Castells - Communication Power

COMMUNICATION POWER

MANUEL CASTELLS

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Manuel Castells 2009

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First published 2009

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To the memory of Nicos Poulantzas,
my brother,
theorist of power

Books are usually a collective endeavor under the authors sole responsibility. This one is no exception. It was born in my mind a long time ago, but it has evolved in interaction with colleagues and students from around the world, and has been shaped by the academic and social environments in which I have lived and worked since the beginning of this millennium. And so, to name the people and institutions who are the co-producers of this work is not a matter of courtesy, but of accuracy in signing the book.

My first acknowledgment goes to Amelia Arsenault, my doctoral student, an outstanding research assistant, and the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Research Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. Simply put, without the intellectual quality and personal dedication of her work over the years, this book would not exist in its current form. She will go on in her academic career to become a great scholar with wonderful values as she engages in understanding the world to make it a better place.

Additional support for the research on which this book is based came from the excellent research assistance of Lauren Movius, Sasha Costanza-Chock, and Sharon Fain, graduate students at the Annenberg School for Communication, and from Dr. Meritxell Roca, my collaborator at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona. Earlier versions of the analyses presented in this volume have been discussed and modified through interaction with my students at the Annenberg School for Communication. I wish to convey special thanks to the students of my research seminar Comm620: Communication, Technology, and Power in the spring of 2008. Specific acknowledgment of the work of several students in this and other seminars can be found in the books notes and references.

My current research, in this book and in other works, has benefited considerably from the intellectual stimulation of my two academic homes: the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona. I feel deeply indebted to my colleagues in both institutions for the support and collegiality they have provided over the years. I particularly thank Dean Geoffrey Cowan, Dean Ernest Wilson, Director Larry Gross, and Director Patricia Riley at USC, and Rector Imma Tubella at UOC, for the wonderful personal and institutional support they have given my research since joining the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at UOC. These academic institutions are at the cutting edge of research and teaching on the global network society, and I feel proud to share their meaningful project of situating the university within the technological and intellectual conditions of the Information Age.

I am also grateful to my colleagues and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program; Department of Urban Studies and Planning; and Media Lab) for their meaningful interaction during my regular teaching periods as a visiting professor in one of the leading scientific institutions of the world. My special thanks go to William Mitchell, Rosalind Williams, David Mindell, Larry Vale, and Malo Hutson.

When I say that this book is a collective work, I mean it. It has received the most generous intellectual contribution from a number of colleagues who have read all or parts of various drafts of the manuscript, and commented extensively on it. I have gone through several rounds of revisions for each chapter, since each time I thought I had reached the point at which my research could be communicated, new comments and suggestions would come from colleagues willing to engage in a dialogue with me during the process of elaborating this book. I have modified my argument, updated my data, and tightened my writing as a result of these multiple interactions with colleagues from different academic institutions. I have not been able to integrate every comment, as many of them came from different perspectives, but I have seriously considered every single comment I received, and this has led to substantial changes in the theory and analyses presented in the book. Of course, misunderstandings and mistakes during this lengthy revision process are my exclusive responsibility. And so, I want to publicly express my deepest gratitude to Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Jerry Feldman, George Lakoff, Jonathan Aronson, Tom Hollihan, Peter Monge, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Ernest Wilson, Jeffrey Cole, Jonathan Taplin, Marty Kaplan, Elizabeth Garrett, Robert Entman, Lance Bennett, Frank Webster, Robin Mansell, William Dutton, Rosalind Williams, Imma Tubella, Michael Dear, Ingrid Volkmer, Geoffrey Bowker, John Thompson, Ronald Rice, James Katz, W. Russell Neuman, George Marcus, Giancarlo Bosetti, Svetlana Balmaeva, Eric Klinenberg, Emma Kiselyova, Howard Tumber, Yuezhi Zhao, Ren Weber, Jeffrey Juris, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Irene Castells, Robert McChesney, and Henry Jenkins. Their collegiality demonstrates that open-source co-production is actually a medieval invention that began in the university environment, and continues today as an essential practice in scientific inquiry.

I am also grateful to the colleagues, students, and citizens at large who commented on my public presentations of the ideas and analyses on communication and power that ultimately led to the elaboration of this book. This interaction at different venues between 2003 and 2008 considerably sharpened the tentative argument I had in my mind years ago when I first engaged in this research project. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the Board of the International Communication Association (ICA), with special thanks to Ingrid Volkmer and Ronald Rice, and the attendees of my lecture at the 2006 meeting of the ICA in Dresden; the American Political Science Association, and the attendees of my 2004 Ithiel de Sola Pool Lecture in Chicago; the London School of Economics and Political Science; the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT; the Milano Graduate School of Management at the New School University in New York; the De Balie Cultural Center in Amsterdam; the Spanish Academy of Cinema and Television in Madrid; the Catalan Parliament in Barcelona; the Institute Fernando Henrique Cardoso in So Paulo; the World Political Forum in Venice; the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon; the School of Information Science at the University of California, Berkeley; my colleagues at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University; and my fellows at the Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities.