics. In all countries, the
media have become the essential space of politics. Not all politics takes place
through the media, and image making still needs to relate to real issues and
real conflicts. But without significant presence in the space of media, actors
and ideas are reduced to political marginality. This presence does not concern
only, or even primarily, the moments of political campaigns, but the day-to-
day messages that people receive by and from the media.
I propose the following analysis:

• To an overwhelming extent people receive their information, on

the basis of which they form their political opinion, and structure
their behaviour, through the media, particularly television and
radio.
• Media politics needs to simplify the message/proposals.
• The simplest message is an image. The simplest image is a person.
Political competition revolves around personalization of politics.
• The most effective political weapons are negative messages. The most
effective negative message is character assassination of opponents'
personalities. The politics of scandal, in the US, in Europe, in Japan, in
Latin America etc. is the predominant form of political struggle.
• Political marketing is the essential means to win political competi-
tion in democratic politics. In the information age it involves media
advertising, telephone banks, targeted mailing, image making, image
unmaking, image control, presence in the media, staging of public
appearances etc. This makes it an excessively expensive business,
way beyond that of traditional party politics, so that mechanisms of
political financing are obsolete, and parties use access to power as a
way to generate resources to stay in power or to prepare to return to
it. This is the fundamental source of political corruption, to which
intermediaries add a little personal twist. This is also at the source of
systemic corruption, that feeds scandal politics. The use of scandal
as a weapon leads to increased expense and activity in intelligence,
damage control, and access to the media. Once a market is created,
intermediaries appear to retrieve, obtain, or fabricate information,
offering it to the highest bidder. Politics becomes a horse race, and
a soap opera motivated by greed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals,
and, often, sex and violence, becoming hardly distinguishable from
TV scripts.
• Those who survive in this world become politically successful, for a
while. But what certainly does not survive, after a few rounds of these
tricks, is political legitimacy, not to speak of citizens' hope.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

8 TIMELESS T I M E

As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structure

is necessarily linked to the redefinition of the material foundations of life, time
and space. Time and space are related, in society as in nature. Their meaning,
and manifestations in social practice, evolve throughout histories and across
cultures, as Giddens, Thrift, Harvey, Adams, Lash, and Urry, among others,
have shown.
I propose the hypothesis that the network society, as the dominant social
structure emerging in the Information Age, is organized around new forms
of time and space: timeless time, the space of flows. These are the dominant
forms, and not the forms in which most people live, but through their domina-
tion, they affect everybody. Let me explain, starting with time, then with some
greater detail on space, given the specific interests of many in this conference.
In contrast to the rhythm of biological time of most of human existence,
and to the clock time characterizing the industrial age, a new form of time
characterizes the dominant logic of the network society: timeless time. It is
defined by the use of new information/communication technologies in a relent-
less effort to annihilate time, to compress years in seconds, seconds in split
seconds. Furthermore, the most fundamental aim is to eliminate sequencing of
time, including past, present and future in the same hypertext, thus eliminating
the 'succession of things' that, according to Leibniz, characterizes time, so that
without things and their sequential ordering there is no longer time in society.
We live, as in the recurrent circuits of the computer networks in the encyclo-
pedia of historical experience, all our tenses at the same time, being able to
reorder them in a composite created by our fantasy or our interests.
David Harvey has shown the relentless tendency of capitalism to eliminate
barriers of time. But I think in the network society, that is indeed a capitalist
society, but something else at the same time, all dominant processes tend to be
constructed around timeless time. I find such a tendency in the whole realm of
human activity. I find it certainly in the split second financial transactions of
global financial markets, but I also find it, for instance, in instant wars, built
around the notion of a surgical strike that devastates the enemy in a few hours,
or minutes, to avoid politically unpopular, costly wars. Or in the blurring of
the life cycle by new reproductive techniques, allowing people a wide range
of options in the age and conditions of parenting, even storing their embryos
to eventually produce babies later either by themselves, or through surrogate
mothers, even after their procreators are dead. I find it in the twisting of
working life by the variable chronology of labour trajectories and time sched-
ules in increasingly diverse labour markets. And I find it in the vigorous effort
to use medical technology, including genetic engineering, and computer-based
medical care to exile death from life, to bring a substantial proportion of the
population to a high level of life-expectancy, and to diffuse the belief that, after
all, we are eternal, at least for some time.

