thesis network society

Manuel Castells's Network Society

Castells is a professor of urban geography at Berkley. He has written a number of books and articles about geography, the city, and the information society, including a three-volume analysis of contemporary capitalism, titled The Information Age . Garnham (2004, p. 165) refers to this as “the most sophisticated version” of the theory of the information society.

Castells' analysis involves economic, social, political, and cultural factors. I will focus on the economic, with a brief introduction to his analysis of space and the changing role of the nation state, and follow with an outline of some critiques of his work. Regrettably, this leaves much unmentioned, such as his theory of timeless time, of the social divides in modern cities and societies, or his examination of specific cases of social action in the context of what he calls the information city.

The Network Society

Castells (2000a; 2000b) claims that we are passing from the industrial age into the information age. This historical change is brought about by the advent of new information technologies – particularly those for communication and biological technologies. Society remains capitalist, but basis of the technological means by which it acts has changed from energy to information. This information is of central importance in determining economic productivity. Communications technologies allow for the annihilation of space and for globalization; the potential for rapid and asynchronous communication also changes the relationship to time. And, while he explains that networks are not a new form of social organization, they have become a “key feature of social morphology” (2000a, p. 5). This is because communication technologies, such as the Internet, allow for decentralization of operations and focusing of control, increasing the effectiveness of networks relative to hierarchical structures. Of business he writes, “[t]he main shift can be characterized as the shift from vertical bureaucracies to the horizontal corporation” (2000b, p. 176).

According to Castells, power now rests in networks: “the logic of the network is more powerful than the powers of the network” (quoted in Weber, 2002, p. 104). Some networks, such as that of financial capital, are global in scale. Networks also exist within and between businesses, where the organizational unit has shifted from being capability-oriented (e.g. accounting, human resources, etc.) to being project-oriented. Resources – including employees, consultants, and other businesses – are brought together to work on a particular project, then dispersed and reallocated when the task is complete. The ability of an actor in the network – be it a company, individual, government, or other organization – to participate in the network is determined by the degree to which the node can contribute to the goals of the network. This new environment requires skilled flexible workers: the organization man gives way to the flexible woman (Castells, 2000a, p. 12). This leads to a binary process of inclusion and exclusion from the network. The people at the bottom are those who, with nothing to offer the network, are excluded.

Capital and Labor

Castells distinguishes the terms “information” and “informational”. He says that information has been an essential component of all societies, whether capitalist or not. In the new “network economy”, information becomes a key factor in economic productivity. Today, for example, for example, the flow of capital into currencies, commodities, and stocks is based upon access to information about relevant topics, from international politics to climate change, weather predictions, and social trends. In that sense, the importance of information in contemporary society is not new. What is new, he claims, is the informational shift to the manipulation of information itself: the “action of knowledge upon knowledge itself” (Castells, 2000b, p. 17) is now the basis to increased productivity.

Castells argues that the operation of networks, particularly their ability to include or exclude actors on the basis of their ability to contribute to the goals of the network, has individualized labor: “the work process is globally integrated, but labor tends to be locally fragmented” (2000a, p. 18). The constantly-shifting “variable geometry” of networks individualizes labor. In consequence, the era of industrial-age conflict between production-based classes ends: individual workers no longer comprise classes, much of the power of the capitalists has shifted to those who manage the networks (for example, the fund manager has greater control than the investors whose money s/he manages), and the class of human capitalists has been replaced by the collective faceless capitalist of the network.

Despite the disappearance of capitalists and the proletariat, exploitation and differentiation remain. In Castells' analysis, labor is fundamentally divided into networked labor, which serves the goals of the network, and switched-off labor, which has nothing to offer the network and in the context of the network economy is non-labor (that is not to say their labor has no value – the realm of discarded labor is also the realm of criminal organizations outside the networks; Castells mentions that the networks can make “perverse” use of these masses of people). Networked labor is itself divided into two groups. Self-programmable labor – such as financial analysts, company officers, journalists – manages information; it is flexible and skilled. Its interests coincide with the goals of the network. Generic labor (including many workers in natural resource, manufacturing, and service industries, also minimum wage and sweatshop labor) is deskilled, interchangeable and disposable; for these people, the goal is simple survival so as not to be relegated to the class of switch-off irrelevant labor.

Flows vs. Places and the Role of the Nation State

Castells is an urban geographer, so his examination of space is central to his work. One of his key spacial characterizations of the information age is the “space of flows”. This is the domain of networks – of capital, of information, of business alliances, etc. He argues that “While organizations are located in places, . . . the organizational logic is placeless , being fundamentally dependent on the space of flows that characterizes information networks” (Castells in Nyíri, 2004, p. 23). This space of flows challenges what Castells calls the space of places, including regional communities and nation states. Networks lead to the “destruction of human experience” (Castells in Nyíri, p. 10): power is separated from political representation, production from consumption, information from communication.

The inclusion/exclusion logic of the network “switches off . . . people and territories dubbed as irrelevant from the perspective of dominant interests” (Castells in Nyíri, 2004, p. 7). This enforces domination: “[d]omination depends . . . on the simultaneous capacity of . . . elites to articulate themselves and disarticulate the masses” (Waterman, 2004, p.49). Groups may choose to develop their own networks with their own goals, but if they wish to interact with the dominant networks in society they must adapt to the goals of those networks.

In opposition to the space of flows is the space of places. While “the space of flows can be abstract in social, cultural, and historical terms, . . . places are . . . condensations of human history, culture and matter.” (Castells, 1990, p. 14). Hence, resistance to the space of flows of the networks arises in the form of communities oriented around places. These communities are often closed, based on fundamentalist or tribal identities. Those dislocated or excluded by the network society (such as unneeded labor) naturally gravitate to such identities of communal resistance – or are relegated to them: “elites are cosmopolitan, people are local” (Castells, 2000b, p. 446). Castells has argued (1990, p. 21) that for communal identity to be a site of democratic resistance communities must reach out and build links (network) with other communities of other cultures. However, his position has since shifted (Nyíri, 2004) 1 , and recent history has shown that the groups that isolate themselves from the network are often reactionary and exclusionary.

This clash between flows and places has consequences for the nation state. Sovereignty is ceded both upwards to the space of flows and downwards to regional and communal groups. States are caught in a bind. If they represent the identities of the communities within them, they isolate themselves from the network. If they obey the network logic, they cease to represent their populations; they become nodes in the network and surrender their sovereignty: “[n]ation states will survive, but not so their sovereignty” (Castells in Nyíri, p. 8)

Critiques of the Network Society

The first and simplest critique of Castells is that his depiction of the contemporary world is so familiar, even derivative (Webster, 2002, p. 115). Its propositions about the character of contemporary society seem commonplaces: the increasing importance of information and knowledge, the increasing speed and of financial and other transactions and the consequent destabilization, the growing gap between the knowledge-rich and the knowledge-poor, the sense that we are indeed in a time of social and technological discontinuity. However, this can also be seen as a success in capturing contemporary life.

More serious criticisms target Castells' analysis of the role of information, of production, and of the relationship between between informational labor and capitalism. These critiques call into question his claim that the present economic and social situation is a new age, rather than a continuation of industrial capitalism.

Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives (2nd edn)

Professor of Internet Geography, Oxford Internet Institute

Senior Fellow, Oxford Internet Institut

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How is society being reshaped by the continued diffusion and increasing centrality of the Internet in everyday life and work? Society and the Internet provides key readings for students, scholars, and those interested in understanding the interactions of the Internet and society. This multidisciplinary collection of theoretically and empirically anchored chapters addresses the big questions about one of the most significant technological transformations of this century, through a diversity of data, methods, theories, and approaches. Drawing from a range of disciplinary perspectives, Internet research can address core questions about equality, voice, knowledge, participation, and power. By learning from the past and continuing to look toward the future, it can provide a better understanding of what the ever-changing configurations of technology and society mean, both for the everyday life of individuals and for the continued development of society at large. This second edition presents new and original contributions examining the escalating concerns around social media, disinformation, big data, and privacy. Following a foreword by Manuel Castells, the editors introduce some of the key issues in Internet Studies. The chapters then offer the latest research, in five focused sections: The Internet in Everyday Life; Digital Rights and Human Rights; Networked Ideas, Politics, and Governance; then Networked Businesses, Industries, and Economics; and finally, Technological and Regulatory Histories and Futures. This book is a valuable resource not only for students and researchers, but for anyone seeking a critical examination of the economic, social, and political factors shaping the Internet and its impact on society.

