The internet bubble produced an abundance of in-house literature attempting to explain the phenomenon. Books with titles like Blur and New Rules for the New Economy vied with techno magazines such as Wired and Fast Company in their breathless admiration of change. But the most respected attempt to link the twin revolutions of technology and globalisation into a convincing narrative has come from a 57-year-old Spanish-born former Marxist, Manuel Castells, now professor of sociology and planning at Berkeley. His reputation is that of cartographer-in-chief to the information age.
If his dust-jackets are to be believed, Castells is a world-beater. Anthony Giddens, Britain's most prominent sociologist, has argued that "it would not be fanciful to compare the work to Weber's Economy and Society." Other reviewers have compared Castells's analysis of the interaction between technology, economics, politics and religion with Marx and Adam Smith. The Wall Street Journal called him "the first great philosopher of cyberspace"; the Los Angeles Times acclaimed him as the "Voltaire of the Information Age." There is evidently a "cult of Castells."
Yet, in some ways, Castells is a "guru's guru." The breadth of his endeavour-a 20-year attempt to synthesise a total theory of the information age covering global economic, technological, social and cultural change-excites the imagination of other intellectuals. However, the sheer abstract complexity of the project puts it beyond the patience of a wider public.
Martin Ince, deputy editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, is adding Castells's name to Polity Press's Conversations With series about leading contemporary thinkers. Telling friends of his project, he says, has led to two results: "I tell some people that I am writing a book about Castells and they look at me blankly. Others want an autograph."
These autograph hunters are probably converts from Castells' most significant work, the 1,200 page Information Age trilogy. Epic in scale and scope it is notable for its intricacy and dense prose style. By contrast, in his latest book, The Internet Galaxy, he has taken time to distil and demystify. This small but complete volume is a critical introduction to internet-related theories, while doubling as a simplified reader on his own ideas. The book should help to spread his influence beyond the faithful.
If it does, it begs a number of questions. First, behind the arcane concepts, what is the gist of Castells's story about the modern world? Second, is it worth the hype? Third, what does this particular brand of social theory have to tell us about current issues? And finally, how do we account for the widespread admiration of his ideas?
Theorising for its own sake may be diverting, but post-11th September we live in a world seeking fewer questions and more answers. Castells's scope, not simply concerned with technology but covering complex changes in identity politics and the sometimes violent reaction to the new world, should provide real insight. If it does not, it must call into question the credibility of his variety of grand social theory.
Ian Hargreaves, a former editor of the Independent, claims that Castells's credibility comes from his roots: "there is a lived-in quality to his work. He is not simply another American writing from an American perspective. Rather, his personal experiences and research have been global." Born in Barcelona in 1942 to parents both employed in the Spanish finance ministry, Castells entered university in his home city to study law and economics. He became involved in protests against the Francoist regime and fled to Paris to avoid arrest. There, having decided to become a sociologist, he worked under social theorist Alain Touraine and became the Sorbonne's youngest professor at the precocious age of 24. Over the next two decades he studied urban spaces and "industrial location" while also endeavouring to observe social change first hand. A possibly apocryphal story claims that Daniel Cohn-Bendit began the 1968 Nanterre student rebellion in his classroom; certainly Castells was forced to leave France for Switzerland during the protests. He also studied in Allende's Chile, and was expelled from Brazil while working with current President Hernando Enrique Cardozo. Eventually, his interest in real-world change led him to leave the "purely abstract and theoretical" nature of French academia and take his interest in Marxist social theory to the University of Berkeley in 1979.
Castells's arrival in California coincided with the beginnings of what would soon be called Silicon Valley. A feeling "that something very important was going on" in the Bay Area which the theorists of Europe were failing to grasp led him to concentrate his studies on the impact of technological development and to question how these embryonic changes would play out in economic and social life.
The internet galaxy is Castells's 18th book. However, the first 14 should be seen as preparation for instalments 15 to 17, the trilogy, Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The three books-The Rise of the Network Society, The Power of Identity, and End of Millennium-attempt the first comprehensive vision of the forces of change remaking the 21st century. They propose a "network society" as the social organisation of the internet age and underpin it with dense case studies of how it is transforming companies, cities and states.
