The other side of cyberspace - interview with professor Manuel Castells - Cover Story

Communication World, March, 1999 by John Gerstner

Where all of this is leading, Castells has little to say. Only in the final chapter of Volume III, "End of Millennium," does he indulge in a bit of futurology. "The dream of Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach. Yet there is an extraordinary gap between our technological overdevelopment and our social undervelopment.

"Valuable locales and people - and switched-off territories and people - will be found everywhere. The global criminal economy will be a fundamental feature of the 21st century.

"Fundamentalisms of different kinds and from different sources, with their potential access to weapons of mass extermination, east a giant shadow on the optimistic prospects of the Information Age."

And finally: "The 21st century will not be a dark age. Neither will it deliver to most people the bounties promised by the most extraordinary technological revolution in history. Rather, it may well be characterized by informed bewilderment."

? - JG: What prompted you to spend 14 years working on your trilogy, "The Information Age"?

MC: The main motivation to undertake the research that led to this trilogy was to understand our world, not just the technology. I felt, in the early 1980s, that the intellectual (and political) categories we were using had become an obstacle for our understanding, and without new concepts/interpretations, we were blind in our world. Information technology was the obvious and most spectacular transformation, but it was not the only object of my research. It was the entry point to the new economy/society/politics that we were entering.

I was highly dissatisfied with the superficiality, lack of rigor, and techno-hype of the prophets of the new world - Toffler, Gilder and the like. I am an academic researcher and an empirical sociologist. I think and write only about evidence, and the theoretically rigorous interpretation of this evidence.

? - JG: It was reported in The Wall Street Journal that a few of your university colleagues implored you to boil down your trilogy into one condensed book. You replied, "In all modesty, this is condensed." How do you react to criticism that your writing is too academic?

MC: My work is totally academic, and I consider that a quality. The world has enough intelligent business consultants, well-informed journalists, and best-selling writers apt at storytelling. But I saw a need for rigorous academic research that would be willing to take the risk of investigating uncharted paths, such as the new social structures and processes associated with the information technology revolution.

There were some major analytical efforts; Alain Touraine in Europe, Daniel Bell in the United States. But their books, published in 1969 and 1973, predated the core of the information technology revolution. The development of the networked economy, the end of the Cold War, the rise of environmentalism and feminism, the crisis of the nation state - all were major issues that I had to take up anew.