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Education: a New Learning Curve

Louis leakey and human evolution emerging out of africa, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, technosols: customised soils to revive the earth and perhaps conquer other worlds, featured author, latest book, the impact of the internet on society: a global perspective, introduction.

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

• The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
• Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
• Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

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 customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References.   Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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The Internet, Politics and the Politics of Internet Debate

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B. Technology

D. politics, e. identity, f. conclusion.

Network: a structural condition whereby distinct points (nodes) are related to one another by connections (ties) that are typically multiple, intersecting and often redundant.     A network exists when many nodes are linked to many other nodes, usually by many ties, which cross the ties connecting other nodes.   Discourses that try to describe our age:   1. Post-Industrialism

• spawned in the 18th century, matured in the 19th and culminated in the 20th.
• an attempt to express the transition of industrial economies and societies into an unknown future.
• Alain Tourain (1971) and Daniel Bell (1973) shift from material manufacturing to service provision as the primary economic activity and source of wealth. The new crucial economic resources are the exploitation of information and knowledge, instead of lab our and capital.  
• social and political hierarchy turned upside down.
• the ideas of the new age were proposed by Daniel Bell as optimistic:

 “Post-industrial society would bring with it a more educated, leisured and engaged     citizenry, a levelling of economic inequality, a thriving global economy, scientific advance immune to ideology, and rational management of public affairs.”

• others (Touraine, Marcuse, Ellul) opposed this ideological idea and saw the dangers, they  believed that this development would deepen the alienation of capitalism.  
• others thought there wasn’t a shift from industry to service, but rather simply a transition from ‘one kind of industrial society to another’ (Cohen and Zysman).

2. Information society

• a model for society and economy that revolves specifically around the increasingly flexible functionality of microcomputers.  
• by Japanese scholars, “joho shakai”
• this model represents an echo of the theory of post-industrialism, but one with a sharper articulation of the role of computing technology and knowledge in the abstract form of information.  
• at the core of the information society would be the computer, the fundamental economic function of which would be to augment and replace mental labor, yielding increased leisure and new information-based industries.  
• “Computopia”
• post-industrialism theorists, such as Bell, rearticulated their analyses in the languages of computerization and information.  

Ideas surrounding the ’information society’ quickly transcended their roots in utopian idealism and disinterested social science, and by the 1980’s took the form of a distinct revolutionary doctrine, which has seven elemental believes:

• The world is in a state of fundamental transition/upheaval, similar in kind and  intensity to that experienced in the shift from agrarian to industrial society in the 19th century.   
• The crucial resource of the new society is knowledge/information.
• The primary dynamic force in this revolution/society is technology development and diffusion.  
• The generation of wealth in the information economy has eclipsed that of the material/manufacturing economy.  
• The social transformation accompanying these technical and economic changes is essentially positive.
• The information revolution -technical, economic and social- is planetary in scale.  
• The information revolution is not only a new phase in human civilization but also an evolutionary step toward for life itself.
• The information revolution is irresistible and irreversible 

3. Post-Fordism

• roots lie in the Regulation School of Economy
• Michel Aglietta (1979) and Alain Lipietz (1987) conceives of capitalism as a succession of ‘regimes of accumulation’ comprised of complementary production, consumption and regulatory configurations:  a regime of accumulation (opeenstapeling) combines a particular way of producing goods, a particular construction of the consumer market for these goods and a particular role for state regulation of the market economy.  
• In the late 1960’s social movements rejected the spirits of mass society, Fordism. 

  Role of the state : to provide conditions for flexibility, innovation and competitiveness.     A retreat of the state in economic matters;

• rapid privatization of state-enterprises
• market deregulation
• decentralization of state authority
• lowering barriers to the mobility of capital and labor
• decreased taxation
• privatizing/devolution of social welfare and security delivery

On the other hand post-Fordist states;

• have played more activists roles in crafting anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary policy.
• subsidized research and development pursuant to innovation
• funded and constructed the technical infrastructure for enterprise
• creating the regulatory conditions for the flexible deployment of labor
• fabricating attractive investment environments to offset the flight of highly mobile capital.  

Post-Fordism regime of accumulation is said to have accomplished the following transitions: 

• from Taylorism and mass production to flexible specialization
• from the mass proletariat to a more flexible labor market.
• from mass, standardized consumption to pluralized customization.
• from the Keynesian welfare state to the neo-liberal competitive state.

The criticism on this model is that:

• they overemphasize discontinuities in capitalist development at the expense of continuities
• they uncritically accept the propaganda of the business elite regarding  enterprise restructuring as evidence of a fundamental shift in the organization of work.  
• they are technologically determinist
• they are more concerned with theorizing the continued stability of capitalism than its inherent  irrationality and injustice.  

4. Postmodernism

• not opposed to modernism, rather hyper modern
• Foucault, Derrida, Lyolard, Baudrillard, Deleuze
• at the core of modern political thoughts lies Thomas Hobbe’s assertions that truth and falsehood are a function of names rather than nature, and that power rather than justice is the central preoccupation of political life.  
• in the post-modern view, truth is neither metaphysical unity nor correspondence to the observed material world; it is instead simply the regularized and institutionalized product of human discourse, which is itself an outcome of the operation of power in human relationship.  
• truth is a reflection of power
• the closest connection between postmodernism and the network society thesis arises in the context of anti-essentialist conceptions of the human identity.

Human identity is thus contested, contextual, multiple, fragmentary and transient.     5. Globalization   In the 1990’s     Core; the claim that nation-states are being challenged in their capacity to organize and contain core elements of modern economic, political and social life. The source of this challenge lies in these three realms:

• economic activities once relatively contained within national borders are now prosecuted as if borders were non-existent.  
• Decline of national economies.  
• state political authority once limited only by national geographic boundaries now  finds itself also challenged and hedged by international and transactional regimes.  
• Decline of national political sovereignty.  
• social practices, identities and solidarities once defined by national purposes and parameters are decreasingly characterized or contained in this way.
• Decline of nationally defined social identity and culture.  
• crucial element is the rise of several international and supranational agreements, instruments and institutions charged with managing the mercurial flow of people, commodities and currencies across national borders.
• it is at least conceivable that the open-ended cultural cross-fertilization embodied in globalization is more natural, healthy and liberating than the somewhat artificial construct of insulated national culture could ever be.   

 6. Network society     The discourse ‘network society’ has taken parts of the other discourses and put them together in this discourse.     The phrase ‘network society’ applies to societies that exhibit 2 fundamental characteristics:

• the presence of sophisticated technologies of networked communication and information management/distribution, technologies that form the basic infrastructure mediating an increasing array of social, political and economic practices.  
• the reproduction and institutionalisation throughout and between those societies of networks as the basic form of human organization and relationship across a wide range of social, political and economic configurations.  

 Networks are comprised of 3 main elements:   1.  nodes, a distinct point connected to at least one other point, though it often simultaneously acts as a point of connection between 2 or more points. 2.  ties, connecting one node to another.   3.  flows, are what passes between and through nodes along ties.     Variables that, taken together, condition the character of any given network:

• nodes can be powerful/powerless, active/dormant, stationary/mobile, permanent/temporarily, net sources/net recipients of various kinds of flows.
• ties can be weak/strong, private/public, singular/multiple, unique/redundant, sparse/dense, parallel/intersecting.
• flows can be copious/minimal, constant/intermittent, one-way/reciprocal, uni-/multi- directional, balanced/imbalanced, meaningful/meaningless.

