40 quotes
Politics becomes a horse race, and a tragicomedy motivated by greed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals, and, often, sex and violence – a genre increasingly indistinguishable from TV scripts.
Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society (2000)
In the network society, the space of flows dissolves time by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous in the communication networks, thus installing society in structural ephemerality: being cancels becoming.
The e-economy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
By social movements we mean a certain type of organisation of social practices, the logic of whose development contradicts the institutionally dominant social logic
"traditional media companies are not generating any profits from their Internet ventures."
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
Beyond the realm of radical protests, there is also fear among many citizens about what this new society, of which the Internet is the symbol, will bring about in terms of employment, education, social protection, and lifestyles.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
The Internet is indeed a technology of freedom - but it can free the powerful to oppress the uninformed, it may lead to the exclusion of the devalued by the conquerors of value. In this general sense, society has not changed much.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
"The city" is not a framework but a social practice in constant flux the more it becomes an issue, the more it is a source of contradictions and the more its social manipulation is linked to the ensemble of social and political conflicts.
If you do not care about networks, the networks will care about you, anyway. For as long as you want to live in society, at this time and in this place, you will have to deal with the network society.
Because we live in the Internet Galaxy.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
The Internet culture is characterized by four layer-structure: • The Techno-Meritocratic Culture • The Hacker Culture • The Virtual Communitarian Culture • The Entrepreneurial Culture
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
"Urban problems" are increasingly becoming a political issue as the socialization of the means of production is accompanied by the increasing socialization of the means of consumption or, if one prefers, from the moment collective facilities begin to play a strategic role in the structure and rhythms of everyday life.
Each ‘urban struggle’ must have its structural content specified, and be considered in terms of the role it plays vis-à-vis the various social classes involved. Then and only then will we know what we are talking about.
The urban renewal programme is one of the most spectacular urban programmes to have been undertaken in Paris; it is certainly the one which has provoked the biggest public outcry. The renewal programme in the strict sense of the term, has two essential characteristics
[Urban planning] must be interpreted on the basis of the social effect produced by the political instance in the urban system and/or in the social structure.
The anti-globalization movement is not simply a network, it is an electronic network, it is an Internet-based movement. And because the Internet is its home it cannot be disorganized or captured. It swims like fish in the net
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
Internationally, the Echelon program, created by the United States and the UK during the Cold War, seems to have been converted into industrial espionage, according to the French government agencies, by combining traditional eavesdropping and interference of telecommunications, with interception of electronic messages.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customised in an ever-changing pattern.
In sum, all the key technological developments that led to the internet were built around government institutions, major universities and research centers. The Internet did not originate in the business world. It was too daring a technology, too expensive a project, and too risky an initiative to be assumed by profit-oriented organizations.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
The most blatant illustration of this statement is the fact that in 1972, Larry Roberts, the director of IPTO, sought to privatize ARPANET, once it was up and running. He offered to transfer operational responsibility to ATT. After considering the proposal, with the help of a committee of experts from Bell Laboratories, the company refused.
The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001)
[Castells major hypotheses in this book are:]