What do you think?
Rate this book
The Rise of Network Society #1
Ağ Toplumunun Yükselişi: Enformasyon Çağı: Ekonomi, Toplum ve Kültür, Birinci Cilt
Günümüzün yaşayan en önemli toplumbilimcilerinden biri sayılan Manuel Castells, üç ciltlik dev eserinde, yeryüzündeki kültürlerin ve kurumların çeşitliliğine bağlı olarak ortaya çıkan ve çok farklı biçimlerde tezahür eden yeni toplumsal yapının oluşumunu inceliyor. Castells bu yapının biçimlenmesini, 20. yüzyılın sonlarına doğru kapitalist üretimin yeniden yapılanmasıyla kendini gösteren yeni bir kalkınma biçiminin ve bu anlamda enformasyonalizmin ortaya çıkışıyla ilişkilendirmektedir.
Bu yaklaşımın gerisindeki kuramsal perspektifi açıklamak için tek bir düşünce sisteminin yeterli olmadığını, günümüzde toplumların tarihi olarak farklı konjonktürlerde belirlenmiş üretim, deneyim ve iktidar ilişkileri çevresinde örgütlendiğini savunan Manuel Castells, bilgi toplumunun oluşumundaki karmaşık sürecin anlaşılmasına yüzeysellikten uzak bir yaklaşımla açıklık getiriyor.
Yazar Enformasyon Çağı: Ekonomi, Toplum ve Kültür eserinin ilk cildi olan Ağ Toplumunun Yükselişi'nde Amerika'dan Uzakdoğu'ya kadar çeşitli bölgelerde yapılmış araştırmalardan yola çıkarak hızlı bilgi, sermaye ve kültür akışının koşulladığı enformasyon çağının dinamiklerine dair sistematik bir teori oluşturuyor.
Eserin ikinci cildi Kimliğin Gücü, üçüncü cildi Binyıl'ın Sonu adlarıyla yayınlanacaktır.
(Tanıtım Yazısından)
Bu yaklaşımın gerisindeki kuramsal perspektifi açıklamak için tek bir düşünce sisteminin yeterli olmadığını, günümüzde toplumların tarihi olarak farklı konjonktürlerde belirlenmiş üretim, deneyim ve iktidar ilişkileri çevresinde örgütlendiğini savunan Manuel Castells, bilgi toplumunun oluşumundaki karmaşık sürecin anlaşılmasına yüzeysellikten uzak bir yaklaşımla açıklık getiriyor.
Yazar Enformasyon Çağı: Ekonomi, Toplum ve Kültür eserinin ilk cildi olan Ağ Toplumunun Yükselişi'nde Amerika'dan Uzakdoğu'ya kadar çeşitli bölgelerde yapılmış araştırmalardan yola çıkarak hızlı bilgi, sermaye ve kültür akışının koşulladığı enformasyon çağının dinamiklerine dair sistematik bir teori oluşturuyor.
Eserin ikinci cildi Kimliğin Gücü, üçüncü cildi Binyıl'ın Sonu adlarıyla yayınlanacaktır.
(Tanıtım Yazısından)
742 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1996
98 people are currently reading
2440 people want to read
About the author
Manuel Castells
167 books248 followersManuel Castells is Professor of Communication and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, as well as Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia, and Marvin and Joanne Grossman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at MIT. He is the author of, among other books, the three-volume work The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews
January 29, 2019
I made the mistake of reading the third volume of this series first – and although Castells says it doesn’t really matter which volume you start with, now that I’ve almost finished all three, it seems to me that it is best to start at the start.
At one point Castells tells us these books took 15 years of his life. And you can tell. This is such an enormous and ambitious project it gives me vertigo trying to imagine anyone would ever start it. The basic idea behind the three volumes is that we now live in a fundamentally new kind of society – a network society – and that has brought about significant changes in how our world works. Not merely superficial changes, but changes that can be said to have brought a kind of revolution affecting every aspect of our lives. In this first volume he describes the information revolution and how that has changed society, work, space and time. Like I said, the scope of this work is breathtaking. He gives an overview of the rise of computers, of the internet, of just-in-time production processes. But he also reminds us that this is a three volume work that he would have preferred to have been a one volume work – where all parts of it, like that of a computer network, are interconnected.
A lot of books I’ve been reading lately have predicted the end of the age of work – almost invariably foreseeing a future that is both work free and dystopian. Castells says that such a future is unlikely given that work has done anything but disappear over the last few decades. In fact, with the increasing feminisation of the labour force – that is, with women entering the labour force in droves since the 1970s – the notion that work is disappearing is in direct contradiction to experience.
Well, sort of. The problem is that none of these processes are simple, they are all complex and contradictory. The proportion of the population that works has grown – but there has also been a huge rise in part time workers, workers have also often been forced out of the labour market in their early 50s, and they often can’t enter the labour market until their late 20s. The nature of work has shifted too, as the industrial sector is replaced by the service sector in many advanced capitalist nations (and the difficulties in measuring the productivity of service industries is a particularly interesting section of this book). Work is also becoming precarious throughout all of our work lives. As another book I read recently said, capitalism prefers to pay employees at piece rates – and the rise of platforms like Uber make that all too obvious and terrifying for many of us. All the same, he doesn’t see work disappearing anytime soon.
The change that technology is presenting may not be to put us all out of work, but rather to change the nature of work and thereby change the material conditions of our lives. A lot of the start of this book presents the history of both the computer and the internet. It is the internet that is the most important metaphor for how the world is changing, in that networks are key to understanding most of what has changed in our world. The internet was first developed by the military as communication and command infrastructure that could avoid being destroyed in a nuclear war. The idea was to create a system of nodes connected via multiple links to other nodes – meaning that if any, or even most, nodes were destroyed the network as a whole would still be viable and able to continue communication. This is not quite a non-hierarchical system – since the nodes have differential value depending on the number of connections they have with other nodes – but it does mean that no individual node is essential to the network as a whole and that the network itself is what is essential, rather than a ‘command centre’. The notion of centre and periphery becomes increasingly meaningless in a network, although, a node with few links to other nodes is perhaps the new definition of periphery.