Networks can be:

centralized,       decentralized, - distributed (center less)  hierarchical,     horizontal,  bounded           boundless  finite                proliferating  accessible        inaccessible    inclusive          exclusive    intensive          expansive  interactive        non-interactive The network society thesis suggests that an increasing number of contemporary social, political and economic practices, institutions and relationships are organized around the network form though the precise configuration and character of these networks vary depending on how they combine the variable qualities of these three essential elements (nodes, ties and flows).   In his path breaking formulation of this thesis, Castells (1998) isolates a number of attributes that together give shape to the network society:

• at the economic base of the network society is an ‘informational’ -as opposed to strictly industrial- capitalist economy.
• the economy of the network society is organized, globally, on the network model.   One result of this is a relative decline in the capacity of the nation-state to organize political, economic and social power in the network society.  
• in the network society, human experience of time and space is displaced to ‘timeless time’ and the ‘space of flows’.  
• in the network society, power and powerlessness are a function of access to networks and control over flows.
• the principal source of conflict and resistance in the network society is the contradiction between the placeless character of networks and the rooted ness of human meaning.  

The network society is a technological society.     The word technology is made up out of the ancient Greek words techne and logos.   Techne refers to the practical arts, those forms of applied knowledge to that, when executed skilfully, typically result in the fabrication of useful things.  Logos refers to ‘the word‘, or speech, and more broadly denotes a reasoned account of a thing, an account that collects particulars into a rational, coherent whole.  The word technology is thus loaded with at least two meanings.   Theories of technology and society:   Instrumentalism Technological devices can be employed to achieve a variety of ends, and these ends can be adjudged as good or bad, worthwhile or worthless, but not the technologies itself. The only judgment that can be brought to bear against technological devices is a technical appraisal of their efficiency in meeting their appointed ends.     Substantivism Beneath the superficial variety of technological instruments and their applications, technology as such has a substantive essence that implicates it in the deepest meaning of human souls, and in the prevailing character of societies where its logic holds sway. Individual devices may be neutral to their instrumental ends, but technology in general embodies and enforces a particular way of being in the world, a particular conception of human relations. Most Substantivism accounts identify technology with the empire of instrumental rationality, standardization and homogenisation, the celebration of mastery over human and non-human nature and the cult of accumulation and efficiency.     Critic: substantivist analyses are open to the charge that they treat technology as a monochromatic, autonomous force that is external to, and imposed upon, human social relations.     Social constructivism Technological outcomes are undetermined by the essence of technology and are, instead, constructed via the interaction between the technology in question, and the social relations/ environment in which it is situated.  The destiny of new technology, such as the internet, is no destiny at all: the outcome of this technology will emerge from ongoing contestation and negotiation.  Social constructivism purports to reintroduce history, culture, contingency, contestation and politics back into the study of technology, and recommends sociological and empirical over philosophical and theoretical approaches to that study.   There is no such thing as the network society, but there are many network societies, perhaps continuously reinventing and reconfiguring themselves. (Castells, 2001)   A composite view Constructivism is instructive, but not perfect. A viable critical theory of technology must affirm what constructivism has taught us: that crude technological determinism is untenable; that the possibility of contestation, contingency and heterogeneity is always present in technological encounters; and that we must pay strict attention to local differences in technological outcomes. Such a theory must also take into account the limitations of this approach and remain open to the insights to be gained from competing perspectives. It must also be sensitive to the role played in technological outcomes by that which unites one technology to another at a very basic level, and by the peculiarities of technical instruments.     A good composite view should pay attention to the following four factors: The essence or spirit of network technology   There are a few common ideas about the essence of technology:   1.  Technology is essentially artificial, whatever specific technologies accomplish or do, they always accomplish something through human ingenuity that nature does not or cannot accomplish or provide on its own, without the intervention of human artifice. The essence of technology is the exploitation, domination or mastery of nature, human nature included. The essence of echnology is to set upon human and non- human nature and demand that they serve as a ‘standing- reserve’ of resources to be exploited (Heidegger).  2. The essence of technology is instrumental rationality, a type of reasoning in which calculations of the efficiency means eclipse judgement about the worthiness of ends and prescribe human behaviour with considerable insistence. Under the regime of instrumental rationality, what matters is that a given procedure or instrument is the most efficient means to its assigned end, and consideration of ends themselves according to other  criteria serves only to undermine efficiency and progress. 3. The essence of technology is its bias towards abstraction, universalism and standardisation. Technologies prescribe ways of doing things, ways of being in the world, ways of doing things that are abstracted from concrete situations in all their variety. Standardisation is the foundation of technology.   Technical design   The design of technological instruments is never neutral. Technical things have political qualities, and not all of those can be attributed to the social and political conditions in which the technology is situated (Winner). Technical artifacts can be said to ‘have politics’ in two distinct sense:   1. In the first instance, ‘the invention, design or arrangement of a specific device or technical system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community’. 2. In the second sense, technological designs are sometimes understood as inherently political, insofar they ‘appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships’ (Winner). Here, technical devices and systems are not as flexible or open to alternative social and political consequences, but are needed for the political bonds with their voters (for example).     Situation of network technology   This third element at play in the determination of technological outcome is situation, which is meant to gather the various social, political and economic aspects of the contexts in which technologies and their use are situated.     Technologies do not develop, and are not used in a vacuum. Instead technological outcomes have a historical and sociological character. They are developed and used in the context of a pre-existing social, political and economic relationships, network of actors, and conditions that enforce various priorities and norms of the technology and its elaboration in practice.     According to Castells, it is the complementarily of these technologies and these contextual factors that produces the outcome that is ‘a new social structure predominantly based on networks’.     Under certain situational conditions, technological deployments lead to particular outcomes that might not arise under other situational conditions. Also, certain situational conditions can undermine the potential of alternative deployments and uses of the same technology.     Situation factors into the determination of the design choices that determine the technical configuration of technological instruments.     The context in which network technology is situated are multiple, diverse and complex.     Uses of network technology   A substantial portion of the social effect of a given technology can be accounted for by the manner in which the technology is actually used by individuals and groups in concrete social situations. It can be argued to day that it is the character of a technology’s everyday and extraordinary uses that determines its ultimate, lasting character. 

In many cases, uses are prescribed, standardized and adopted by individuals who assume the posture of consumers in choosing either to use the technology in the manner prescribed, or not to use it at all. In other cases, users intervene and appropriate the technology for purposes other than those prescribed.     From network technology to network society Some ways in which technological qualities of digital information and communication networks have been linked with fundamentally new conditions for human sociability typically associated with ‘the network society’:   Time - space compression physical distance and the passage of time seems shorter, at least insofar as activities involving communication are concerned.     Deterritorialization there has never been a mass communication that seems so little contained or constraint by territorial expanse.     Decentralization and control there is not one point where a message is send to a receiver.  Interactivity and customization.  

The network society is a species of capitalism, not a new economic system.  Castells: “the rise of the network society is linked to the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism, as industrialism was linked to its constitution as a mode of production.”  The distinction here between change at the level of form and practice, and continuity at the level of substance is the key. These changes must be situated within an appreciation of certain basic continuities in the substance of capitalism, to which these same technologies also make a significant contribution.     Capitalism is the major element of the context in which the development of network technology, and the society it mediates, is situated. Network technology, and the network society, reflect and confirm the dynamics and parameters of life under a capitalist technology.     Five aspects of the relationship between network technologies and late modern capitalism:

• Globalization;
• Network economy;
• Network enterprise;
• Network work;
• Network property.

Globalization   Economic globalization refers to the transactional organization of capitalist firms, production, finance, services, trade, investment and markets, made possible in part by a variety of international economic agreements in which constituent nation-states have agreed to relax nationally specific controls on a wide range of economic activities.     According to Ronald Deibert, there is a definite historical ‘fitness’ between the ‘hypermedia environment’ and the shift from a modern, nationally organized political and economic order to a post-modern, globally organized one. This fitness manifests itself in a few ways:

• these technologies are instrumental to the operation of the global economy, providing for an infrastructure and control technology for the execution and coordination of economic activities that are territorially disaggregated and dynamic.
• these technologies are similarly indispensable to the operation of the global system of finance and capital circulation.  
• digital communication technologies are central to the production and circulation of the branded entertainment and information commodities that increasingly drive the consumer end of the global economy, and contribute to the maintenance of a global commercial culture that operates notwithstanding national particularities.
• the globalization of the capitalist economy on the model of market liberalism also sets the conditions under which network telecommunication technologies have been developed and deployed.  

Network technologies have been a crucial enabler of the globalization of the capitalist economy; they are also subject to, and situated within, the limitations and direction imposed by that economy.     The regime of global neo-liberalism that has prevailed since the 1980’s, is characterized by four primary orientations:   1.  the privatization of public enterprises. 2.  the liberalization of markets. 3.  a reorientation of the goal of state regulation away from securing the public interest against market failure and towards creating a hospitable climate for investment and enterprise.   4.  the commercialization / corporatisation of the public sector.     New Economy   The basis of economic life has shifted dramatically, not from capitalism to some other system, but rather from an economy driven by the resource extraction and industrial manufacturing to one driven by the circulation and application of knowledge. Services take up a central role in the economy, and information and knowledge assume apparently new prominence as productive resources and commodities.     These ‘new economies’ are characterized by a considerable variety of indicators, most of which are somehow related to the expansive economic role played by new information and communication technologies, these include:

• escalating productivity of technology sectors and technology-intensive industries;
• growing markets for commodified information/knowledge products and services;
• transactional organization of firms, markets and services;
• increased technological mediation of commercial and financial activity (ie ‘e- commerce’)
• elevated importance of skills education and training (ie ‘lifelong learning’)
• continued growth of service/information-processing employment;
• restructuring of work and employment in response to the imperatives/possibilities of information technology;
• innovation and research and development as drivers of economic growth and competitiveness;  
• proliferation of new models of ‘flexible’ production and management;  
• growing ‘digital divides’ between those who are positioned to take advantage of network technology and those who are not. This refers to that feature of the new economies whereby material and political polarization intensifies between those who are effectively integrated into technological an economic networks and those who are excluded from them. This polarization pertains internationally between individuals within economically advantaged countries, between regions within countries, and internationally between affluent and poor countries.  
• Many people contest the notion of a new, knowledge-based economy. Some think it trades on a dubious conception of knowledge (knowledge as information, skill/expertise, technology/technique).
• Others feel that the idea of a knowledge economy exaggerates the purported demise of capitalism’s industrial base, which remains central to most capitalist economies, even those where new technologies are widely present.  
• Others argue that every economy is a knowledge economy, to the extent thatno effective execution of human labour is possible without an organization of the knowledge entailed in that effort.  
• Finally, critics charge that the rhetoric of the ‘new economy’ obscures the basic continuities of the old capitalist economy that are present even in technologically saturated technologies.  

To serve a knowledge-driven economy, education must be more carefully articulated with the needs of enterprise and industry.     Network Enterprise   The network is the enterprise.     “The organizational from built around business projects resulting from the cooperation between different components of different firms, networking among themselves for the duration of a given business project, and reconfiguring their networks for the implementation of each project… Thus, the network enterprise is neither a network of enterprises nor an intra-firm networked organization. Rather it is a lean agency of economic activity, built around specific business projects, which are enacted by networks of various composition and origin… While the firm continues to be the unit of accumulation of capital, property rights and strategic management, business practice is performed by ac-hoc networks. These networks have the flexibility and adaptability required by a global economy subjected to relentless technological innovation and stimulated by rapidly changing demand. “ (Castells)   The network enterprise is a deterritorialized network of networks of economic nodes, a formation whose architecture resembles that of the advanced digital communication technologies that make it possible.      These constellations are comprised of overlapping intra- and inter-firm production and distribution networks, temporary strategic and sectoral alliances between large (even competing) firms with common interests, and relatively immediate relationships between vendors and consumers.   Flexible, just-in-time production and delivery systems, novel marketing strategies aimed at maximizing consumers’ perceptions of personalization and customization within the framework of a familiar brand, and horizontal management strategies aimed at melding limited autonomy for nodes (ie, workers, managers, partners, ‘teams’) with enhanced centralized control, these arrangements make for a mode of organization agile enough to thrive under the conditions of post-Fordist, global capitalism.     1.  internal decentralized networking of large firms;   Flattened horizontal networks of interdependent, self-managing ‘teams‘. The traditionally,  hierarchical organized firms are not flexible enough to adapt quickly to changing demand cycles, markets and technological innovations.  2.  multilocational, segmented production and distribution;   The chain of production is multilocational, transactional networks, with various elements of a finished product produced and assembled in a multiplicity of locations.  3. networks of small and medium-sized firms linked to larger networks; the network model does not only apply to large firms, transactional firms, but also to small and medium-sized firms that specialize in certain niche areas and make their profits by connecting to larger networks that contract for their products and services, either as individual nodes or as part of small constellations of nodes with other small firms. 4. sectoral-level strategic alliances and project-driven, ad hoc ventures between firms; When competitive firms have a common goal (ie reducing costs) they work together to achieve this goal, and then move on again.  5.  networks of synchronous interactivity between consumers/customers and vendors/firms;   the flow between the consumer nodes and the enterprise nodes are reciprocal; it is not just that consumers receive flows (products); they also contribute flows (information) that become crucial in the success of the entire enterprise, and are necessary for the mass personalization and short product cycles upon which  the entire model sits.     Crucial to the success of this model has been the proliferation of digital information and communication technologies.     The relationship between the new technologies and the reorganization of economic technologies is a reciprocal one, with the new organizational form demanding enhanced communicative capacities, and the technological innovations rising to meet these demands in turn spurring further refinement and entrenchment of network logic on an organizational level.     These new information and communication technologies form the indispensable infrastructure of the network enterprise, whereby economic activity can be dispersed in decentralized, dynamic networks of operation that nevertheless remain firmly under centralized surveillance and control.   Network work   The new technologies destroy jobs.   Because tasks that once required a direct application of human labour can now be accomplished entirely by a computerized device, by fewer employees because of the productive efficiencies afforded by computerization, or by management remotely using a computer.     The new technologies, on the other hand, create jobs.   It is the characteristics, rather than the level, of employment in societies where network technology has proliferated that are significant. Several trends in trends in this regard:

• the phasing out of agricultural employment and a steady decline in manufacturing jobs;
• the rise and diversification of the service sector as the dominant source of employment;
• the simultaneous expansion of upper and lower levels in the occupational structure, yet the rate of the expansion in the upper registers of the occupational structure is outpacing growth at the lower registers, resulting in a “relative upgrading of the occupational structure over time” (Castells).

Digitalisation has affected the nature of work performed in the economy as much as the quantity of employment.   Flexibility in human labor; achieved through the reconstitution of work and workplaces according to the network model and the mediation of work by digital network technologies. The network society has succeeding in the defining flexibility as a condition of security, and anything that compromises flexibility as security’s enemy.     All these different work types area best described as non-standard forms of employment:

• part-timework and temporary work
• self-employment and episodic contract work, consulting or ‘freelancing’  
• the temporal and spatial dislocation of work
• eclipse of lifetime career in a single occupational trajectory or firm
• increasing social emphasis on the value of so-called ‘lifelong learning’

The individualization of work has two faces:

• one face for those who either choose it freely or are positioned to capitalize on its potential for autonomy and satisfaction
• a second face that presents itself to those have no choice but to settle for non-standard work involuntary, and to those who lack the means to make this situation a healthy one. This stimulates also the polarization of the well-educated and the less skilled. 

Network property   Network technologies are said to have affected the status of information, knowledge and communication as property and commodities in two contradictory ways.  

• In the first place, these technologies and the markets in which they are situated,  have provided the means and incentive for a historically unprecedented expansion of the co modification of information and knowledge.  
• In the second place, the technical attributes of network technology are such that control over these commodities, which is crucial to their status as property exchangeable for money or other property, had purportedly been destabilized.

What we have witnessed in the information age is a remaking of information as property, despite its potential free availability. The network economy is therefore not exactly the same as the capitalisms that have preceded it historically.  

Three paths:

• an examination of the purported demise of the nation-state as the primary container of political power, organization and practice in the present era;
• an account of the ‘new politics’ presented as definitive of the political condition of the network society;
• assessment of the democratic prospects of political life in the network society.

Sovereignty; refers to the holding and exercise of supreme political power, the power to make judgements that are binding on others and the power to act to enforce compliance with compliance with those judgements. Sovereignty denotes the power to rule.     The normative principles upon which the modern system of stated would be based:

• territorial sovereignty,
• the formal equality of states,  
• non-intervention in the internal affairs of other recognized states,
• state consent as the foundation stone of international legal agreement.

The state is the entity that has jurisdiction over activity within a given territory, including the exclusive right to act coercively, if alternative means of socialization, persuasion or inducement fail, to enforce that jurisdiction.     That a state enjoys a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory is crucial, because it is this combination of monopoly and a fixed boundary that generates the exclusivities that define the sovereign authority of the state. The state is sovereign when it enjoys exclusive, ultimate authority over matters within its borders.     ‘A modern nation-state displays a correspondence between sovereignty, territory and legitimacy‘ (Held & McGrew).   Within a nation-state, sovereignty can be organized in a number of ways, and vested in a variety of institutions:   initially sovereignty was vested in the persons of absolute monarchs.     since liberal revolutions the power of national monarchies has diminished, and sovereignty has been reconstituted in the depersonalised institutions we have come to associate most closely  with the modern nation-state:

• written constitutions and statutes;
• the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government;
• the police and military;
• bureaucratic state agencies. 

Politics refers to the competition to control the institutionalised, sovereign power of the nation state, and the governments that carry that power.     Modern communication technologies have been instrumental to the organization of social and economic activity, and certainly to the exertion and maintenance of sovereign political authority, on a national scale. These modern technologies made possible:

• the more or less simultaneous, standardized communication of political authority from a centralized state apparatus to a national public dispersed across a national territory;
• for those centralized authorities to receive information about compliance or threats (both internal as external), to which they could then more or less rapidly respond.  
• the formation, maintenance and shape out of national public spheres, the political arenas of civil society in which liberal democratic citizenship is enacted, public opinion is formed, and the legitimacy  of sovereign state authority is tested.  

Globalization, the capacity of states to exercise exclusively the ultimate power of judgment and action within their territories has been decisively diminished; sovereignty has become unbundled, as states no longer enjoy the exclusive power to prescribe and proscribe activity within their national jurisdictions. This power is now shared amongst a constellation of domestic and international public and private actors and institutions, ranging from private, transactional corporations to an increasing array of international policy-making venues (WTO, G8, EU etc).     The roots of globalization lie in the dynamics of deterritorialization. The dynamic of globalization is most evident in the deterritorialization and transnationalisation of economic activity from 1980s onwards.     A number of factors stimulated this process of economic deterritorialization;  

• increased international migration;
• significant advances in transportation and communication technology;

the more or less voluntary decision by prosperous states to ease limits the exercise of their independent sovereign authority might otherwise place on economic enterprise and accumulation within the free market. States have pledged to liberate the flow of economic activity by restricting their own ability to regulate those flows independently in response to domestic pressures or priorities that might not be encompassed by the desire for economic growth.   The globalization of world economics has purportedly stimulated a deterritorialization of politics. This is manifested in:

• the growth of international institutions which enjoy power and jurisdiction without territory;
• the disarticulation of territory and identity evident in the rise  of international migration and diasporic communities;
• the heightened awareness and salience of territorially indefinite issues such as human rights and the environment;
• the beginnings of a global civil society and possibly even a transactional/deterritorialized public sphere.  

These changes are seen by many as responsible for the democratic crisis that is said to characterize the politics of globalization. This crisis operates on two levels:   The level of the nation-state,   membership in the global economic marketplace is contingent upon a range of commitments made by states to refrain from intervening prejudicially in the flow of a range of economic values. These economic commitments are also political commitments, as they limit states’ ability to secure non-market public goods, and to respond when the democratically expressed will of their citizens directs them to do so. In many cases these commitments undermine the state’s capacity to deliver the benefits of social welfare and security that have been the cornerstone of the state’s legitimacy since WW2.     The level of the international venues to which its power is apparently shifting,    decisions made by institutions (such as the WTO) have a decisive impact upon life in the countries that are subject to them. Most of these institutions lack the institutionalized mechanisms for participation, representation, scrutiny and accountability that are necessary for them to claim democratic legitimacy.  Critics:  It is important to note that there are many who argue that reports of the demise of the nation-state and its sovereignty are greatly exaggerated. Their arguments:   1.  globalization is the continued progress of an old one, the growing economic and political interdependence of nation-states.   2.  globalization is anything but global, because of the unevenness with which its fruits and burdens are distributed across the planet. 3.  ‘border effects’ continue to contain economies within national territorial, linguistic and cultural boundaries, affording states much more room for political autonomy in relation to economic matters than is supposed in most accounts of globalization.  4.  regardless of multilateralism (van vele partijen uitgaand) and interdependence, there remain no organizations that rival the interdependent economic and military resources, and so the power, of modern nation-states.  5. radical critics suggest that globalization is more of an ideological device than a material reality, a discourse generated to obscure the responsibility of states for their commitment to neo-liberal, market capitalism, their abandonment of the welfare state, and their power to reverse these commitments.     Nevertheless, the modern state is increasingly embedded in webs of regional and global interconnectedness permeated by supranational, intergovernmental and transactional forces, unable to determine its own fate.     The account given above of the decline of the nation-state under the pressure of globalization is central to the network society thesis. Castells advances the model of the network as both contributor to, and an outcome of, the state’s descent into powerlessness.     While nation-states continue to exist, and they will continue to do so in a foreseeable future, they are and will increasingly be, nodes of a broader network of power.     It’s from the wreckage caused by the democratic crisis of old politics that the new politics of the network society supposedly emerges. Castells calls this new politics “information politics” and connects it directly to network communication technologies.     Media have become the privileged space of politics.     The new politics is a politics of struggling over information management and control in the ‘space’ constructed by prevailing media of communication, as a necessary precondition of access to more material forms of power.     A minimum condition of political action is access to and presence and/or representation within, the arenas in which these battles are engaged. Not everyone has this access. So the digital divide is at once a technological, economic and political divide. 

There is a struggle in the new politics about the meaning of globalization;   Globalization as the extension of the rights and freedoms associated with liberal democracy, a sharing of the prosperity associated with market capitalism, rising standards of living, enhanced intercultural understanding and harmony, international peace and global democracy.     This is the meaning preferred by the forces of transactional capital that stand to gain from globalization on the neo-liberal model.     Globalization as the end of national self-determination and autonomy, the triumph of unaccountable transactional corporations and institutions over democratic governments, global dominance of American cultural commodities, a deepening of the dependency and exploitation of the developing world, environmental degradation and an assault on the working people.     This meaning is preferred by the multifaceted transactional social movements that has risen in opposition to these forms.     Network technologies provide resources to both sides in this contest. They provide the infrastructure for the various economic flows of transactional capitalism, and their deterritorializing effects undermine the ability of national governments, democratically accountable to the public interest, to impose limits on those powerful economic actors. Network technologies also provided an opportunity and means for transactional elites to consolidate their control over the global medias cape, through a dramatic consideration of ownership, through horizontal and vertical integration, across media-platforms, and across the content/carriage divide.     Many new social movements are nationally specific and these have made significant use of networked communication technologies to considerable impact within and beyond their respective borders.     However, it is specifically transactional new social movements whose rise and activity are more strongly identified as definitive of the politics of the network society, largely because these movements are themselves structured as networks.     Dynamic, deterritorialized coalitions of local, national and international groups, each of which represents a node in a complex network whose coordination relies heavily on the communication made possible by digital networks.     There are a lot of opportunities to new social movements by digital information and communication networks. These instruments provide spatially dispersed activist coalitions with the means to accomplish a range of functions that are central to their operations and impact. These include the following 9:  

• collection, production, archiving and global publication of information resources (especially political material that might not otherwise be disseminated so widely and inexpensively)
• a platform for event promotion, recruitment, fundraising and the solicitation of other forms of support;
• a delivery system for consciousness raising, political education and training
• a means of establishing and maintaining communication links with sympathetic and allied organizations, and the networks of which they are a part;
• a communication system for internal organization, administration, mobilization and coordination of activities;
• a communication system for democratic dialogue, debate and deliberation, contributing to the possibility of a global, democratic sphere;
• a medium for political communication otherwise prohibited by repressive states
• a distribution system for independent media, new reporting and alternative journalism that bypasses corporate-controlled mass media;
• an instrument for engagement in novel forms of direct political action.  

The limits and challenges that high-technology organization and activism present to new social movements;

• the technological, financial and time/labor resources required to mount and maintain an effective ‘digital’ movement,
• issues of privacy and surveillance,
• over-reliance on a technology to which access is far from equally distributed,
• vulnerability to technology failure,
• issues of censorship/freedom of expression.  

Digital networks have done more to help than to harm the proliferation and effectiveness of new social movements and the global civil society into which they coalesce (samenvoegen).     New instruments do not necessarily make for new politics, but the claim that the politics of the network society is ‘new’ rests not only on an account of the character of instruments political actors use, but also on certain assumptions about the object of political action, and the organization of political power. To say that politics is primarily informational is a contestable claim. Network technologies and democracy: the arrival of new information and communication technologies was attended b an often euphoric discourse that these would be the instruments of a radical democratic renaissance, and this discourse has proved to be quite persistent.     One of our deepest liberal democratic intuitions is that generalized advance in our ability to gather and share information, and to communicate with one another, stimulates democratic politics. So instruments that expand our access to information and communication, must contribute positively to democracy’s achievements and enhancements. Democracy is a deeply communicative brand of politics. It demands the communication and exchange of information and views. It demands dialogue, and a public sphere, in which citizens can engage in the practices that define them as citizens and their society as democratic:

• the dissemination of information,
• the expression and consideration of contending viewpoints,  
• rational, critical debate on issues of common concern,
• scrutiny of public authority and policy,
• the presentation and contestation of reasons,
• the holding of officials to account.  

None of the other mass-media has achieved to gain citizen participation in politics, but expectations that the internet will be able to do so remain high. Because of its technical attributes (decentralized architecture and interactive applications) enable practices, that the old centralized, one-way media do not.     Seven contributions the new network communication technologies might make to enhance democratic politics; 1.  More convenient, generalized access to a massive volume of politically relevant information, including information produced by and about government and its critics; 2.  A medium of publication, by a plurality of sources, of a broader diversity of public-interest information than is characteristic of highly centralized, corporate-controlled, commercial mass media; 3.   A powerful, relatively accessible tool of organization, mobilization and action for politically active individuals, groups and organizations; 4.  A means of enhanced, routine, vertical communication between citizens and legislators/officials, enabling improved representation, responsiveness and scrutiny, and heightened accountability;  5.  A means of enhanced horizontal communication amongst citizens, including expanded opportunities for public dialogue and deliberation on issues of common concern; 6.  A mechanism to enable more direct forms of popular participation in democratic decision-making, such as online voting, and deliberative opinion polling;   7.  An infrastructure for the erection and maintenance of a more inclusive, politicized public sphere than that mediated by existing, commercial mass media.     There are also substantial reasons to believe that these potentials will not be realized, and that network technologies might just as well serve to reinforce the undemocratic tendencies to contemporary mainstream politics, and perhaps even to  undermine the possibility of their transformation in democratic decisions. For example the role they played in the expansion of globalization.   People use the internet sites of established mass information providers (CNN, BBC etc). This suggest that the potential for the internet to deliver plurality of alternative political information is unlikely to be realized.     The governments have been rapid to adopt the network technology for the purposes of more efficient information access and service delivery, but relatively little serious effort at using these technologies to transform practices of decision- and policy-making.     The network model has figured into the processes and practices of government in ways that do represent a potentially significant shift a the rise of so called ‘network governance’. This refers to the distribution of select government functions into multi-sectoral networks that cross the territorial, jurisdictional and sectoral boundaries that have traditionally served to organize these functions.   Networks enable governments to better manage the risks and take advantage of the opportunities that economic liberalization and technological change bring… They represent a promising medium through which stated and their international organizations can achieve their mission, maintain their competence in a changing global environment, and serve their citizens in a more effective and legitimate way (Witte et al, 2002).   The network model certainly holds promise for a decentralization and democratisation of governance, but it would be an exaggeration to day that this model has replaced the hierarchical, bureaucratic organization of institutional political authority and power, or that it is necessarily democratic in either intention or outcome. It could be argued that, for example, networked governance represents;

• a significant incursion of private interests into public governance,
• the reorganization of public sector government along corporate lines,
• a strategy for co-opting civil society opposition without significant devolution of power,  
• a style of public management feed from traditional structures of democratic representation and accountability.  

The network model remains as open to undemocratic possibilities as it is to democratic ones. Political parties have embraced new information and communication technologies. In most cases, parties use these technologies in exactly the same way that new social movements do, e-mail and websites are deployed as instruments of publication, recruitment, fundraising, mobilization and organization. Parties also use digital technology to engage in sophisticated information-gathering practices that enable them to craft highly customized appeals. Also, political party sites enable various forms of interactively. Critics say however, that this last feature is used not enough.     It is far from clear that the use of new information and communication technologies by established mainstream political parties represents a qualitive improvement in the practices of electoral and representative democracy that have been the source of such widespread disaffection in Western liberal democracies.     And even if governments and political parties chose to capitalize creatively on the interactive capacities of digital communication technology to provide for robust, democratic engagement. It is not to say that citizens would take the advantage of this opportunity.     Some say that the internet holds out the promise to act as a radically democratised public sphere, capable even of overcoming the biases and exclusions that undermine existing liberal democratic politics.     There are, however, many reasons to be skeptical of this view:   The most likely impact of network communication on the public sphere is that it will contribute to a condition of ‘accelerated pluralism’. Critics worry that the internet will exaggerate the negative aspects of pluralism, whereby the public sphere fragments into many small groups pursuing their private interests against, or in isolation, from others, without really engaging each with others concerning the common good.     The internet can be inclusive in ways that other media are not, it is far from clear that participation in this medium meets the standards of equality necessary to declare it an adequately democratic public sphere. Serious material inequalities characterize access to and use of digital technologies;

• levels of access to the new technologies mirror existing unequal distributions of power and resources in society,
• even those who do have ‘access’ to these technologies are far from equal,
• most users simply do not employ digital technologies in order to engage in the kinds of political activities characteristic of a democratic public sphere. This is a cultural matter, not a technical one.

Identity is the word we use to denote our consciousness of who we are, our sense of our most significant or defining attributes. Identity is comprised of the ideas that others have about you, and the ideas that you have about yourself. Identity is a crucial component of human subjectivity, of the experience of being a conscious actor in the world.     Identity as it is discussed in the discourse surrounding the network society : The logic of identity takes on a particular importance in the network society. The salience of identity is both accelerated by the prevailing conditions of the network society, and also as a crucial source of social and political resistance to these conditions.     Identity is presented as an energetic dialectical force opposing the dislocating dynamics of the network society. This appears in both within and beyond the reach of global networks.     Within this reach, identity emerges as an organizing force amongst those who experience the network society as one in which their autonomy is diminished, in which global forces threaten to reduce their particularity and distinction to homogeneity, and in which the power to define the conditions of their existence is decreasingly located in actors and institutions over which they might hope to have direct influence.     Beyond this reach, identity also thrives in those areas of the world where existence remains intensely local  and membership n the cosmopolitan is not an option, by virtue of systematic exclusion from global technological, economic and political networks.  The power of identity .     There are two remarkable features regarding identity in network society:  1. Identity persists as a social force despite the supposedly universalising spirit of global networks, technologies and markets.  2. The nation-state is no longer the only one, or the most significant mobilizer of identity.   The primacy and power of identity in (and against) the network society is embodied and carried by a variety of social movements, some of which are organized nationally but many which are not, and whose bases of identification are many and varied.     There are, according to Castells, three distinct categories of identity   Legitimizing identities;   those induced by a society’s dominant institutions and ideology, in order to reflect, support and rationalize its structure of social roles and relationships. These identities establish the boundaries of civil society in a given context.  The rise of the network society is marked by a collapse of the legitimacy of this kind of identity, as a result of economic globalization, technological dynamism and the declining inclination and ability of nation-states and other traditional institutions to impart to their adherents a sense of autonomy and efficacy, or to deliver the social welfare necessary to secure their ongoing allegiance and consent.     Resistance identities ; formed upon the basis of opposition to, exclusion from, or subordination under the legitimizing identities of a given societies and its institutions. These resistance identities typically congeal around the very bases of their exclusion or marginalized from mainstream civil society: their biology (race sex), their history (class, ethnic or religious minorities), their geography (regional minorities).  Identities of this sort challenge the structure of civil society to become less suppressive of difference, more accommodating and inclusive.   These resistance identities are ‘defensive reactions’ against the threats to traditional social organization. These threats motivate social movements built around resistance identities in a variety of forms. These include:

• religious fundamentalisms,  
• ethnic and minority nationalisms,
• territorial communes that cohere around the location of identity at the urban level.  

