The Rise of the Network Society

Manuel Castells

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444356311
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This first book in Castells' groundbreaking trilogy, with a substantial new preface, highlights the economic and social dynamics of the information age and shows how the network society has now fully risen on a global scale.

• Groundbreaking volume on the impact of the age of information on all aspects of society
• Includes coverage of the influence of the internet and the net-economy
• Describes the accelerating pace of innovation and social transformation
• Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe

1

The Information Technology Revolution

Which Revolution?

“Gradualism,” wrote paleontologist Stephen J. Gould, “the idea that all change must be smooth, slow, and steady, was never read from the rocks. It represented a common cultural bias, in part a response of nineteenth century liberalism to a world in revolution. But it continues to color our supposedly objective reading of life’s history… The history of life, as I read it, is a series of stable states, punctuated at rare intervals by major events that occur with great rapidity and help to establish the next stable era.”¹ My starting-point, and I am not alone in this assumption,² is that, at the end of the twentieth century, we lived through one of these rare intervals in history. An interval characterized by the transformation of our “material culture”³ by the works of a new technological paradigm organized around information technologies.

By technology I understand, in a straight line from Harvey Brooks and Daniel Bell, “the use of scientific knowledge to specify ways of doing things in a reproducible manner.”⁴ Among information technologies, I include, like everybody else, the converging set of technologies in micro-electronics, computing (machines and software), telecommunications/broadcasting, and opto-electronics.⁵ In addition, unlike some analysts, I also include in the realm of information technologies genetic engineering and its expanding set of developments and applications.⁶ This is not only because genetic engineering is focused on the decoding, manipulation, and eventual reprogramming of the information codes of living matter, but also because biology, electronics, and informatics seem to be converging and interacting in their applications, in their materials, and, more fundamentally, in their conceptual approach, a topic that deserves further mention below in this chapter.⁷ Around this nucleus of information technologies, in the broad sense as defined, a constellation of major technological breakthroughs took place in the last two decades of the twentieth century in advanced materials, in energy sources, in medical applications, in manufacturing techniques (current or potential, such as nano-technology), and in transportation technology, among others.⁸ Furthermore, the current process of technological transformation expands exponentially because of its ability to create an interface between technological fields through common digital language in which information is generated, stored, retrieved, processed, and transmitted. We live in a world that, in the expression of Nicholas Negroponte, has become digital.⁹

The prophetic hype and ideological manipulation characterizing most discourses on the information technology revolution should not mislead us into underestimating its truly fundamental significance. It is, as this book will try to show, at least as major an historical event as was the eighteenth-century industrial revolution, inducing a pattern of discontinuity in the material basis of economy, society, and culture. The historical record of technological revolutions, as compiled by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell,¹⁰ shows that they are all characterized by their pervasiveness, that is by their penetration of all domains of human activity, not as an exogenous source of impact, but as the fabric in which such activity is woven. In other words, they are process-oriented, besides inducing new products. On the other hand, unlike any other revolution, the core of the transformation we are experiencing in the current revolution refers to technologies of information processing and communication.¹¹ Information technology is to this revolution what new sources of energy were to the successive industrial revolutions, from the steam engine to electricity, to fossil fuels, and even to nuclear power, since the generation and distribution of energy was the key element underlying the industrial society. However, this statement on the pre-eminent role of information technology is often confused with the characterization of the current revolution as essentially dependent upon new knowledge and information. This is true of the current process of technological change, but so it is of preceding technological revolutions, as is shown by leading historians of technology, such as Melvin Kranzberg and Joel Mokyr.¹² The first industrial revolution, although not science-based, relied on the extensive use of information, applying and developing pre-existing knowledge. And the second industrial revolution, after 1850, was characterized by the decisive role of science in fostering innovation. Indeed, R&D laboratories appeared for the first time in the German chemical industry in the last decades of the nineteenth century.¹³

What characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation.¹⁴ An illustration may clarify this analysis. The uses of new telecommunications technologies in the past two decades have gone through three distinct stages: the automation of tasks, an experimentation of uses, and a reconfiguration of applications.¹⁵ In the first two stages, technological innovation progressed through learning by using, in Rosenberg’s terminology.¹⁶ In the third stage, the users learned technology by doing, and ended up reconfiguring the networks, and finding new applications. The feedback loop between introducing new technology, using it, and developing it into new realms becomes much faster under the new technological paradigm. As a result, diffusion of technology endlessly amplifies the power of technology, as it becomes appropriated and redefined by its users. New information technologies are not simply tools to be applied, but processes to be developed. Users and doers may become the same. Thus users can take control of technology, as in the case of the Internet (see below in this chapter, and in chapter 5). There is therefore a close relationship between the social processes of creating and manipulating symbols (the culture of society) and the capacity to produce and distribute goods and services (the productive forces). For the first time in history, the human mind is a direct productive force, not just a decisive element of the production system.