He provides an extended discussion on how the internet has changed human interactions, including sexual interactions, although, this was written in the days before Tinder and so on and so may have aged more than other parts of this book. But what is particularly interesting is his discussion of the impact of the internet on media. He says a couple of times, reversing McLuhan’s phrase, that the message is the medium. That is, that if you are attempting to communicate with young people about music, then the medium is likely going to be something that looks like MTV, while if you are seeking to communicate to people about a news event, the medium is likely to look a lot like CNN.
There are 500 pages to this book, I’m really not going to be able to give you even a brief summary of even the most important themes – but I am going to have to mention the last two major chapters in the book: The Space of Flows and The Edge of Forever: Timeless Time.
The space of flows chapter is pretty much what I came to this book for. Bauman refers to it in multiple of his books. The idea is that global capitalism is global only for a select few people – global in the proper sense of being largely disconnected from the local. And yet, Castells’ point is that since this new space exists, this kind of no-place, it shows us that a key aspect of the new world we have entered also exists. In book two of this collection he points out that an almost all of the ‘identity’ movements defining our age are intimately connected with this new ‘no-place’, with the global space of flows – and that generally these identity movements exist in opposition to the implications of that space, if not always. The space of flows defines our age, and such a space is inconceivable without the technological, computer and internet revolutions.
The space of flows is contrasted with the space of place – essentially, the space of place is where we have mostly always lived in. These two spaces are not necessarily distinct – that is, they can exist in what appears to be otherwise the same space. He makes the point that world cities, such London, say, both continues to be a space of place for most people that live in them, and to be concurrently globally interconnected spaces within a space of flows. The space of flows is inhabited by people who, regardless of where they were born or brought up, look remarkably the same – they dress in their Hugo Boss suits and wear their Apple Watches and eat foods flown in from across the world so they can eat regardless of season. But it isn’t just that they dress in the same uniform (and as he also says, this is increasingly true of both men and women of this class), but rather that all aspects of their lives are increasingly the same. They live fluid lives between cities such that it hardly matters where they are at any one time – in Auckland or Mumbai, they are connected to everyone they need to be in Shanghai and LA. It isn’t that they just dress the same, but that the corporate buildings they inhabit (and the section in Chapter 6 called The Architecture of the End of History is a must read) can stand in China and yet they are very unlikely to pay any reference at all to the history of the local architecture – the word ‘postmodern’ was originally an architectural term. The space of flows is somewhat like an airport lounge – each one is pretty much identical to any other, the things that differentiate one from another (a kangaroo here, a plastic Eiffel Tower there) are much less interesting that what unites them all.
The space of flows, like computer networks, is everywhere – except, also like computer networks, certain nodes are more important than others. Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, New York – but as with structuralist linguistics, the space of flows is composed of locations that fit within a system of differences. That is, no node is identical to any other node and it is the differentiation between nodes is what is essential. Just as no two words in any one language can have the exact same meaning – so two with locations in the networked space of flows.
The other interesting part of this idea is that just like in the internet, no node is central and therefore essential to the network as a whole. This may be something London is about to learn. One of the things that differentiates London from other nodes is that it is the heart of a financial network – but with Brexit it is possible that London will be in effect turning its back on the major financial centres of Europe and consequently isolating itself from much that makes itself distinctive. It will be interesting to see how sustainable that will be – and how well such a cutting of connections can be done without fundamentally undermining the viability of the node – as I said before, it is the connections that make any node important, not only other more ‘intrinsic’ aspects of the node.
Which is part of the reason why one of the predictions of the early phase of the computer network age has never really come to pass. We had assumed that with the development of the internet the part of space that would become less and less important would be ‘place’ in the particularly restricted sense of real estate location. If you are a company seeking to trim costs, surely it would be better to shift your office to the outskirts of a city, or out of cities altogether – maybe to a beach somewhere for ‘work-life balance’ – rather than continue to pay the ever-increasing rental of inner-city office space. Given that internet connectivity means you can work anywhere at any time…Except this hasn’t eventuated. In fact, the exact opposite has. Today over half of the people of the world live in cities – and this is for the first time in human history. Rather than computer networks making place irrelevant, they have done the opposite. And the reason comes back to the notion of nodes on a network. Global cities provide more connections and interconnections and it is in these that information blooms.
This presents other problems too. The ‘global’ aspects of the city are in stark contradiction to the ‘local’ aspects – that is, global cities are always located in local cities – the space of flows is coextensive with the space of place. And this becomes a problem because global companies have no interest in paying local taxes, and have the means to avoid them, and do all they can to do so – but these global companies also want a significant proportion of the local city finances used to support the infrastructure that facilitates their ‘space of flows’. The contradiction here is generally borne by those of us left in the space of place.
Time is also impacted – he discusses three forms of time: sequential time, timeless time and glacial time. Sequential time is basically what facilitated the industrial revolution – without a clock, factory work is impossible. Fordism requires things to occur one after another and Taylorism speeds up this process by scientifically analysing work processes and then reducing the time spent performing any particular one of them.
Glacial time is the time that the environmental movement is hoping to reacquaint us with – the time in which we ought to be measuring our destruction of the world in, rather than in the blink of an eye we seem so keen to reduce our world to ashes in at present.
Timeless time is the time of the new, networked world. It is not that sequence is no longer important in such a world, but rather that sequence alone no longer explains the causal relationships that exist in this world of flows, where much of what happens is asynchronous or at least disconnected from ‘local’ time.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is covered in this book. One of the things that might put you off reading this is that even though this updated version is from 2010, this is already again getting out of date. But Castells answers this concern too. He says that he didn’t write this book to make predictions about the future nor to completely illuminate the present – but rather to show patterns that help to explain the new world in new ways. As such, the examples given are of almost secondary importance to the patterns they help to illuminate. That the particular examples have gone on doesn’t necessarily take away from the underlying pattern.
