Bright Networks and Dark Spaces: Implications of Manuel Castells for Higher Education

Academe, May/Jun 2004 by Marginson, Simon

Bright Networks and Dark Spaces: Implications of Manuel Castells for Higher Education

Emergent technology possesses the potential to transform the nature of higher education. The importance of networking is related to its influence on education's democratic potential.

The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Manuel Castells Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 3 volumes, The Rise of the Network Society (volume 1, 2nd ed., 2000) The Power of Identity (volume 2, 1997) End of Millennium (volume 3, 2nd ed., 2000)

The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society Manuel Castells Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001

In The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, sociologist Manuel Castells argues that information and communication technologies are associated with a new kind of economy, society, and culture that he calls "informationalism." In this new economic order, knowledge generation, information processing, and symbolic communication-"the action of knowledge on knowledge"-are the main sources of productivity and profit. The commanding heights of the new economy (though not the whole of it) have become global: information and communication technologies make possible for the first time in human history an economy that operates in real time on a planetary scale through computer-based financial transactions. This is a staggering change.

Socially, networking permits cost-effective expansion, goaldriven flexibility, and the return of the small- and mediumsized unit amid controllable decentralization. The network form of organization divides human society between the people, social groups, and nations located inside the networks and those that are "switched off," or left in the dark spaces between the dazzling linkages of the networks. The informational brand of capitalism-more so than the industrial capitalism that preceded it-is polarized unequally between those with economic power and those without it, between capital and labor, and between developed and developing nations.

Culturally, according to Castells, the dominant ethos is "real virtuality," in which reality itself, or people's material and symbolic existence, is immersed in a world of make believe in which symbols and images make up the actual experience. Cultural expressions, no longer the exclusive totem of those who create them, are relentlessly torn from their context and perpetually recombined and rearranged within a universal hypertext determined by "the interests of senders and the moods of receivers."

These trends make up a world in which, for the dominant groups, the coordinates of space and time are transformed. The "network society" is vectored by the "space of flows," a world structured by motion (of things, money, people, relationships) in which place does not disappear but becomes just one part of the geography. (Castells's argument here veers close to that of Arjun Appadurai, the cultural theorist of globalization, in his 1996 book, Modernity at Large.) In addition, "timeless time" displaces clock time, as everything converges toward simultaneity with no past or future. The long-term perspective, that of historian Fernand Braudel's la longue duree, must now be restored, Castells argues.

"Maybe there is another option,"writes Castells ironically, in the last paragraph of The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society, an extended and more conversational coda on The Information Age, that focuses on the origins, economics, politics, and culture of the Internet. "One might say, 'Why don't you leave me alone? I want no part of your Internet, of your technological civilization, of your network society. I just want to live my life.'" Confronted by five hundred e-mail messages when one returns from a short Christmas vacation, one can only agree! But, of course, there is no choice. "If this is your position," Castells writes, "I have bad news for you. If you do not care about the networks, the networks will care about you, anyway. For as long as you want to live in this society, at this time and in this place, you will have to deal with the network society." That is, you will have to unless you are switched off in the dark spaces between the networks, still stuck in clock time. Some people might choose to hide from the information age, but many others left in the dark spaces have no choice. They are excluded by the harsh logic of the information economy, in which they create no economic value.

Castells does not argue that everything is driven by information and communication technologies. If he did, the books would be shorter. "Technology does not determine society. Nor does society script the course of technological change," he asserts. The revolution in information and communication technologies can be understood only in the context of other forces that have helped to shape its effects: the restructuring of Western capitalism; the terminal crisis of Soviet statism and the spread of capitalism to every corner of the planet; the new geostrategic international order; the emergence-partly in response or reaction to globalism and informationalism-of new forms of individuality and culturally defined collective social movements; and the crisis of democratic politics. At the same time, Castells argues, the autonomous dynamics of information and communication technologies must be accounted for as part of the matrix of forces.