Thus, computers, communication systems, and genetic decoding and programming are all amplifiers and extensions of the human mind. What we think, and how we think, become expressed in goods, services, material and intellectual output, be it food, shelter, transportation and communications systems, computers, missiles, health, education, or images. The growing integration between minds and machines, including the DNA machine, is canceling what Bruce Mazlish calls the “fourth discontinuity”¹⁷ (the one between humans and machines), fundamentally altering the way we are born, we live, we learn, we work, we produce, we consume, we dream, we fight, or we die. Of course, cultural/institutional contexts and purposeful social action decisively interact with the new technological system, but this system has its own, embedded logic, characterized by the capacity to translate all inputs into a common information system, and to process such information at increasing speed, with increasing power, at decreasing cost, in a potentially ubiquitous retrieval and distribution network.

There is an additional feature characterizing the information technology revolution in comparison with its historical predecessors. Mokyr¹⁸ has shown that technological revolutions took place only in a few societies, and diffused in a relatively limited geographic area, often living in isolated space and time vis-à-vis other regions of the planet. Thus, while Europeans borrowed some of the discoveries that took place in China, for many centuries China and Japan adopted European technology only on a very limited basis, mainly restricted to military applications. The contact between civilizations at different technological levels often took the form of the destruction of the least developed, or of those who had predominantly applied their knowledge to non-military technology, as in the case of American civilizations annihilated by Spanish conquerors, sometimes through accidental biological warfare.¹⁹ The industrial revolution did extend to most of the globe from its original West European shores during the next two centuries. But its expansion was highly selective, and its pace rather slow by current standards of technological diffusion. Indeed, even in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century, sectors that accounted for the majority of the labor force, and at least half the gross national product, were not affected by new industrial technologies.²⁰ Furthermore, its planetary reach in the following decades more often than not took the form of colonial domination, be it in India under the British empire; in Latin America under commercial/industrial dependency on Britain and the United States; in the dismembering of Africa under the Berlin Treaty; or in the opening to foreign trade of Japan and China by the guns of Western ships. In contrast, new information technologies have spread throughout the globe with lightning speed in less than two decades, between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, displaying a logic that I propose as characteristic of this technological revolution: the immediate application to its own development of technologies it generates, connecting the world through information technology. ²¹ To be sure, there are large areas of the world, and considerable segments of the population, switched off from the new technological system: this is precisely one of the central arguments of this book. Furthermore, the speed of technological diffusion is selective, both socially and functionally. Differential timing in access to the power of technology for people, countries, and regions is a critical source of inequality in our society. The switched-off areas are culturally and spatially discontinuous: they are in the American inner cities or in the French banlieues, as much as in the shanty towns of Africa or in the deprived rural areas of China or India. Yet dominant functions, social groups, and territories across the globe are connected at the dawn of the twenty-first century in a new technological system that, as such, started to take shape only in the 1970s.

How did this fundamental transformation happen in what amounts to an historical instant? Why is it diffusing throughout the globe at such an accelerated, if uneven, pace? Why is it a “revolution?” Since our experience of the new is shaped by our recent past, I think the answers to these basic questions could be helped by a brief reminder of the historical record of the industrial revolution, still present in our institutions, and therefore in our mind-set.

Lessons from the Industrial Revolution

Historians have shown that there were at least two industrial revolutions: the first started in the last third of the eighteenth century, characterized by new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, the Cort’s process in metallurgy, and, more broadly, by the replacement of hand-tools by machines; the second one, about 100 years later, featured the development of electricity, the internal combustion engine, science-based chemicals, efficient steel casting, and the beginning of communication technologies, with the diffusion of the telegraph and the invention of the telephone. Between the two there are fundamental continuities, as well as some critical differences, the main one being the decisive importance of scientific knowledge in sustaining and guiding technological development after 1850.²² It is precisely because of their differences that features common to both may offer precious insights in understanding the logic of technological revolutions.

First of all, in both cases, we witness what Mokyr describes as a period of “accelerating and unprecedented technological change”²³ by historical standards. A set of macro-inventions prepared the ground for the blossoming of micro-inventions in the realms of agriculture, industry, and communications. Fundamental historical discontinuity, in an irreversible form, was introduced into the material basis of the human species, in a path-dependent process whose inner, sequential logic has been researched by Paul David and theorized by Brian Arthur.²⁴ They were indeed “revolutions,” in the sense that a sudden, unexpected surge of technological applications transformed the processes of production and distribution, created a flurry of new products, and shifted decisively the location of wealth and power in a planet that became suddenly within the reach of those countries and elites able to master the new technological system. The dark side of this technological adventure is that it was inextricably tied to imperialist ambitions and inter-imperialist conflicts.

Yet this is precisely a confirmation of the revolutionary character of new industrial technologies. The historical ascent of the so-called West, in fact limited to Britain and a handful of nations in Western Europe as well as to their North American, and Australian offspring, is fundamentally linked to the technological superiority achieved during the two industrial revolutions.²⁵ Nothing in the cultural, scientific, political, or military history of the world prior to the industrial revolution would explain such indisputable “Western” (Anglo-Saxon/German, with a French touch) supremacy between the 1750s and the 1940s. China was a far superior culture for most of pre-Renaissance history; the Muslim civilization (taking the liberty of using such a term) dominated much of the Mediterranean and exerted a significant influence in Africa and Asia throughout the modern age; Asia and Africa remained by and large organized around autonomous cultural and political centers; Russia ruled in splendid isolation a vast expanse across East Europe and Asia; and the Spanish empire, the laggard European culture of the industrial revolution, was the major world power for more than two centuries after 1492. Technology, expressing specific social conditions, introduced a new historical path in the second half of the eighteenth century.