This is a seriously interesting book – like I said, I’ve almost finished all three volumes now, and the scope of what is covered almost makes me laugh out loud that someone would think it was okay to tackle this. This is the sort of idea you might dream up when you have had far, far too much to drink, only to abandon the next morning in horrors of a hangover. I don’t agree with everything he says, parts of this strike me as quite conservative, but really, this book is unlike just about anything else I’ve ever read before.
At one point Castells tells us these books took 15 years of his life. And you can tell. This is such an enormous and ambitious project it gives me vertigo trying to imagine anyone would ever start it. The basic idea behind the three volumes is that we now live in a fundamentally new kind of society – a network society – and that has brought about significant changes in how our world works. Not merely superficial changes, but changes that can be said to have brought a kind of revolution affecting every aspect of our lives. In this first volume he describes the information revolution and how that has changed society, work, space and time. Like I said, the scope of this work is breathtaking. He gives an overview of the rise of computers, of the internet, of just-in-time production processes. But he also reminds us that this is a three volume work that he would have preferred to have been a one volume work – where all parts of it, like that of a computer network, are interconnected.
A lot of books I’ve been reading lately have predicted the end of the age of work – almost invariably foreseeing a future that is both work free and dystopian. Castells says that such a future is unlikely given that work has done anything but disappear over the last few decades. In fact, with the increasing feminisation of the labour force – that is, with women entering the labour force in droves since the 1970s – the notion that work is disappearing is in direct contradiction to experience.
Well, sort of. The problem is that none of these processes are simple, they are all complex and contradictory. The proportion of the population that works has grown – but there has also been a huge rise in part time workers, workers have also often been forced out of the labour market in their early 50s, and they often can’t enter the labour market until their late 20s. The nature of work has shifted too, as the industrial sector is replaced by the service sector in many advanced capitalist nations (and the difficulties in measuring the productivity of service industries is a particularly interesting section of this book). Work is also becoming precarious throughout all of our work lives. As another book I read recently said, capitalism prefers to pay employees at piece rates – and the rise of platforms like Uber make that all too obvious and terrifying for many of us. All the same, he doesn’t see work disappearing anytime soon.
The change that technology is presenting may not be to put us all out of work, but rather to change the nature of work and thereby change the material conditions of our lives. A lot of the start of this book presents the history of both the computer and the internet. It is the internet that is the most important metaphor for how the world is changing, in that networks are key to understanding most of what has changed in our world. The internet was first developed by the military as communication and command infrastructure that could avoid being destroyed in a nuclear war. The idea was to create a system of nodes connected via multiple links to other nodes – meaning that if any, or even most, nodes were destroyed the network as a whole would still be viable and able to continue communication. This is not quite a non-hierarchical system – since the nodes have differential value depending on the number of connections they have with other nodes – but it does mean that no individual node is essential to the network as a whole and that the network itself is what is essential, rather than a ‘command centre’. The notion of centre and periphery becomes increasingly meaningless in a network, although, a node with few links to other nodes is perhaps the new definition of periphery.
He provides an extended discussion on how the internet has changed human interactions, including sexual interactions, although, this was written in the days before Tinder and so on and so may have aged more than other parts of this book. But what is particularly interesting is his discussion of the impact of the internet on media. He says a couple of times, reversing McLuhan’s phrase, that the message is the medium. That is, that if you are attempting to communicate with young people about music, then the medium is likely going to be something that looks like MTV, while if you are seeking to communicate to people about a news event, the medium is likely to look a lot like CNN.
There are 500 pages to this book, I’m really not going to be able to give you even a brief summary of even the most important themes – but I am going to have to mention the last two major chapters in the book: The Space of Flows and The Edge of Forever: Timeless Time.
The space of flows chapter is pretty much what I came to this book for. Bauman refers to it in multiple of his books. The idea is that global capitalism is global only for a select few people – global in the proper sense of being largely disconnected from the local. And yet, Castells’ point is that since this new space exists, this kind of no-place, it shows us that a key aspect of the new world we have entered also exists. In book two of this collection he points out that an almost all of the ‘identity’ movements defining our age are intimately connected with this new ‘no-place’, with the global space of flows – and that generally these identity movements exist in opposition to the implications of that space, if not always. The space of flows defines our age, and such a space is inconceivable without the technological, computer and internet revolutions.
The space of flows is contrasted with the space of place – essentially, the space of place is where we have mostly always lived in. These two spaces are not necessarily distinct – that is, they can exist in what appears to be otherwise the same space. He makes the point that world cities, such London, say, both continues to be a space of place for most people that live in them, and to be concurrently globally interconnected spaces within a space of flows. The space of flows is inhabited by people who, regardless of where they were born or brought up, look remarkably the same – they dress in their Hugo Boss suits and wear their Apple Watches and eat foods flown in from across the world so they can eat regardless of season. But it isn’t just that they dress in the same uniform (and as he also says, this is increasingly true of both men and women of this class), but rather that all aspects of their lives are increasingly the same. They live fluid lives between cities such that it hardly matters where they are at any one time – in Auckland or Mumbai, they are connected to everyone they need to be in Shanghai and LA. It isn’t that they just dress the same, but that the corporate buildings they inhabit (and the section in Chapter 6 called The Architecture of the End of History is a must read) can stand in China and yet they are very unlikely to pay any reference at all to the history of the local architecture – the word ‘postmodern’ was originally an architectural term. The space of flows is somewhat like an airport lounge – each one is pretty much identical to any other, the things that differentiate one from another (a kangaroo here, a plastic Eiffel Tower there) are much less interesting that what unites them all.
