Castells and the Media

Theory and Media

Philip N. Howard

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745652597
  9780745652580
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745637679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

One of the most prolific and respected scholars today, Manuel Castells has given us a new language for understanding the impact of information and communication technologies on social life.

Politicians can no longer run for office without a digital media strategy, new communication technologies are a fundamental infrastructure for the economy, and the internet has become an invaluable tool for cultural production and consumption. Yet as more of our political, economic, and cultural interaction occurs over digital media, the ability to create and manipulate both content and networks becomes real power.

Castells and the Media introduces a great thinker, presents original theories about the network society, and encourages readers to use these theories to help them understand the importance of digital media and social networks in their own lives.

1

CASTELLS AND THE THEORY OF THE NETWORK SOCIETY

This first chapter serves to introduce Manuel Castells and the research path he has taken. While the book as a whole is titled Castells, most of the biographical information appears in this chapter. Since he has advanced research in multiple disciplines, this chapter will also explain the domains in which he has worked and the labels he has been given. He has taken—or been given—several kinds of monikers during a career path from as a Marxist sociologist in France, an urban geographer at UC-Berkeley, to a professor of communication with multiple institutional affiliations. Thus, this chapter will chart his course—and his contribution—to the study of media.

INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY

Manuel Castells was born in Hellín, Spain, in 1942. He was raised in Barcelona and lived there until his student activism drew the wrath of the dictator Francisco Franco. Castells moved to France and earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Paris. His personal interest in resisting cultural power continued, and his participation in the 1968 public protests cost him his instructor’s job at the Paris X University Nanterre. Subsequently, he taught at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and in 1979 he moved to the University of California at Berkeley. There he was appointed to a joint professorship in the Department of Sociology and the Department of City and Regional Planning. In 2001 he formally joined the Open University of Catalonia as a research professor and in 2003 he accepted a position as Chair of Communication and Technology at the University of Southern California. In recent years he has split his time between researching and mentoring in Los Angeles and Barcelona. Indeed, he mentors a large network of people who study the media, technology, and power.

Initially, Castells was most interested in urban sociology, and he helped develop a Marxist approach to the study of social transformation in large cities. Social movements and civic activism played a key role, according to Castells, in the evolution of urban spaces. Public resources, such as transportation systems, housing, and libraries, brought together people of diverse backgrounds and formed the basis of collective experience in the modern city. Yet by the 1980s many of the cities he studied were also developing digital infrastructures that enabled new forms of economic exchange and political power. If cities represented the seat of power in economic development, digital networks were significantly extending the ability of urban centers to marshal distant resources and project that power farther afield. For the most part, these digital networks only served governments, media barons, and financial institutions, and they were good servants. Information technologies allowed financial actors to better evaluate the risks of their investments, estimate the return on them, and develop more complex financial instruments and trading mechanisms. These same technologies made militaries better able to project the power of the state, with satellite defense systems, smart bombs, and internal communications systems. Digital networks allowed media barons to globalize urban cultures, export media products, and customize advertising. When the internet was privatized in 1995, the digital infrastructure that had served to connect powerful institutions in global cities began to serve individuals who had access to consumer electronics.¹

It was during this important transformation that Castells began to study the politics of information infrastructure and media.

PUBLICATIONS AND IMPACT

Castells has published over 20 books, and there are several books about him and his ideas. There are upwards of 80 articles, working papers, speeches, and sundry publications available in different electronic libraries. Google Scholar reports that 12,000 books, book chapters, and articles offer some citation to the first volume of Castells’ The Information Age trilogy, which is called The Rise of the Network Society. The other two volumes, The Politics of Identity and End of Millennium are also widely referenced. This trilogy has been translated into 22 languages, and The Internet Galaxy has been translated into 15 languages. His recent book Communication Power was eagerly awaited by social scientists across media studies, sociology, political science, geography, and many other domains of inquiry in which his theories are valued. It is hard to measure his impact, but Manuel Castells is certainly one of the most cited social scientists.

While selections of writings may appear on syllabi around the world, some researchers succumb to the instinct to cite The Rise of the Network Society only as a general, honorary link to an influential work. As a researcher, if you want to make the assumption that digital media has revolutionized social order but then move on to your specific research questions, citation to this work is necessary. It is not always easy to go through Castells’ writings: the ideas are complex; some ideas seem contradictory even though his thinking has evolved; there are some obvious points of critique. But it is not possible to dismiss his contributions, and one of the goals of this book is to intrigue readers enough through an introduction to his work that they will go on to read the original material.

But where to begin? With a broad intellectual agenda and a long publishing career, what is the best way to locate the beginnings of Castells’ research on media? What menu of readings would best represent his research? Castells’ research on the network society really began with his study of information and labor supplies in urban areas. The “informational city,” as he called it, was an important new phenomenon that challenged the assumptions of contemporary Marxist and sociological theory. To keep this book focused, however, it may be better to begin with the research he was conducting in the mid-1990s. It was at this point that he began transporting his network perspective from the informational city to broader institutional contexts. Good theories are transportable to other contexts, so it is with the publication of The Rise of the Network Society that we really begin to see how his unique perspectives have bearing on media. For those who might treat this book as a companion to the original material, two menus for “Castells on the Media” can be recommended.

The short menu could include one book and a couple of book chapters and articles. The Internet Galaxy is Castells’ most accessible book (Castells 2001). Yet, Communication Power is his latest major book-length work and his discussion of the power of media networks is most advanced here (Castells 2009). One good article to complement Communication Power could be “An introduction to the Information Age” which is a succinct statement of many of the concepts developed in the trilogy. Another could be the article-length statement about his theories of media and social structure, “Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society,” which was written in response to the critiques of his trilogy (Castells 1997, 2000a).

The longer menu could include Communication Power and selections from The Rise of the Network Society (Castells 2009, 1996). The Rise of the Network Society is a magnum opus in the sense that it has some parts that most people read and a few parts that interest specific readers. This first volume of the trilogy The Information Age is the most widely read, because it offers the comprehensive statement on what the social structure of the network society looks like. The second volume is dedicated to social movements and political processes, particularly in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, which demonstrate network effects. Having developed some grand ideas in the previous volumes, the third volume is the most specific in terms of presenting evidence. Castells uses the third volume to show how two significant social events—the collapse of the Soviet Union and rise of the Asian Tigers—were the result of new forces at play in the network society. Indeed, it is in this volume that he tackles the pernicious problems of social inequality in the network society.

There are certainly other combinations and permutations of articles, book chapters, and books that could make for a good menu of readings. Different disciplines would compose their own menu of Castells’ writings. Geographers might be most interested in the statements on the “space of flows” found in Chapter 6 of The Rise of the Network Society (which is Volume I of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture) or Chapter 8 of The Internet Galaxy. Organizational behavior scholars, economists, and economic historians might prefer Chapters 2 or 3 of The Rise of the Network Society. Sociologists most often seem to build on Chapters 1, 4, and 5. Volume II of the trilogy offers detailed study of social movements, from feminism to environmentalism. For readers interested in international relations or international political economy, Volume III of the trilogy contains rich chapters on the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Asian financial crisis of the late 1980s, and global criminal networks.

Castells is an enormously influential scholar on the media, but he is also a node in a scholarly network. That is, over the course of his career, he has built on the work of others, and they have built on his. He has collaborated with other scholars and mentored his students by coauthoring articles and book chapters and edited collections. He has effectively used his own social networks to maintain ties across intellectual communities in Barcelona, Paris, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Universities in these cities are only nodes in Castells’ globally networked intellectual community.

There are a variety of strategies one could have for linking up Castells’ ideas and evidence with those of other scholars. There are other prominent scholars of digital media, so it is tempting to build in citations to the extensive network of people and texts that have influenced Castells and been influenced by him in turn. Experts can read his writings and make educated guesses about the origins of some insights. It would be possible to offer citations to other scholars when I see their relevant works and ideas in his argument or think a reader might want to go to the likely source of Castells’ inspiration. Given his publication record and impact, this would result in an enormous book with a lengthy bibliography. The following chapters are meant to feature his work on the media. So for the most part, citations to other scholars will be offered when Castells himself has named them as relevant to his argument. To help readers understand Castells’ use of other scholarly works, many other prominent scholars are referenced throughout this book.

BASIC STATEMENTS ON NETWORK THEORY

For those of us interested in studying the media, more seems to have changed between 2000 and the present than between 1900 and 2000. In the last decade, the vast majority of people living in wealthy countries came to have easy access to the internet and the vast majority of people around the world came to have easy access to a mobile phone. More and more people are able to maintain links to family and friends even if life takes us across the country or between continents. Most of the cultural industries and news organizations that evolved in a century of movie theaters and broadcast networks had to rapidly develop digital media strategies or face bankruptcy. In most democracies, particularly in the West, a politician without some kind of digital media campaign is unelectable. In most of the rest of the world, mobile phones activate voters or protesters at sensitive political moments.

The networks that connect people may involve media such as computers, mobile phones, Wi-Fi fields and undersea trunk cables. But these networks are fundamentally social: the network of fiber optic cable that connects cities and crosses oceans was laid deliberately, to serve (wealthy) populations. The bits that flow through cyberspace are created and received by people (though sometimes indirectly).

Castells, like Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis, firmly argues that society cannot be understood without studying media technologies. “Technology does not determine society. Nor does society script the course of technological change, since many factors, including individual inventiveness and entrepreneurialism, intervene in the process of scientific discovery, technical innovation and social applications, so the final outcome depends on a complex pattern of interaction” (Castells 1996, 5). In his study of the social impact of the internet, Castells makes some of the same observations that McLuhan made studying the impact of the television. Castells probably uses more evidence, gathered in a more systematic way, than McLuhan. Still, McLuhan eloquently suggested that systems of electric technologies connect people to a kind of social nervous system. New communication technologies seemed to be extending our global consciousness, changing our creative processes, and generating new forms of knowledge. The electronic revolution decentralized, integrated, and accelerated social interaction, and resulted in technological convergence (McLuhan and Lapham 1994).

As an economic historian, Harold Innis was one of the first to specialize in the study of how civilizations communicate (Innis 2008). He developed three core assumptions that have held up well over time, assumptions that also back Castells’ work. First, Innis argued that the use of a particular communication tool defined the quality and quantity of knowledge shared in a society and preserved about that society. Second, he argued that new communication technologies allowed for new organizational forms, so that societies becoming dependent on a single medium would tend to become stagnant and inflexible. Finally, he argued that our understanding of long-dead or culturally distant societies depended on the character of their media. If these assumptions hold true, then Castells can sensibly argue that the way we generate and share knowledge will be shaped by digital media, that digital media will support new forms of economic, political, and cultural organization. Media scholars of the future will have to confirm if our impact is interpretable only through our media.

While some researchers can seem overly enthusiastic about how new technologies will revolutionize society, it can be tough to actually find many scholars who say that technology directly causes social change. Quite the opposite, most researchers are careful to note that media technologies and social order evolve together and shape each other. If society cannot be understood without its media technologies, does it make sense to study media technologies without their social context? (For people who study the media, the answer is no!).

An information society is a term used in contrast with agrarian or industrial society, to emphasize that the important features of contemporary economics, politics, and culture are defined by the role of information. An information society could be simply defined as a set of social relations in which data is the most important source of value, rather than capital or labor. One of the ways Castells has advanced our understanding of the media has been by demonstrating that what has changed over the last decade is that it is not just information that is important, but the very structure and organization of information.

The provisional outcome of my research should allow us to stop using the notion of information society and replace it with the concept of network society as the specific social structural characteristic of our time. (Castells 2000b, 110)

The notion of the information society was developed to explain the growing importance of information supplies in the economy and the rising class of information workers. Many economists and political theorists have helped fill out the metaphor of the information society. Even though different scholars emphasize different features of the information society, most of them hold one attribute constant: power resides within the nation-state. Indeed one of the ways of defining an information society is to say that the state monopolizes the tools of information, a variation on the more classic definition that the state monopolizes the tools of violence.

But Castells undermines this state-centric understanding of where power lies. He builds an argument using the work of two other prominent scholars. Ulrich Beck has argued that state power is being challenged by globalization (which limits its sovereignty), market pressures for deregulation (which reduces its capacity to intervene), and declining public legitimacy (which diminishes its influence over citizens) (Beck 2006; Castells 2007). Lance Bennett has argued that the media is a well-articulated system in which, for the most part, the print journalists generate original information and break news stories, television broadcasts information to a mass audience, and radio customizes news content and provides some interaction (Bennett 1990). Since states no longer really monopolize information, Castells argues that a significant amount of economic, political, and cultural power has actually moved from the state to the media system. Moreover, it is not simply that information is an important new source of value, which defines contemporary social life. Instead of speaking of media systems, we should refer to them as media networks. There are strong new structures—networks—that support peculiar forms of social interaction, unique patterns of authority, and particular sources of power. The power to control information no longer resides exclusively with the institutions of the state; it resides in media networks. And media networks are constituted by social relations and communication technologies.

So Castells argues that in contemporary network society the power residing in media networks is stronger than that residing in states. Industrial societies certainly had communica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Castells and the Theory of the Network Society
• 2. Media Economics and Life Online
• 3. Networks of Power and Politics
• 4. Cultural Industries in a Digital Century
• 5. Mobile and Social Media
• 6. Conclusion—Media Rules and the Rules of Media
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Glossary/Index