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As with space, timeless time characterizes dominant functions and social

groups, while most people in the world are still submitted to biological time
and to clock time. Thus, while instant wars characterize the technological
powers, atrocious, lingering wars go on and on for years, around the planet, in
a slow-motion destruction process, quasi-ignored by the world until they are
discovered by some television programme.
I propose the notion that a fundamental struggle in our society is around
the redefinition of time, between its annihilation or desequencing by networks,
on one hand, and, on the other hand, the consciousness of glacial time, the
slow-motion, inter-generational evolution of our species in our cosmological
environment, a concept suggested by Lash and Urry, and a battle undertaken,
in my view, by the environmental movement.

9 T H E SPACE OF F L O W S

Many years ago (or at least it seems to me as many) I proposed the concept of
Space of Flows to make sense of a body of empirical observation: dominant
functions were increasingly operating on the basis of exchanges between elec-
tronic circuits linking up information systems in distant locations. Financial
markets, global media, advanced business services, technology, information. In
addition, electronically based, fast transportation systems reinforced this pattern
of distant interaction by following up with movements of people and goods.
Furthermore, new location patterns for most activities follow a simultaneous
logic of territorial concentration/decentralization, reinstating the unity of their
operation by electronic links, e.g. the analysis proposed in the 1980s on location
patterns of high tech manufacturing; or the networked articulation of advanced
services throughout the world, under the system labelled as 'global city'.
Why keep the term of space under these conditions? Reasons: (1) These
electronic circuits do not operate in the territorial vacuum. They link up
territorially based complexes of production, management and information,
even though the meaning and functions of these complexes depend on their
connection in these networks of flows. (2) These technological linkages are
material, e.g. depend on specific telecommunication/transportation facilities,
and on the existence and quality of information systems, in a highly uneven
geography. (3) The meaning of space evolves - as the meaning of time. Thus,
instead of indulging in futurological statements such as the vanishing of space,
and the end of cities, we should be able to reconceptualize new forms of spatial
arrangements under the new technological paradigm.
To proceed with this conceptualization I build on a long intellectual tra-
dition, from Leibniz to Harold Innis, connecting space and time, around
the notion of space as coexistence of time. Thus, my definition: space is the
material support of time-sharing social practices.1
What happens when the time-sharing of practices (be it synchronous or asyn-
chronous) does not imply contiguity? 'Things' still exist together, they share time,

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

but the material arrangements that allow this coexistence are inter-territorial or
transterritorial: the space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing
social practices that work through flows. What concretely this material organi-
zation is depends on the goals and characteristics of the networks of flows, for
instance I can tell you what it is in the case of high technology manufacturing or
in the case of global networks of drug traffic. However, I did propose in my anal-
ysis some elements that appear to characterize the space of flows in all kinds of
networks: electronic circuits connection information systems; territorial nodes
and hubs; locales of support and social cohesion for dominant social actors in
the network (e.g. the system of VIP spaces throughout the world).
Dominant functions tend to articulate themselves around the space of flows.
But this is not the only space. The space of places continues to be the predomi-
nant space of experience, of everyday life, and of social and political control.
Places root culture and transmit history. (A place is a locale whose form, func-
tion, and meaning, from the point of view of the social actor, are contained
within the boundaries of physical contiguity.)
In the network society, a fundamental form of social domination is the
prevalence of the logic of the space of flows over the space of places. The space
of flows structures and shapes the space of places, as when the differential
fortunes of capital accumulation in global financial markets reward or punish
specific regions, or when telecom systems link up CBDs to outlying suburbs
in new office development, bypassing/marginalizing poor urban neighbour-
hoods. The domination of the space of flows over the space of places induces
intra-metropolitan dualism as a most important form of social-territorial
exclusion, that has become as significant as regional uneven development. The
simultaneous growth and decline of economies and societies within the same
metropolitan area is a most fundamental trend of territorial organization, and
a key challenge to urban management nowadays.
But there is still something else in the new spatial dynamics. Beyond the
opposition between the space of flows and the space of places. As information/
communication networks diffuse in society, and as technology is appropriated
by a variety of social actors, segments of the space of flows are penetrated by
forces of resistance to domination, and by expressions of personal experience.
Examples:

(a) Social movements. Zapatistas and the Internet (but from the
Lacandona forest). But also American Militia.
(b) Local governments, key agents of citizen representation in our
society, linking up through electronic networks, particularly in
Europe (see research by Stephen Graham).
(c) Expressions of experience in the space of flows.