The space of flows, like computer networks, is everywhere – except, also like computer networks, certain nodes are more important than others. Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, New York – but as with structuralist linguistics, the space of flows is composed of locations that fit within a system of differences. That is, no node is identical to any other node and it is the differentiation between nodes is what is essential. Just as no two words in any one language can have the exact same meaning – so two with locations in the networked space of flows.
The other interesting part of this idea is that just like in the internet, no node is central and therefore essential to the network as a whole. This may be something London is about to learn. One of the things that differentiates London from other nodes is that it is the heart of a financial network – but with Brexit it is possible that London will be in effect turning its back on the major financial centres of Europe and consequently isolating itself from much that makes itself distinctive. It will be interesting to see how sustainable that will be – and how well such a cutting of connections can be done without fundamentally undermining the viability of the node – as I said before, it is the connections that make any node important, not only other more ‘intrinsic’ aspects of the node.
Which is part of the reason why one of the predictions of the early phase of the computer network age has never really come to pass. We had assumed that with the development of the internet the part of space that would become less and less important would be ‘place’ in the particularly restricted sense of real estate location. If you are a company seeking to trim costs, surely it would be better to shift your office to the outskirts of a city, or out of cities altogether – maybe to a beach somewhere for ‘work-life balance’ – rather than continue to pay the ever-increasing rental of inner-city office space. Given that internet connectivity means you can work anywhere at any time…Except this hasn’t eventuated. In fact, the exact opposite has. Today over half of the people of the world live in cities – and this is for the first time in human history. Rather than computer networks making place irrelevant, they have done the opposite. And the reason comes back to the notion of nodes on a network. Global cities provide more connections and interconnections and it is in these that information blooms.
This presents other problems too. The ‘global’ aspects of the city are in stark contradiction to the ‘local’ aspects – that is, global cities are always located in local cities – the space of flows is coextensive with the space of place. And this becomes a problem because global companies have no interest in paying local taxes, and have the means to avoid them, and do all they can to do so – but these global companies also want a significant proportion of the local city finances used to support the infrastructure that facilitates their ‘space of flows’. The contradiction here is generally borne by those of us left in the space of place.
Time is also impacted – he discusses three forms of time: sequential time, timeless time and glacial time. Sequential time is basically what facilitated the industrial revolution – without a clock, factory work is impossible. Fordism requires things to occur one after another and Taylorism speeds up this process by scientifically analysing work processes and then reducing the time spent performing any particular one of them.
Glacial time is the time that the environmental movement is hoping to reacquaint us with – the time in which we ought to be measuring our destruction of the world in, rather than in the blink of an eye we seem so keen to reduce our world to ashes in at present.
Timeless time is the time of the new, networked world. It is not that sequence is no longer important in such a world, but rather that sequence alone no longer explains the causal relationships that exist in this world of flows, where much of what happens is asynchronous or at least disconnected from ‘local’ time.
I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is covered in this book. One of the things that might put you off reading this is that even though this updated version is from 2010, this is already again getting out of date. But Castells answers this concern too. He says that he didn’t write this book to make predictions about the future nor to completely illuminate the present – but rather to show patterns that help to explain the new world in new ways. As such, the examples given are of almost secondary importance to the patterns they help to illuminate. That the particular examples have gone on doesn’t necessarily take away from the underlying pattern.
This is a seriously interesting book – like I said, I’ve almost finished all three volumes now, and the scope of what is covered almost makes me laugh out loud that someone would think it was okay to tackle this. This is the sort of idea you might dream up when you have had far, far too much to drink, only to abandon the next morning in horrors of a hangover. I don’t agree with everything he says, parts of this strike me as quite conservative, but really, this book is unlike just about anything else I’ve ever read before.
October 17, 2019
This book is definitely not timeless and becomes less relevant as time moves on. The author is trapped in his own time period and drivels into superficiality and irrelevance as hindsight slowly deadens his points of emphases within the book. There’s fundamental change happening as the author is writing but he just can’t seem to wrap his thoughts around it. The third volume of Henri Lefebreve’s ‘Critique of Everyday Life’, the volume on ‘Information Age’ understood what was going on in networking and data as knowledge and why it was so important for understanding who we were and what we were becoming and he wrote that in 1981 before this book and Castell would have been better to follow Lefebreve’s approach.
It’s a real danger to understand the world within its own terms and by its own paradigms while uncritically accepting the lies that are constantly being foisted on to us as if they were true within and for themselves. The world has changed in the 20 or so years since this book was first published and his now (circa 1999) that he is describing is hued by the selective tones he chooses to share with the reader. The turn that the world has made since then has made his presentation for the most part irrelevant for the reader of today, 2019.
While I clearly didn’t think this book worked 20 years after it was written, I’m looking forward to the next volume in this series on identity because I suspect it will not suffer from an over emphasis on the now of the time period he was writing about, but I’ve already noticed he’s not really understanding the fundamental change that was happening around religion and once again is not able to see the reality from the appearance since he is getting bogged down in accepting everything around him within the paradigms of the time period. There’s a data point he quotes that will illustrate my point: ‘only 29% of people surveyed saw a need for downloading video’. Almost nobody in the year 2000 would have even understood that there would be a need for that before it happened. To understand the world we live in sometimes we have to lose our old paradigms before we can replace it with something that will be better in every single way. Old farts don’t change; the young people just ignore them and shut up and download and the world fundamentally changes and creates a different version of itself that is not obvious unless one takes a step out of what was and looks at what will be.
It’s a real danger to understand the world within its own terms and by its own paradigms while uncritically accepting the lies that are constantly being foisted on to us as if they were true within and for themselves. The world has changed in the 20 or so years since this book was first published and his now (circa 1999) that he is describing is hued by the selective tones he chooses to share with the reader. The turn that the world has made since then has made his presentation for the most part irrelevant for the reader of today, 2019.