Project identities ; arise when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society, and by doing so, seek the transformation of the overall social structure. These identities also challenge the legitimacy of civil society as it is constructed by the dominant categories and institutions. They differ from resistance identities in two aspects:

• they do not congeal around categories that simply reflect the bases of exclusion/ subordination coded into the legitimizing identities of a given society, they establish entirely new identity categories.  
• they do not aim at inclusion or acceptance in mainstream civil society as it is constructed, they seek transformation of that society.  

Project identity emerges from the radicalization of resistance identity, when a group of people who are marginalized or subordinated (ondergeschikt gemaakt) in a civil society do not simply seek inclusion, but rather reject the society that rejects them, and seek to transform it. Such project identities are highly self-consciously politicized, and they represent a diversity of ideological positions.     Both resistance and project identities have an ambivalent relationship with the opportunities of network communications:  

• On one hand, movements driven by identities developed in opposition to the ‘new global order’ are, in effect, opposed to the order built by network technology.  
• On the other hand, the relationship between new social movements and new information and communication could be described as umbilical. The powerful impact of these movements has come, to a large extent, from their media presence and from their effective use of information technology. New technologies are fundamental for these movements to exist.  

In Castells’ estimation, hope for social change in the information age lies in the conversion of progressive resistance identities into projects aimed at fundamental transformation.     Identity as network: Inhabitants of the late modern West have witnessed a gradual eclipse of many of their traditional sources of meaning and identification. The salience of traditional sources of meaning and identity have waned for many people in contemporary, late capitalist societies, leaving subjects with the task of reflexively building, rather than passively accepting, their identities. Post-modern identity is constructed as a complex pastiche of relationships, choices and acts, enacted in a variety of parallel and overlapping contexts. It’s artificial, fluid, contingent, multifaceted and mutable. Post-modern identity is a lot like a network.     Computers change our selves by providing us with a novel instrument for the self-directed social construction of our selves (Turkle).  Several of the technical affordances of the network media environment lend themselves to the postmodern identity as described by Turkle:

• The dislocated, deterritorialized character of network communications, which diminish geographic location as a decisive factor in the determination of identity.
• Network communication is disembodied, and does not require physical co-presence for routine interpersonal interaction.
• Networks are opaque (ondoorzichtige) media that cannot be seen through. This opacity effectively eliminates the impact of visual apprehension of physical appearance and behavior which have traditionally been strongly tied to identity.

Identity and community : Identity and community are organically related, and communication technologies have long been identified as central to the constitution, maintenance and character of communities.     As people less and less occupy a localized, common physical space, communication technologies (in a sense) become the space of community. On the other hand, it has been argued that the proliferation of communication technology is implicated in what is best understood as a long-term decline in the vitality of community in the modern West.   Communication technologies, notably television, have been identified by some as having a delocalising, atomizing, privatizing effect that, far from making meaningful community possible, fatally weakens it. Technologically mediated communities are not communities at all. They are rather at best ‘pseudo communities’, which have the appearance, but not the substance of genuine communities (Beniger).      Communication networks provide venues for sociability and for developing and representing identity. Some common characteristics of online communities:

• communication is their core and definitive activity.
• membership is voluntary and easily revocable.
• basis of relationship is a shared personal interest, rather than some form of obligation.  

Digital networks strengthen communities:

• The advent and spread of network technology brings with it the promise of a rejuvenation of community engagement and solidarity.
• Virtual communities overcome the obstacles of scale, including time, distance and population size.
• More meaningful because they are volitional (vrijwillig), rather than based on the arbitrary foundations of geographic proximity, common ethnicity or shared ancestry.
• Less hierarchical and less discriminatory, more equalitarian and inclusive than traditional communities, where recourse to visual markers of identity often results in prejudicial exclusion, silencing and mistreatment.  
• It makes it far easier to enter and exit at will than is possible in offline communities.  
• Integration

Digital networks weaken communities:

• Undermine rooted ness in place and body that is necessary for a robust experience of, and commitment to, community
• Further encourage withdrawal from civic engagement offline, and a deepening of social life
• Fragment general interest and shared experience
• People withdraw from ‘real’ relationships.  
• Anonymity of interaction erodes the foundation of responsibility, accountability and social trust upon which meaningful communities are built.  
• Dislocation

The most likely effect of network communication on community is that it will contribute to an ‘accelerated pluralism’, in which ‘thin’ communities (associations of individuals whose private interests are complementary) will proliferate but ‘thick’ community (wherein members collectively pursue goals beyond the sum of their mutual private interests) is unlikely to be enhanced.     Castells: Digital networks facilitate networked individualism.   We might say that digital technology is the perfect instrument for networked individuals to imagine themselves as communities. It is perfect because social relationships based on the network model require communication that can be maintained in the context of individual mobility, and despite spatial and temporal dislocation of nodes.     The defining practices and activities of life in the network society are decreasingly located in consistent, enduring proximity with others and, in societies where everything is on, open and for sale all the time, we also decreasingly share temporal rhythms with others. Digital technology contributes to this dislocation, but it also provides the means to connect or communicate with others, similarly dislocated, under these conditions.     Identity and culture: Our understanding of culture has become very expansive, encompassing cultivated behaviors enacted by an identifiable group of people; any set of shared, routinized social practices, whether institutionalized or not; any set of learned ideas, values, norms, beliefs, habits and traditions; any set of symbolic or communicative representations of the foregoing. Culture consists of patterns, behaviors, symbols and artifacts.     Cultural systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of human behavior and symbolic action, and on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further behavior and symbolic action as a way of life and as a system of meaning.     The advent of digital network technology is widely believed to be involved in nothing less than a cultural transformation. It has transformed fundamental parts of life: how we work and play, how we communicate and consume, even how we understand politics and participate in public life.     The culture of the internet is shaped by the values of the technology’s producers and initial users. The culture of internet, according to Castells, is one of openness, freedom and voluntary cooperation, built upon four layers of definitive users:   1. Techno-elite culture, is one of openness, determined by a technomeritocratic (technologische prestatiemaatschappij) culture rooted in academia and science. This is a culture of belief in the inherent good of scientific and technological development as a key component of the progress of humankind.   2. Hacker culture, the loose affiliation of programmers who creatively and collaboratively built on the academic and scientific roots of the internet to produce the various programming languages, protocol and applications that now form the infrastructure of the internet (email, web, browsers).  culture is freedom; to create, to appropriate whatever knowledge is available, to redistribute this knowledge under every form and channel chosen by the hacker. Other values are spontaneous voluntary cooperation, anti-commercialism, and hostility to property and propriety relations and institutional power.   3. Virtual communitarian culture, arose from the online social formations established by early users of the internet, many of which were born of the counter cultural movements and alternative lifestyles of the late 1960s.  Two major, common, cultural features: 

• the value of horizontal free communication, global free speech that circumvents the communicative dominance (and censorship) of media conglomerates and government bureaucracies,
• the value of self-directed networking: the capacity for anyone to find his destination on the net and, if not found, to create and post his information, thus inducing a network.  