This path originated in Britain, although its intellectual roots can be traced back all over Europe and to the Renaissance’s spirit of discovery.²⁶ Indeed, some historians insist that the necessary scientific knowledge underlying the first industrial revolution was available 100 years earlier, ready to be used under mature social conditions; or, as others argue, waiting for the technical ingenuity of self-trained inventors, such as Newcomen, Watt, Crompton or Arkwright, able to translate available knowledge, combined with craft experience, into decisive new industrial technologies.²⁷ However, the second industrial revolution, more dependent on new scientific knowledge, shifted its center of gravity towards Germany and the United States, where the main developments in chemicals, electricity, and telephony took place.²⁸ Historians have painstakingly dissected the social conditions of the shifting geography of technical innovation, often focusing on the characteristics of education and science systems, or on the institutionalization of property rights. However, the contextual explanation for the uneven trajectory of technological innovation seems to be excessively broad and open to alternative interpretations. Hall and Preston, in their analysis of the changing geography of technological innovation between 1846 and 2003, show the importance of local seedbeds of innovation, of which Berlin, New York, and Boston are crowned as the “high technology industrial centers of the world” between 1880 and 1914, while “London in that period was a pale shadow of Berlin.”²⁹ The reason lies in the territorial basis for the interaction of systems of technological discovery and applications, namely in the synergistic properties of what is known in the literature as “milieux of innovation.”³⁰

Indeed, technological breakthroughs came in clusters, interacting with each other in a process of increasing returns. Whichever conditions determined such clustering, the key lesson to be retained is that technological innovation is not an isolated instance.³¹ It reflects a given state of knowledge, a particular institutional and industrial environment, a certain availability of skills to define a technical problem and to solve it, an economic mentality to make such application cost-efficient, and a network of producers and users who can communicate their experiences cumulatively, learning by using and by doing: elites learn by doing, thereby modifying the applications of technology, while most people learn by using, thus remaining within the constraints of the packaging of technology. The interactivity of systems of technological innovation and their dependence on certain “milieux” of exchange of ideas, problems, and solutions are critical features that can be generalized from the experience of past revolutions to the current one.³²

The positive effects of new industrial technologies on economic growth, living standards, and the human mastery of a hostile Nature (reflected in the dramatic lengthening of life expectancy, which did not improve steadily before the eighteenth century) over the long run are indisputable in the historical record. However, they did not come early, in spite of the diffusion of the steam engine and new machinery. Mokyr reminds us that “per capita consumption and living standards increased little initially [at the end of the eighteenth century] but production technologies changed dramatically in many industries and sectors, preparing the way for sustained Schumpeterian growth in the second half of the nineteenth century when technological progress spread to previously unaffected industries.”³³ This is a critical assessment that forces us to evaluate the actual effects of major technological changes in light of a time lag highly dependent on the specific conditions of each society. The historical record seems to indicate however that, in general terms, the closer the relationship between the sites of innovation, production, and use of new technologies, the faster the transformation of societies, and the greater the positive feedback from social conditions on the general conditions for further innovation. Thus, in Spain, the industrial revolution diffused rapidly in Catalonia, as early as the late eighteenth century, but followed a much slower pace in the rest of Spain, particularly in Madrid and in the south; only the Basque Country and Asturias had joined the process of industrialization by the end of the nineteenth century.³⁴ The boundaries of industrial innovation were to a large extent coterminous with areas that were prohibited to trade with the Spanish American colonies for about two centuries: while Andalusian and Castilian elites, as well as the crown, could live from their American rents, Catalans had to provide for themselves through their trade and ingenuity, while being submitted to the pressure of a centralist state. Partly as a result of this historical trajectory, Catalonia and the Basque Country were the only fully industrialized regions until the 1950s and the main seedbeds of entrepreneurialism and innovation, in sharp contrast with trends in the rest of Spain. Thus, specific social conditions foster technological innovation that itself feeds into the path of economic development and further innovation. Yet the reproduction of such conditions is cultural and institutional, as much as economic and technological. The transformation of social and institutional environments may alter the pace and geography of technological development (for example, Japan after the Meiji Restoration, or Russia for a brief period under Stolypin), although past history does bear considerable inertia.

A last and essential lesson from the indu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Information Age
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface to the 2010 Edition of The Rise of the Network Society
• Acknowledgments 2000
• Acknowledgments 1996
• Prologue: the Net and the Self
• 1: The Information Technology Revolution
• 2: The New Economy: Informationalism, Globalization, Networking
• 3: The Network Enterprise: the Culture, Institutions, and Organizations of the Informational Economy
• 4: The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-timers1
• 5: The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of Interactive Networks
• 6: The Space of Flows
• 7: The Edge of Forever: Timeless Time
• Conclusion: the Network Society
• Summary of the Contents of Volumes II and III
• Bibliography
• Index