While I clearly didn’t think this book worked 20 years after it was written, I’m looking forward to the next volume in this series on identity because I suspect it will not suffer from an over emphasis on the now of the time period he was writing about, but I’ve already noticed he’s not really understanding the fundamental change that was happening around religion and once again is not able to see the reality from the appearance since he is getting bogged down in accepting everything around him within the paradigms of the time period. There’s a data point he quotes that will illustrate my point: ‘only 29% of people surveyed saw a need for downloading video’. Almost nobody in the year 2000 would have even understood that there would be a need for that before it happened. To understand the world we live in sometimes we have to lose our old paradigms before we can replace it with something that will be better in every single way. Old farts don’t change; the young people just ignore them and shut up and download and the world fundamentally changes and creates a different version of itself that is not obvious unless one takes a step out of what was and looks at what will be.
Read
August 23, 2008Working in the vein of David Harvey, Castells manages to put together a wise, all-encompassing analysis, linking the "network" processes of space, time, and capital. Despite its broad scope, Castells manages to avoid heavy generalization, instead showing us how any oddities and exceptions are firmly ingrained in the network. Good for anyone interested in the state of modern society.
September 14, 2012
I'm reading this for a class assignment. A lot of it is a useful historical review of world economic and technological trends and events from the 70s to the 90s, charting the rise of "network enterprises" as the key units of the new global economy. His main points are on the consequences of these changes, for example that the processes of innovation are marginalizing large sections of the global population, and that there is a growing antithesis between the Net and the Self leading to the rise of extremist, identity-based political and social movements. My professor has warned me not to get "sucked in" to the "seductive" arguments, but mostly I'm enjoying how it addresses my ignorance in some important areas.
March 16, 2013
Very, very serious anthropological book! Contains genealogy and the reasons for the successes and failures of different cultures at different times in technological development, which outlines how we got into the current situation. Castells examines the historical emergence of new forms of social interaction, experience, production, power and control, and what is behind it all reaching the 21st century.
August 27, 2025
Manuel Castells’ The Rise of the Network State extends and deepens the themes of his earlier trilogy, The Information Age, by interrogating the reconfiguration of power, governance, and legitimacy in an era defined by digital networks and global flows. Castells, one of the most influential sociologists of communication and globalization, argues that the state—once understood in Weberian terms as the central locus of political sovereignty and coercive authority—is undergoing a profound transformation. This transformation is neither its dissolution nor its simple continuity, but its reconstruction as a “network state,” a hybrid structure shaped by the tension between transnational flows of capital, information, and culture on the one hand, and the enduring claims of identity, territoriality, and collective security on the other.
At the heart of Castells’ analysis is the thesis that the traditional nation-state has been destabilized by the globalization of economic processes and the digitalization of communication. Power no longer emanates solely from hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions but is dispersed across networks that transcend territorial boundaries. Yet Castells resists the declinist narrative of the “end of the state”; instead, he contends that states are reconstituted through networks of interdependence, in which sovereignty becomes shared, negotiated, and contested across multiple scales—from supranational organizations like the European Union to local and subnational actors asserting autonomy.
A distinctive strength of the book lies in its attention to the cultural and political dimensions of this transformation. Castells emphasizes that while global financial flows and digital communication platforms erode the autonomy of the nation-state, identities—whether national, ethnic, or religious—become intensified in response. The network state is thus a paradoxical entity: at once porous and interdependent, but also subject to pressures from resurgent forms of identity politics. This double movement—toward global integration and local fragmentation—marks the instability of contemporary governance.
Castells’ methodological approach combines empirical detail with a synthetic theoretical vision. Drawing on case studies from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, he demonstrates how states adapt to global informational capitalism while grappling with crises of legitimacy. For instance, the European Union embodies the possibilities and limitations of supranational governance: it operates as a networked polity but is persistently undermined by tensions between integration and national sovereignty. Similarly, Castells explores how global counterterrorism networks, digital surveillance, and the rise of non-state actors illustrate the diffusion and reconfiguration of power.
Critically, The Rise of the Network State is not a triumphalist account of digital globalization. Castells underscores the fragility of the emerging order. The network state is inherently unstable, vulnerable to financial volatility, cyber insecurity, and crises of democratic legitimacy. The capacity of networked states to manage global risks—climate change, pandemics, migration—remains uncertain. Indeed, Castells suggests that the very logic of networking, while enabling flexibility and adaptability, undermines the capacity for coherent collective decision-making.
From an academic standpoint, the book’s greatest contribution lies in its conceptual reframing of the state. Whereas much of the literature on globalization emphasizes either the decline or resilience of the nation-state, Castells advances a more nuanced account: the state as a node in overlapping networks of power, neither sovereign in the classical sense nor irrelevant in the global age. This conceptualization provides a powerful analytical framework for understanding contemporary transformations in governance, security, and legitimacy.
Yet the book is not without limitations. Castells’ sweeping theoretical scope occasionally comes at the expense of sustained empirical depth; some case studies are illustrative rather than fully developed. Moreover, his emphasis on the structural logic of networks may underplay the role of political agency and contingency. For example, the rise of authoritarian populism in the early twenty-first century suggests that state power can be recentralized in ways that resist or manipulate network logics. These phenomena call for a more dialectical account of how networks and hierarchies interact in practice.
The Rise of the Network State is a significant and provocative contribution to political sociology and globalization studies. Castells offers a compelling vision of a world where the state is neither eclipsed nor untouched by globalization, but rather transformed into a complex assemblage of networks. For scholars of international relations, political science, and communication, the book provides both an indispensable framework and an invitation to further inquiry. In an era of accelerating digitalization, resurgent nationalism, and global crises, Castells’ notion of the network state offers a conceptual tool of enduring relevance.
GPT
At the heart of Castells’ analysis is the thesis that the traditional nation-state has been destabilized by the globalization of economic processes and the digitalization of communication. Power no longer emanates solely from hierarchical, bureaucratic institutions but is dispersed across networks that transcend territorial boundaries. Yet Castells resists the declinist narrative of the “end of the state”; instead, he contends that states are reconstituted through networks of interdependence, in which sovereignty becomes shared, negotiated, and contested across multiple scales—from supranational organizations like the European Union to local and subnational actors asserting autonomy.