Castells argues that the modern world is the result of three colliding forces: the rise of electronic communications networks, embodied in the internet's "network of networks"; various social and cultural revolutions beginning in the 1960s; and the economic restructuring of western economies during the 1980s. The network society is forged by the interaction of these forces. Each requires the other: the restructuring of capitalism could not have happened without electronic networks; equally, the freewheeling spirit of Silicon Valley was sustained by the liberal individualism fostered in the 1960s.
Just as Weber and Marx had organisations at the heart of their theories-respectively, bureaucracy and the state-so Castells places networks at the front of all his ideas. The network is the "prime organisational form" of the information age. Economic and social organisations previously dominated by specific things (states, corporations, individuals) can now only be understood by looking at the networks that bind them. Castells sees these "extraordinary, dynamic, lean structures" lurking in every corner. Stove-pipe corporations are being gradually excavated and transformed into interconnected "network enterprises." This in turn gives rise to the transformation of work and the cult of free workers who use access to information and contacts to create a new world of fragmented and individualised labour.
Other relics of the industrial era are similarly unsettled: civil society is disrupted, nation states see their legitimacy and effectiveness reduced and traditional cultures are undermined. Societies are no longer "discrete worlds" in which power flows down from the top. In a decentralised, network world, social change becomes more indeterminate. The politics of the industrial age centred around social class and distribution; the politics of the information age derive from values and identity.
The internet is a central emblem of these changes: non-hierarchical, ungoverned, instant, value-based. The internet creates what Castells dubs a culture of "real virtuality" which occurs in a "space of flows." Real virtuality can be loosely understood as the replacement of stable social foundations (place, nation, class or race) with virtual and changeable environments, which can exist in cyberspace quite separately from geographic locations or real cultural backgrounds. The virtual and networked space of flows is contrasted with the industrial-era "space of places" in which the same stable foundations are sustained by organisations and locations existing in tangible settings and through an orderly process of time. The network citizens, stripped of certainty and security while cocooned in networks they cannot control or comprehend, become dominated by the search for personal or collective identity. Some adapt well, while others react aggressively against a world "characterised by informed bewilderment."
To back up this vision, Castells provides a wealth of statistics and case studies. The vision itself is optimistic and somewhat awed. He is clearly enamoured by his networks and networkers, who provide the possibility of realising modernity's dream of continual reinvention. However, as a man of the left he also worries about those excluded from the new order, particularly in Africa, and the tendency of those within the system to react against and disrupt it.
What should we make of Castells's contribution? In the narrow world of academic social science he has undoubtedly been a creative force. David Held, a leading globalisation theorist, says: "His work is pioneering. It must be understood against a previous idea of the world as neatly divided into clearly bounded states, with hierarchical organisations and rigid social structures shaped by particular economic activities. The emerging order is more fluid and volatile. " But there are four aspects of his work that have attracted criticism: language, precision, explanatory power and form.
His use of language is the most common criticism. Difficult language is justified in the expression of difficult concepts and some respected theory from Weber to Foucault requires the reader to be armed with a specialist lexicon. Yet convoluted writing is not always necessary to express complex arguments and should only be tolerated if it is internally coherent and adds to understanding. Castells's neologistic concepts-real virtuality, the space of flows, timeless time, and others-can be bewildering. This practice of throwing abstract nouns at problems would be acceptable were these new concepts backed up with articulate explanations. However, notwithstanding his case studies, the explanatory prose style is often more aphoristic than empirical. Picking one concept at random, "timeless time," "the dominant temporality of our society," is said to occur when "the characteristics of a given context, namely the informational paradigm and the network society, induce systemic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena performed in that context." Is this helpful? Other similar examples abound and whatever value might be found in the idea is often lost in its explanation. Perhaps with the relative clarity of The Internet Galaxy, Castells has realised that crimes against clear writing are not necessary for academic acclaim.
Second, Castells's work has been accused of imprecision. He often uses evidence in the rather sweeping, rhetorical manner of European social theory. Peter Abell, a social scientist at the LSE, details these failings in a coruscating attack on Castells (in particular) and social theory (in general). His accusation is that The Information Age ignores the "good intellectual practices of careful and precise exposition," claiming that no single chapter would "easily find a place on the pages of a respectable social science journal. The quality of the writing and often inept and selective use of data would rule this out." Abell has a point: it is difficult to find concrete and precise definitions of Castells's central concepts. Even the all-important networks are left loosely defined. Some critical areas of analysis also seem oddly under-developed. Financial markets, the most important of the network flows, are not analysed in any depth.
