Contents include the information technology revolution, the new economy, the network enterprise, the transformation of work and employment, the culture of real virtuality, the space of flows, and more. Reprint. Previous edition: c1999. Softcover. DLC: Information technology–Economic aspects. Amazon.com Review
The Rise of the Network Society, the first volume in a trilogy collectively known as the Information Age, has earned Manuel Castells comparisons… More >>
The Rise of the Network Society
My high hopes for this book were based on hype in a financial journal and were quickly dashed when I encountered sentences such as: “The full understanding of the current technological revolution would require the discussion of the specificity of new information technologies vis-a-vis their historical ancestors of equally revolutionary character, such as the discovery of printing in China probably in the late seventh century, and in Europe in the fifteenth century, a classical theme of communications literature.” Note that the sentence would be more tractable if the final murky clause were dropped, if the unnecessary comma between ‘century’ and ‘and’ were also dropped, and if the awkward phrase ‘probably in the late seventh century’ were to be replaced with ‘in about the seventh century’. Every other line of this book is like this sentence. I have been unable to detect a theme which is anything more than a verbose recitation of that which is obvious about the information age. Want to read something light and interesting which is related to the techno economy? Try “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. It’s a marketing book, but it’s rather coherent and it explains quite a bit about the nature of the mad rush to innovate. I just completed “Conquests and Cultures” by Dr. Thomas Sowell. Dr. Sowell’s work is somewhat related to the stated purposes of Senor Castells book in that ‘Conquests’ gives a historical world view of the ways in which peoples have fared at making the most of new technologies. I can’t resist giving a tidbit from Dr. Sowell’s book. Be advised that it does not typify the work. It is this: the advertisements for a coming PBS program blame white men alone for the near extermination of the American bison while attributing their resurrection to vague forces of liberalism; Dr. Sowell states that it frequently happened that Indians were hired by white men to do the hunting. -Mike O’Connor
Rating: 1 / 5
Many of the observations Prof. Catells made are valid, however the connection between information technology and the social problems are not very strong. The network states, global criminal society, wealth disparity, etc. are more or less the byproduct of globalization.
Yes, information technology accelerates the rate of globalization. But would those social problems exist without information technology? Mostly likely yes. These phenomena are not new, they predate the advent of the Information Age (the World Wide Web and mass adoption of internet is a post-1990 phenomenon). Multinatioal organizations (or globalization) have been around for many decades, same goes for the North-South polical economic paradigm. So, attributing all these social problems to the Information Age (at least that is the impression I got out of it) is a jump and may not be an accurate representation. Information capitalism is just another term for globalization.
Nonetheless, his trilogy does demonstrate the acute problem of a global digital divide, and he suggested some possible solutions in some of his other books.
Rating: 4 / 5
The Rise of the Network Society was on my reading list for school — and I was looking forward to reading it, not only in the context of my class, but because the subject is an important one, especially regarding the distribution of information and knowledge in our society. Unfortunately, I was soon disappointed to find that Castells, with all his remarkable insight into the arts of communication, has not been able to go beyond the oh-so cumbersome turns of phrase typical of academic writing. I find myself turned off by the lingo, where I am truly interested in the subject; I resent having to plow my way through his phraseology, while I certainly do appreciate the research and energy he has invested in his work. There seems to be an ideal to academic writing that somewhat opposes the general trend of having knowledge and information made accessible to everyone. Or is it that Castells really means to restrict his writing (and being read) to the groves of Academe? If proving himself versed in the field is more important than getting the information out there, what does he have to teach us about the implications of a network society? That we should better cling to our own in-group, to only those who speak our language, whatever that is? If that is so, what change can we expect from being related through networks? If Castells intends to put into practice his belief that *observing, analyzing, and theorizing is a way of helping to build a different, better world* (p. 4), then he might as well start with generously offering his insights to the world he wants to see changed.
Rating: 2 / 5
First – someone in an earlier review said that this book is not for everyone, it’s an academic book. Well that doesn’t mean that only academics should read it, does it?
The book presents lots of facts and statistics, and then tries to explain “the informational economy” and the economic development. Many impressed academics have written many reviews on this one. It’s not a bad book, but it’s no “Das Capital” either. In 10 years it’ll probably not be as “important”. It’s a very good contemporary piece though…
/JBgood, Kista
Rating: 3 / 5
After twenty years of search and investigations, Manuel Castells gathered many information (on the labour market, demography in the world…) borrowed from work and investigations of researchers and thus could describe the change of the world society. He put forwards the emergence of a new society: the information society which in its change has impacts on the structure of employment, the relations of the individuals to the medias and the organization of space by flows of information. This book is a mine of information and gives still more desire for reading the two following volumes. cindy
Rating: 5 / 5