A distinctive strength of the book lies in its attention to the cultural and political dimensions of this transformation. Castells emphasizes that while global financial flows and digital communication platforms erode the autonomy of the nation-state, identities—whether national, ethnic, or religious—become intensified in response. The network state is thus a paradoxical entity: at once porous and interdependent, but also subject to pressures from resurgent forms of identity politics. This double movement—toward global integration and local fragmentation—marks the instability of contemporary governance.
Castells’ methodological approach combines empirical detail with a synthetic theoretical vision. Drawing on case studies from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, he demonstrates how states adapt to global informational capitalism while grappling with crises of legitimacy. For instance, the European Union embodies the possibilities and limitations of supranational governance: it operates as a networked polity but is persistently undermined by tensions between integration and national sovereignty. Similarly, Castells explores how global counterterrorism networks, digital surveillance, and the rise of non-state actors illustrate the diffusion and reconfiguration of power.
Critically, The Rise of the Network State is not a triumphalist account of digital globalization. Castells underscores the fragility of the emerging order. The network state is inherently unstable, vulnerable to financial volatility, cyber insecurity, and crises of democratic legitimacy. The capacity of networked states to manage global risks—climate change, pandemics, migration—remains uncertain. Indeed, Castells suggests that the very logic of networking, while enabling flexibility and adaptability, undermines the capacity for coherent collective decision-making.
From an academic standpoint, the book’s greatest contribution lies in its conceptual reframing of the state. Whereas much of the literature on globalization emphasizes either the decline or resilience of the nation-state, Castells advances a more nuanced account: the state as a node in overlapping networks of power, neither sovereign in the classical sense nor irrelevant in the global age. This conceptualization provides a powerful analytical framework for understanding contemporary transformations in governance, security, and legitimacy.
Yet the book is not without limitations. Castells’ sweeping theoretical scope occasionally comes at the expense of sustained empirical depth; some case studies are illustrative rather than fully developed. Moreover, his emphasis on the structural logic of networks may underplay the role of political agency and contingency. For example, the rise of authoritarian populism in the early twenty-first century suggests that state power can be recentralized in ways that resist or manipulate network logics. These phenomena call for a more dialectical account of how networks and hierarchies interact in practice.
The Rise of the Network State is a significant and provocative contribution to political sociology and globalization studies. Castells offers a compelling vision of a world where the state is neither eclipsed nor untouched by globalization, but rather transformed into a complex assemblage of networks. For scholars of international relations, political science, and communication, the book provides both an indispensable framework and an invitation to further inquiry. In an era of accelerating digitalization, resurgent nationalism, and global crises, Castells’ notion of the network state offers a conceptual tool of enduring relevance.
GPT
September 8, 2020
Es un libro interesante, enorme, un mamotreto que abarca una infinidad de temas. Una vez leí que a Castells lo criticaban por ser un excelente compilador de teorías e investigaciones, más no de proponer análisis novedosos. Al menos en este primer volumen se agradece la amplia bibliografía citada y la gran cantidad de notas explicativas a final de cada capítulo. En una actualidad dominada por la brevedad de la escritura, la superficialidad de las explicaciones o la cortedad del paper, sin duda este modo de escritura puede parecer agotador y excesivo.
No valoraré el volumen en función de si es tedioso o no, o si el autor gasta tinta en decenas de paginas para explicar un punto de vista o una tesis. La verdad que sí es tedioso en varios pasajes, al explicar detalladamente la evolución del microchip o analizar comparativamente la evolución de las empresas en el sudeste asiático, por ejemplo. A no ser que te importen realmente estos temas tan específicos puede realmente ser abrumador la extensión de estos temas y sus detalles. Pero todo sea en favor de la claridad y la fundamentación empírica.
Creo que la mayor utilidad del libro reside en la explicación teórica-empírica del paso de un modelo societal industrial a otro informacional basada en las nuevas tecnologías, y esto se encuentra en los 2 o 3 primeros capítulos, todos los demás se desarrollan bajo la gran teoría contenido en los primeros.
Este libro fue publicado a fines de los años 90 y creo que los aspectos esenciales se mantienen aunque al 2020 ya se da por sentado mucho de lo que contiene este volumen y ya no nos parece interesante este porvenir Informacional y seguramente muchos de los datos contenidos estén más que desactualizados. Las tecnologías evolucionado demasiado rápido y resultará un tedio leer gran cantidad de ejemplos utilizados que ya nada tienen que ver con nuestra década más que en algún aspecto teórico.
Leí este libro a destiempo, en su momento y hace veinte años seguramente fue fascinante hacerlo y entender lo que venía por delante a través de este volumen.
No valoraré el volumen en función de si es tedioso o no, o si el autor gasta tinta en decenas de paginas para explicar un punto de vista o una tesis. La verdad que sí es tedioso en varios pasajes, al explicar detalladamente la evolución del microchip o analizar comparativamente la evolución de las empresas en el sudeste asiático, por ejemplo. A no ser que te importen realmente estos temas tan específicos puede realmente ser abrumador la extensión de estos temas y sus detalles. Pero todo sea en favor de la claridad y la fundamentación empírica.
Creo que la mayor utilidad del libro reside en la explicación teórica-empírica del paso de un modelo societal industrial a otro informacional basada en las nuevas tecnologías, y esto se encuentra en los 2 o 3 primeros capítulos, todos los demás se desarrollan bajo la gran teoría contenido en los primeros.
Este libro fue publicado a fines de los años 90 y creo que los aspectos esenciales se mantienen aunque al 2020 ya se da por sentado mucho de lo que contiene este volumen y ya no nos parece interesante este porvenir Informacional y seguramente muchos de los datos contenidos estén más que desactualizados. Las tecnologías evolucionado demasiado rápido y resultará un tedio leer gran cantidad de ejemplos utilizados que ya nada tienen que ver con nuestra década más que en algún aspecto teórico.
