castells@LSE
Posted by popkitchen | Filed under academic
Manuel Castells is the most cited social scientist in the world. And in person, he is a charming, funny old man. Aside from a pre-promotion, he is doing for his upcoming book (which will deal with issues of Internet and power, yet to be released) Castells’s goal in his lecture at London School of Economics was to dispel the myths that surround the Internet research.
Important note – Castells is not interested in Internet from the aspect of technological change, but from the aspect of social change. Despite the obvious digital divide, Castells believes that “net is a fabric of our life”, which transformed the material basis of our society.
Media, in his view, neglect the results of scholarly research in their depiction of the evil effects of technology. In the attempt to repudiate these views, Castells set up a project in his native Catalonia a very comprehensive research, whose aim was to “scan the entire society”. He focused on four points.
Effects of the net on sociability
Against the popular myth that Internet is alienating us, this research proves that with most people in the usage of the net, the feelings of depression decreased. But the most important issue is that the net contributed to the transformation of sociability making it the major platform for social, political and economic change.
Construction of autonomy in networked society
Even though he is interested in several dimensions of autonomy (personal, professional, autonomy of a body …), Castells primarily wants to know how political autonomy is constructed in the new media environment. Internet has proved to be a critical platform for expression and organization of political autonomy, enabled by a crucial shift from mass media (one to many) to mass-self media (many to many). Even though serious claims can be put forward estimating the level of freedom on the net, Castells states that regardless of those claims, we direct the channel/flow of communication ourselves in the new net environment.
The outcomes of this increased autonomy are various social movements and appearance of insurgent policies.
Social movements aim not to change policies, but values, exemplified by the anti-globalization or environment movement.
By insurgent politics, Castells implies new actors in political system, disrupting politics as usual.
The events after 2004 Al-Qaida attack on Madrid, which caused the widespread mobilization of mostly young people, who overturned the results of the elections that followed in the favor of the left coalition (one of the rare left-wing governments currently in Europe).
Another very predictable example is the Obama presidential campaign, which started with engagement of his supporters on the net during the primary elections. As the supporters requested money for specific reasons and provided the account of how the money was spent, the response was unparallel – 62% of all donations were given over the Internet, totaling USD605m. Which all very much changed the outcome of the campaign – two years when it started who would have thought that an African-American guy, who grew up in Indonesia, under the name Barrack Hussein Obama could be considered a serious contended for the position of a president.
Business and public sector
The effects of networked organization on business sector is not to be only felt in e-commerce, Castells probably alludes to the dominant “reputation economy” model on the web, where information is available to be rated, which would become the prevailing marketing model in the future, if it isn’t so now.
Even though most promising uses of the net (transparency, efficiency, increased productivity) were expected to take place in the public sector, there is a huge resistance in health, education and public sector. For example, 97% of all doctors and patients are online, only 2% establish a relationship this way.
Surveillance, control and privacy
According to Castells, more than government control, we ought to be worried about commercial control. Google basically commodified our freedom – they are making money on the way we use our freedom to organize against corporate interests.
Similarly to Benkler and Lessig, Castells is mostly worried about the “enclosure of commons” online, which he predicts is going to be the biggest issue in the internet politics/policy in the future, with the announced deregulation in the US.
After his talk, Castells engaged with questions from the audience, which mostly dealt with the current global financial crisis (this is London School of Economics after all).
An evening very usefully spent, indeed.
Tags: academia, castells, london
November 8th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Congratulations! Now we have understandable Popkitchen! And it’s nice to read your texts…
One of interesting aspects of Castells, besides the geniality of his academic insights, is the regular accessibility to his logic, which he gives us through a colloquial and common language. He is almost informal when writing. Reading Castells give me the impression he is seated on the next sofa drinking coffee and eating a cake he just got out from the oven, and saying: “take care, the cake is still hot”. I think this obviousness is the key to great part of his geniality and appealing, this natural skill to ‘smell’ and realize the obvious before most others within his field. Of course all his insights are not obvious, but after understanding networked society and its details through Castells eyes, don’t phenomena like mass-self media, increasing of social movements, insurgent politics (to be in those you quoted) seem to be very familiar like if we always knew about that?
I never saw him live as you did, but I always had the feeling that this guy must be very captivating, personally speaking. Maybe cause I love Barcelone… who knows..