Thus, we do witness an increasing penetration, and subversion, of the space

flows, originally set up for the functions of power, by the power of experience,

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inducing a set of contradictory power relationships. Yes, it is still an elitist

means of communication, but it is changing rapidly. The problem is to integrate
these observations in some theory, but for this we still lack research, in spite of
some insightful elaborations, such as the one by Sherry Turkle at MIT.
The new frontier of spatial research is in examining the interaction between
the space of flows, the space of places, function, meaning, domination, and
challenge to domination, in increasingly complex and contradictory patterns.
Homesteading in this frontier is already taking place, as shown in the pioneer-
ing research by Graham and Marvin, or in the reflections of Bill Mitchell, but
we are clearly at the beginning of a new field of study that should help us to
understand and to change the currently prevailing logic in the space of flows.

CONCLUSION: THE NETWORK SOCIETY

So, what is the Network Society? It is a society that is structured in its domi-
nant functions and processes around networks. In its current manifestation it
is a capitalist society. Indeed, we live more man ever in a capitalist world, and
thus an analysis in terms of capitalism is necessary and complementary to the
theory of the network society. But this particular form of capitalism is very
different from industrial capitalism, as I have tried to show.
The Network Society is not produced by information technology. But
without the information technology revolution it could not be such a compre-
hensive, pervasive social form, able to link up, or de-link, the entire realm of
human activity.
So, is that all? Just a morphological transformation? Well, historically,
transformation of social forms has always been fundamental, both as expres-
sions and sources of major social processes, e.g. standardized mass production
in the large factory as characteristic of the so-called Fordism, as a major form
of capitalist social organization; or the rational bureaucracy as the foundation
of modern society, in the Weberian conception.
But this morphological transformation is even more significant because the
network architecture is particularly dynamic, open-ended, flexible, potentially
able to expand endlessly, without rupture, bypassing/disconnecting undesir-
able components following instructions of the networks' dominant nodes.
Indeed, the February 1997 Davos meeting titled the general programme of its
annual meeting 'Building the Network Society'.
This networking logic is at the roots of major effects in our societies. Using
it:

• capital flows can bypass controls

• workers are individualized, outsourced, subcontracted
• communication becomes at the same time global and customized
• valuable people and territories are switched on, devalued ones are
switched off.

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AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

The dynamics of networks push society towards an endless escape from

its own constraints and controls, towards an endless supersession and
reconstruction of its values and institutions, towards a meta-social, constant
rearrangement of human institutions and organizations.
Networks transform power relationships. Power in the traditional sense
still exists: capitalists over workers, men over women, state apparatuses still
torture bodies and silence minds around the world.
Yet, there is a higher order of power: the power of flows in the networks
prevails over the flows of power. Capitalists are dependent upon uncontrol-
lable financial flows; many workers are at the same time investors (often
unwillingly through their pension funds) in this whirlwind of capital; network-
ers are interrelated in the logic of the network enterprise, so that their jobs
and income depend on their positioning rather than on their work. States are
bypassed by global flows of wealth, information, and crime. Thus, to survive,
they band together in multilateral ventures, such as the European Union. It
follows the creation of a web of political institutions - national, supranational,
international, regional, and local - that becomes the new operating unit of the
information age: the network state.
In this complexity, the communication between networks and social actors
depends increasingly on shared cultural codes. If we accept certain values,
certain categories that frame the meaning of experience, then the networks will
process them efficiently, and will return to each one of us the outcome of their
processing, according to the rules of domination and distribution inscripted in
the network.
Thus, the challenges to social domination in the network society revolve
around the redefinition of cultural codes, proposing alternative meaning and
changing the rules of the game. This is why the affirmation of identity is so
essential, because it fixes meaning autonomously vis-a-vis the abstract, instru-
mental logic of networks. I am, thus I exist. In my empirical investigation I have
found identity-based social movements aimed at changing the cultural founda-
tions of society to be the essential sources of social change in the information
age, albeit often in forms and with goals that we do not usually associate with
positive social change. Some movements, that appear to be the most fruitful
and positive, are proactive, such as feminism and environmentalism. Some are
reactive, as in the communal resistances to globalization built around religion,
nation, territory, or ethnicity. But in all cases they affirm the preeminence of
experience over instrumentality, of meaning over function, and, I would dare
to say, of use value of life over exchange value in the networks.
The implicit logic of the Network Society appears to end history, by enclos-
ing it into the circularity of recurrent patterns of flows. Yet, as with any other
social form, in fact it opens up a new realm of contradiction and conflict, as
people around the world refuse to become shadows of global flows and project
their dreams, and sometimes their nightmares, into the light of new history
making.

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MANUEL CASTELLS

NOTE

1. Leibniz: 'Space is something purely relative, like time; space being an order of coex-
istences as time is an order of successions. For space denotes in terms of possibil-
ity and order of things that exist at the same time, in so far as they exist together
. . . When we see several things together we perceive this order of things among
themselves.'

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