Leí este libro a destiempo, en su momento y hace veinte años seguramente fue fascinante hacerlo y entender lo que venía por delante a través de este volumen.
July 6, 2025
This book is very, very interesting, but it is not pleasure reading by any stretch of the word. Castells basically goes about explaining everything - an ambitious theory about how the world works. I don't know if my chronology is right, but I think the basic network structures defined here - nodes, degrees, edges have become really influential in Graph Theory and Network Science (but I may be wrong and they actually originated elsewhere and Castells just made use of them here).
The basic premise of the book is that the global economy has shifted from an industrial system to an informational system; which means that the most important thing in this new system is the flow of information and knowledge from one part of the world to another, and those who control the system are those who control how this information flows. Information flows through channels called edges to locations known as nodes. The more edges a node has flowing to it, the greater the degree of the node, and thus the more important the node is in the system. So if you look at the global economy as regards to finance, New York City has the highest number of edges running to and from it, thus is the most important node in the global financial system, Other larger nodes include London, Tokyo etc. Global control of the international financial system largely occurs from these big nodes.
This network system also has implications for how people move, and thus how culture is shaped. If anyone is interested in finance for example, they are much more likely to move to New York City or London or Tokyo: all the skilled people, the resources etc are agglomerated there. Same for Los Angeles if you are interested in movies etc.
The basic premise of the book is that the global economy has shifted from an industrial system to an informational system; which means that the most important thing in this new system is the flow of information and knowledge from one part of the world to another, and those who control the system are those who control how this information flows. Information flows through channels called edges to locations known as nodes. The more edges a node has flowing to it, the greater the degree of the node, and thus the more important the node is in the system. So if you look at the global economy as regards to finance, New York City has the highest number of edges running to and from it, thus is the most important node in the global financial system, Other larger nodes include London, Tokyo etc. Global control of the international financial system largely occurs from these big nodes.
This network system also has implications for how people move, and thus how culture is shaped. If anyone is interested in finance for example, they are much more likely to move to New York City or London or Tokyo: all the skilled people, the resources etc are agglomerated there. Same for Los Angeles if you are interested in movies etc.
March 10, 2013
The three volumes that this book is a part of ate staggering in scope and often penetrating in analysis. Castells' theory of flow is groundbreaking and provides a framework for an entirely new direction in communication theory, the political economy of mediated communication, and the politics of information and culture.
One critique of these three volumes is that there are moments in all three books where Castells becomes nostalgic for a so-called authentic urban space and culture that is highly problematic. As well, his theory of the spatiality and temporality of flow is under-theorised. That said, this is one of the most important series of works on communication to surface in the last 20 years. All three volumes are must reads.
One critique of these three volumes is that there are moments in all three books where Castells becomes nostalgic for a so-called authentic urban space and culture that is highly problematic. As well, his theory of the spatiality and temporality of flow is under-theorised. That said, this is one of the most important series of works on communication to surface in the last 20 years. All three volumes are must reads.
May 20, 2014
What did I think? Not much. I had to read this for a graduate school seminar and had to keep slapping myself awake. The author takes hundreds of pages to say nothing other than the information age (internet, computers, social networks, etc) has changed our lives and globalized much of the world. He could have said that in one sentence rather than page after page of drivel written in what he thinks is impressive academic language but really isn't.
December 1, 2011
Dry, academic, treatse on globalization in the world today. I had to read it for a Globalization class in grad school. I never really got it; the class or the book.
December 19, 2011
Pompous. Terrible. Castells has perfected the art of saying next to nothing in the most overblown opaque possible. I can only hope series dies a rapid death.
November 14, 2017
The most comprehensive sociological research on our current state of society I had ever delved into. It's a deep and intricate intellectual journey through every corner of the world, culminating with a complete redefinition of fundamental aspects of our reality - space and time. First and foremost, Castells gives his main emphasis on empirical knowledge, thus this book is swelling due to long statistical observations, what comes as a two sided coin: this book has an enormous scientific value, although 1/3 of reading is rather boring. But oh well, nobody's obliged to read it all. Castells provides you with a flexible reading experience, where you can either pay attention only to analytical conclusions, or use his statistical observations as a tool for your research, or both. It's a must read for anyone who is eager to understand what the hell is going on with all this digitalized society, and what is the part of individual in it.
May 4, 2020
Castells' book is obviously a little bit dated, but the empirical basis that he brings to conceptualizing the depth and breadth of informationalism and the network society is darned impressive. As a historical document it's one thing, and as a piece of theory it's entirely another, but in both senses there's a synthesis here that pushes past specifics and makes the book and its ideas continually relevant. One important step that Castells takes is to constantly push his concepts and analysis back to the everyday people who live in the type of society that he is identifying, reminding us that social, economic, and technical stratification exists, and has far-reaching effects. In this sense his empirical study is remarkably critical in its inclinations, and so offers a lot of utility for even contemporary theorizing. The book is well-written, too, with fun asides every so often and some good humor in the footnotes. All around a long, sometimes tedious, but ultimately rewarding read.
May 11, 2022
The gap between the speed of development of technology and the perception of social reality is growing more and more each day. Therefore, many new phenomena emerging in technology are much more difficult to understand by people outside their scope today. In this first volume of his three-volume series, in which he examines the social and cultural consequences of the internet and other technological devices, Castells explains how this process emerged and its effects through many different social structures. This study is very valuable, especially since there are very few studies on the results of the Internet in academic sources. I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject to read it.
September 13, 2023
Me parece una buena guía para este campo de las ciencias sociales. Creo que el detalle puesto en el análisis de la transformación del trabajo, la cultura de la realidad virtual y los espacios de flujo fueron muy útiles para complementar o contextualizar otros conceptos que son utilizados comúnmente al hablar de sociedad red.