Third, there is the question of explanatory power. Castells has always been adamant that he is no pop-futurist, often citing Alvin Toffler as the exemplary offender. In interviews, he stresses his refusal to offer predictions or prescriptions. But surely his concepts must have some explanatory power, otherwise the network idea becomes just a metaphor. The Information Age does implicitly claim explanatory power for its concepts. The company Cisco Systems is given a lengthy profile and held up as an exemplar of the "network enterprise," leaving the strong impression that all companies either are, or will soon, look a lot like Cisco. But, of course, most companies do not look like Cisco. This example is writ large in the frequent use of Silicon Valley culture as the likely model which other areas will and are following.
The final problem is the form itself. His work is the grandest form of social theory, which ranges over virtually every conceivable topic and in so doing produces an all-encompassing narrative into which all examples seem to fit. The second and third volumes of The Information Age contain a dizzying array of illustrations neatly slotted into the theory, from Colombian drug runners and Mexican Zapatistas to American ghetto kids and African tribespeople.
But are the examples shoe-horned into the theory? In the End of Millennium, Castells (who is married to a Russian) produces a first-rate analysis of the demise of the Soviet Union. He places the collapse in the context of his theories, arguing that it "proved incapable of navigating the stormy waters of historical transition between industrialism and informationalism." This is uncontroversial. However, a simple macroeconomic model of centrally-planned economies would reach the same conclusion in rather less time. Moreover, the self-assured style of Castells gives no indication that the precise reasons for Soviet decline remain contested. Once again, the impression is left that placing such examples within the context of an overarching theory might reveal and conceal in equal measure. Such confident grand narrative undoubtedly seems more satisfying than more circumspect and limited analysis, but is it really more useful?
In the aftermath of 11th September there has been a profound need for explanation. It is reasonable to note that, although an event of this scale could conceivably have happened at any time in the past 30 years, it did not. It is equally plausible to request that a social theorist of Castells's reputation would be able to offer some sort of analysis of how such events should usefully be viewed. Where, then, does terrorism of this kind fit in the network society?
In terms of prediction, initially the theory does not disappoint. The attack of 11th September is anticipated with depressing clarity in End of Millennium: "Increasing technological sophistication leads to two trends converging towards outright terror: on the one hand, a small determined group, well-financed, and well-informed, can devastate entire cities, or strike at the nerve centres of our livelihood; on the other hand, the infrastructure of our everyday life, from energy to transportation to water supply, has become so complex, so intertwined, that its vulnerability has increased exponentially."
So far, so good; although Castells is merely making a commonplace observation made by countless other commentators. But he goes further. In the second volume of The Information Age, The Power of Identity, under the chapter heading "Identity and Meaning in the Network Society," Castells discusses the rise of fundamentalism and identity politics, looking specifically at the rise of fundamentalist Islam and contrasting it with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in the US. This section of the book contains a wealth of research on developments across the Muslim world. However, the cause of Islamic fundamentalism is again located in his big picture theory. The process begins with raised expectations, following state-led economic modernisation in the 1960s, followed by 20 years of economic decline, caused by a failure to "adapt to the new conditions of global competition and technological revolution."
The Internet Galaxy considers another form of sometimes violent political network: the anti-globalisation movements. Here we have, Castells argues, "a paradigmatic example of the new type of social movement." Such movements are caused by another troika of Castellian driving forces. First, new social movements are based "around cultural values." This is not uncontroversial, but the explanation relapses into impenetrable jargon-such movements can be varied in purpose, but "they take on new meaning when they become trenches of cultural identity to build social autonomy in a world dominated by homogenous information flows." The second characteristic of new social movements is, and no surprises here, that they organise in networks. Third, they are global in scope: reversing, Castells claims, the old adage that modern social protests must think locally for their networks draw strength from local problems and groups, but must act globally to have influence and effect upon the global system.
How relevant is this vision of networked dissent? Does it flow easily from Castells's vision of a network society, or is this another example of phenomena being adopted by an over-extended theory? Although the network analysis is interesting in both of these cases, we do run up against the same problem of precision and explanatory power. The two types of dissenting network-one of terror, one of protest-seem very different. Al Qaida may be a network, but it often curtails its use of electronic communication to avoid interception. Individuals travel instead and meet face to face. Al Qaida deploys autonomous cells defined by their not being in constant contact with the whole group-it could be said to be the antithesis of a network. Conversely, anti-globalisation protesters like the J18 and Reclaim the Street maintain constant contact and tend to organise using mobiles, e-mail and the web. One network is prehistoric compared to the other, but which has had more impact?
Castells anticipates some of these criticisms. Speaking to Prospect in early January about 11th September, he said: "al Qaida certainly shows the effectiveness of networking as a form of organisation. It is true that most of their important exchanges are face to face. But the important point is that in a network, the destruction of a 'node' (even an important one) does not destroy the network itself, so long as it has the capacity to reconfigurate itself on the basis of new resources which are labour (people moved by fundamentalism), capital (money laundering in the global financial markets), and information (technology provided by the criminal economy)."
Castells claims that nowadays, as paper beats stone, network beats industrial-era hierarchy or bureaucracy. But can we say that the networked anti-globalisation protesters "won"? In facing down the WTO and the police forces of various countries they came up against standard industrial-era organisations. Who emerged victorious? It would be a brave theorist who argued that the protesters achieved more than raising the profile of their organisations and complaints. Furthermore, network organisations, even of a dissenting kind, cannot do away with hierarchy and leadership entirely; indeed, power within such networks may come to be based not on democratic legitimacy but on charisma.
One could make similar points about the response to 11th September. An old-fashioned state bureaucracy-admittedly a large and rich one-destroyed a terror network in the mountains of Afghanistan. Castells is not so sure: "I do not think the US state has been very effective. Subduing by bombardment a few guerrilla bands in Afghanistan (while killing many civilians), without capturing Bin Laden, and without destroying the fundamentalist networks and their support bases around the world, does not seem much of a victory. The battle of information has been lost by the western intelligence agencies. Without a network state able to respond with flexible policies and tactics, the insurgent networks will retain a strategic advantage."
Castells's vision of networked organisation may lack precision or explanatory power, but his insight on organisational structure and interconnection remains useful. Charles Leadbeater, one of Britain's foremost analysts of the information revolution, admits that sometimes the theory doesn't quite hang together, but claims that: "his achievement is to have clearly linked the rise of a new type of economic activity with a new organisational form. Others have since written more profoundly on internet economics, and the importance of networks, but it was Castells who first saw their wider implication."
But what explains Castells's extraordinary appeal, at least amongst certain groups of journalists and academics? One explanation is that he is himself a kind of "high theory journalist," a magpie analyst who satisfyingly slots current events into an impressive theoretical framework. Similarly, Castells's brand of social theory-rooted in the here and now-appeals to many academics with a residual commitment to radical change. Peter Abell believes that the rapid expansion of higher education from the 1960s has produced new types of thinkers, who cannot be bothered with the rigour and limitations of traditional empirical social science. Egged on by students and commentators hungry for complete explanations of social phenomena, he claims that Castells and others like Giddens head a new caste of thinkers whose contributions to proper social science are deeply flawed. To this academic industry we might also add the rise of an equally powerful commercial industry formed in the early 1990s to explain the cause and consequences of technological development. A mix of consultancy firms and business writers, equally hungry for plausible storylines about the modern world, have turned to theorists to make credible their offerings. In both of these cases, Castells's reputation should properly be seen as the function of our continuing hunger for narrative about the world, and the desire to understand the whole rather than just the parts.
Here we settle upon a dual culpability: Castells, or at least his proselytisers, are guilty of suggesting that his theory would provide the answers, and his readers are guilty of expecting it to do so. Instead, we should view his network society as an imperfect roadmap, perhaps no more than a useful metaphor. Castells himself in The Internet Galaxy concedes that the idea of a network society remains a work in progress. His efforts invite criticism, but he does provide a compelling, ambitious vision of society and change in the era of globalisation. This alone is sufficient to justify the cult of Castells.