Es la primera vez que leo a Castells fuera de la universidad, y aunque el libro era relativamente largo, en general, la perspectiva con bastantes enfoques hace que la lectura pase rápido, y, más que nada, están bien estructurados y secuenciados los capítulos.
Es la primera vez que leo a Castells fuera de la universidad, y aunque el libro era relativamente largo, en general, la perspectiva con bastantes enfoques hace que la lectura pase rápido, y, más que nada, están bien estructurados y secuenciados los capítulos.
March 13, 2022
This book is still relevant and maybe more so because practically Castells places in the future has come to be - not in a detailed sense but in general trends and evolution. Want to understand our world digital and analog: read Pickett for economic inequality and castells for sociology in the information age.
December 17, 2020
Main topics are migration and technology here.
June 7, 2021
A lot of economics and business stuff in the middle. A lot.
December 26, 2022
Rivoluzionario quando fu pubblicato
July 22, 2025
توضیحات طولانی با جزئیات خیلی زیاد برای خواننده امروزی جذاب نیست. منم چون دیدم از منابعی است که باید بخونمش خوندم.
در هر صورت این کتاب رو به شخصه فقط برای ادم های اکادمیک توصیه میکنم:))
در هر صورت این کتاب رو به شخصه فقط برای ادم های اکادمیک توصیه میکنم:))
September 3, 2025
Fundamental para entender el siglo XXI
October 7, 2024
این کتاب از آنهایی است که یک دو جین کلید دستت میدهد تا درهای بسیاری را بگشایی و بدانی چه شد که عصر ما چنین آش شله قلم کاری از آب درآمد.
از ریشههای گروههای افراطی مانند القاعده گرفته تا شورشیان جذابی مانند زاپاتیستا، تا شکلگیری فمینیسم و ورافتادن پدرسالاری و در نهایت چگونگی پا گرفتن هویت در جامعهای جهانی که به اشکال گوناگون به هم پیوسته است و ارتباطاتِ نوینِ انسانی و جنبشهای اجتماعی و مطالبهگریها به دنبال آن به وجود میآید.
از ریشههای گروههای افراطی مانند القاعده گرفته تا شورشیان جذابی مانند زاپاتیستا، تا شکلگیری فمینیسم و ورافتادن پدرسالاری و در نهایت چگونگی پا گرفتن هویت در جامعهای جهانی که به اشکال گوناگون به هم پیوسته است و ارتباطاتِ نوینِ انسانی و جنبشهای اجتماعی و مطالبهگریها به دنبال آن به وجود میآید.
September 16, 2015
An exhaustive and pedantic tome that moves somewhat unpredictably between dryasdust academic nervousness - names and dates and light axegrinding - and genuinely original imaginings of how time and space might be reconciled.
This insight about postmodern architecture stands as a fine example of what this book offers:
The more that societies try to recover their identity beyond the global logic of uncontrolled power of flows, the more they need an architecture that exposes their own reality, without faking beauty from a transhistorical spatial repertoire. But at the same time, oversignificant architecture, trying to give a very definite message or to express directly the codes of a given culture, is too primitive a form to be able to penetrate our saturated visual imaginary. - (p. 450)
Another two volumes, though, might be requiring more than is appropriate - a judgment to be made after reading Volume II.
This insight about postmodern architecture stands as a fine example of what this book offers:
The more that societies try to recover their identity beyond the global logic of uncontrolled power of flows, the more they need an architecture that exposes their own reality, without faking beauty from a transhistorical spatial repertoire. But at the same time, oversignificant architecture, trying to give a very definite message or to express directly the codes of a given culture, is too primitive a form to be able to penetrate our saturated visual imaginary. - (p. 450)
Another two volumes, though, might be requiring more than is appropriate - a judgment to be made after reading Volume II.
February 27, 2011
A massive, boundary-spanning, all-encompassing work of social theory attempting to reformulate the way we live now. It's a big book, but full of interesting tid-bits -- a more massive companion to Jerry Davis' Managed by the Markets: How Finance Has Re-Shaped America. Castells does not wear his learning lightly, but he has a lot of it.
Hopefully, I'll sit down and write massive review it deserves soon.
Hopefully, I'll sit down and write massive review it deserves soon.
January 14, 2015
Uma visão abrangente de nossa sociedade. O autor apresenta argumentos onde procura descrever as consequências geradasb pelo advento da tecnologia no dia a dia das pessoas e das empresas. Ao seu ver o advento da tecnologia não aconteceu em função do capital, o que houve foi a adaptação do capitalismo as novas formas de tecnologia. Sua visão sobre o mercado do trabalho e o modo de produção, cita a obra de Schumpeter e faz alusão a uma massificação tecnológica acompanhada de uma crescente extratificação social. Estou ancioso para ler o próximo volume.
March 30, 2014
De consulta obligada si estás investigando temas relacionados con las nuevas tecnologías pero no me convence del todo. Hay un par de ideas interesantes pero el resto es repetición de los mismo.
Creo que abarca demasiados temas sin profundizar demasiado.
Por alguna razón, esta trilogía ha sido un éxito. Puede que mi intelecto no sea capaz de captar toda la esencia de este libro.
Creo que abarca demasiados temas sin profundizar demasiado.
Por alguna razón, esta trilogía ha sido un éxito. Puede que mi intelecto no sea capaz de captar toda la esencia de este libro.
April 7, 2015
A dark and prophetic analysis over the informational society. The author brilliantly describes the modus operandi of the deep and intricate changes our globalized world faces through the rapid movements the network imposes along the development of information technologies. A must read to grasp what might be going on right now.
May 21, 2010
The second edition with the new preface is a must-read! Castells offers a concise insight on the mechanisms of our globalized world and provides a basis to explain the current political and financial incidents.
to-keep-reference
October 18, 2016Acerca de la empresa en red ver Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 151-200.
Imperio Pág.223
Imperio Pág.223
Displaying 1 - 30 of 38 reviews