4. Entrepreneurial culture,   the culture of business entrepreneurs and venture capitalists responsible for disseminating internet technology to society at large. Its cornerstone values are the high value placed on ideas, knowledge and innovation.     These four cultures articulate to form internet culture (Castells):   the culture of the Internet is a culture made up of a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology, enacted by communities of hackers thriving on free and open technological creativity, embedded in a virtual network aimed at reinventing society, and materialized by money-driven entrepreneurs into the workings of the new economy.     Post-materialist values include meaningful work (over basic job security); environmental protection (over economic growth); sexual equality (over traditional family roles); cosmopolitanism (over national identity); tolerance of diversity; secularism and free expression (over religious authority); and participatory democracy (over deference and bureaucracy). Norris’s hypothesis is that, given the demographic profile of internet users (affluent, educated and young), the culture of internet users is particularly post materialist in its value/ideological structure.     Norris’ conclusions: “The cyber culture sympathizes with the values of openness, freedom and tolerance, on both the social and economic agenda, perhaps reflecting the broader ethos of individualism and alternative lifestyles that seems to flourish online.”   The American and European internet users have many similarities: they posit (veronderstellen) a certain kind of freedom as the core cultural value of internet users.   Network technology infringes on culture in a variety of ways, and there are numerous possible ways of interpreting the cultural condition of the network society:

• Digital technology is an instrument of the global homogenisation of culture, the erosion of national and local cultural distinctions, the extension of American mass entertainment and consumer culture into every corner of life in every corner of the world.  
• Some celebrate the digitally mediated globalization of culture as a universalization of the values of freedom and democracy.  

The internet contributes to a fragmentation of common culture into a patchwork of cultures. Most of what was/is culturally significant about communication media before internet is that they were mass media capable of constructing mass audiences and mass consciousnesses. It was the ability of these communication media to gather and construct mass audiences that made them:

• economically significant as industry (because mass attention could be sold to advertisers)
• politically significant as tools of administration and propaganda
• culturally significant as a source of widely shared systems of meaning, symbolic interaction and socialization.  

Digital media have technical characteristics that undermine the mass media model. The internet is a mass medium, in the sense that it reaches increasingly massive populations. But it does not construct its users as a mass audience that pays attention to the same things at the same time. The technical characteristics enable customization or personalization of cultural consumption. There are a few reasons for this:

• the decentralization of production/distribution to the networked desktop personal computer has produced an explosion of highly varied cultural material accessible from multiple decentralized sources
• digitisation of material makes for ease of copying, alteration, appropriation anddistribution in ways unintended by the originator of the material
• digital interfaces increase the role of individual preference signaling and choice making (and unpredictability) in the reception of cultural information
• the a-synchronic nature of the medium enables physically dispersed users to engage in cultural consumption at times of their own choosing
• digitisation has also enabled an overcoming of the ‘bandwidth’ limitations that previously kept the channels of cultural transmission to a relative minimum, and so increased individual choice.  

There are many possible interpretations of this dynamic of fragmentation:

• some people say that the claims of the demise of the mass audience under the auspices of the internet are greatly exaggerated. They argue that the internet will just be experienced as yet another medium of mass culture. At most, fragmentation means the reorganization of the mass audience into more precisely defined niche markets ripe for more customized marketing strategies. 
• some are pleased to witness the demise of mass culture: an artificial, industrial product that has robbed popular culture of its authentic, diversity and dignity, and turned it into a commodity, or a propaganda device that generates meaningless spectacle, soul-destroying entertainment, false consciousness and political disempowerment. The internet provides the means for an explosion of authentic,diverse, non-commodified cultural practices and forms. 
• many see in the technological fragmentation of culture the demise of the particular virtues of a common culture. The internet disinter mediates culture, allowing a degree of customization and personalization that radically curtails our exposure to diverse cultural practices and artifacts, and undermines the common cultural experiences that might cultivate attention to widely shared common goods. The internet is the perfect instrument for the extension of a culture of radical individualism, narcissism and idiocy. A culture that presumes that there is no such thing as culture, only self determined individual choices, freely undertaken.  

Names have a performative aspect: they are not just labels, they also make things happen.     So we must not only consider whether ‘the network society’ is a name that accurately describes the characteristics of contemporary society, but also the performative operation of this name as an active part, rather than a neutral description, of the historical dynamics currently under way.     It is too soon to evaluate how well the network model describes the society that we live in. the network society thesis is neither right nor wrong, it is simply premature, and it is history and not us that will decide whether it is a name that sticks.     Castells’s theory of the network society identifies five attributes as definitive of the contemporary situation, each enabled by the proliferation of networked information and communication technologies:

• A shift in capitalist economies from industrial to an informational base
• The organization of capitalist economic activity globally, on the network model
• Reorientation of the temporal and spatial organization of human activity, in response to technologies that enable real-time communication across vast distances
• Distribution of power based on access to networks and control over flows
• Tension between localized human identity and placeless networks.  

Intellectuals, including Castells, have begun to refer to networks not simply as a sociological reality that we should recognize, but also as a ‘superior organizational form’ upon which an entire socials order can, and probably should, be built. In this respect, the discourse of the network society takes on ideological proportions.     The network society is not just a descriptive name. It is also an elaborate discourse that, in purporting simply to describe a set of contemporary social dynamics, provides a script that sets out roles, norms expectations and the terms of dialogue. As an alleged fact, the network society becomes the standard for what is normal, desirable and for what we can reasonably expect.     At its most advanced level of articulation, the discourse of the Network Society not only normalizes present conditions, but also justifies political, social and economic measures that might otherwise be negotiable. 

The network thesis as a tool of                 The rhetoric of the Network Society as an investigation and interpretation.      Vs     ideological discourse that serves a performative                                              prescriptive function.

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Language and interaction: applying sociolinguistics to social network analysis

• Published: 04 July 2018
• Volume 53 , pages 757–774, ( 2019 )

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• David K. Diehl   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3043-809X 1  

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In recent years social network analysis, influenced by relational sociology, has taken a cultural turn. One result has been a growing interest in the cultural, and not just structural, aspects of social networks. And yet, while relational literature conceptualizes network ties as being interactionally constructed through cultural processes, relationalist inspired quantitative network analysts have rarely made face-to-face interaction a focus of study. More often, these scholars have adopted an interpretive approach and examined the network structure of cultural forms and belief systems. This article argues that network analysis is missing an opportunity to study procedural aspects of culture by taking advantage of our growing ability to collect and analyze streaming data of face-to-face interaction. To productively do so, however, network studies of interaction can apply ideas from sociolinguistics related to the context and style of communication in order to capture cultural aspects of interaction.

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Following Mast et al. ( 2015 : 154) we can define social interactional data as that related to “any verbal or nonverbal behavior directed toward or elicited by one or many real or imagined social interaction partners”.

Analysis of interactional data can also be augmented with large-scale data sets of the movements and interactions of actors across large social landscapes most typically relies on Bluetooth enabled devices like smartphones. Increasingly researchers are tying multiple sources of data together. For individuals this might be a combination of call logs, text logs, geographical positioning and Bluetooth data. At the city level it might be a combination of cell-phone call records with demographic, transportation and economic data (Stopczynski et al. 2014 ). Research projects that have collected this kind of trans-situational behavioral data include the Reality Mining Study (Eagle and Pentland 2006 ), The Lausanne Data Collection Campaign (Kiukkonen et al. 2010 ), and the Locaccino study (Cranshaw et al. 2010 ).

Sociolinguistic functionalism, which emphasizes on social functions of language, should not be confused with functionalism in sociology, which focuses on the functions different parts of a social system serve in maintaining the whole.

Notably, work on variation often draws on social network analysis. The sociolinguistic assumption in this work is that membership in a given demographic categories cannot explain language variation by itself and social network analysis offers a supplementary explanatory device. The study of social networks in sociolinguistics is generally traced back to the 1960 s and 70 s with Labov’s study of Martha’s Vineyard ( 1963 ) Blom and Gumperz’s study of code-switching ( 1972 ). Milroy’s study of Belfast (Milroy and Margrain 1980 ) is generally considered the first study to systematically examine the connection between social networks and language variation. This work, and the work that followed, looked for associations between structural aspect of networks like multiplexity and density on the one hand and natural language use on the other.

The co-construction of conversations is itself a salient, and common, example of this: “In conversation… each person uses their own language production systems (hence the generative model underlying their own behavior) to help predict the other’s utterances, while also using the output of the other as a kind of external scaffolding for their own ongoing productions…Each party to such a process is, in the typical case, in the business of matching, or attempting to match, their behavior and expectations to those of the other. As conversation proceeds, words, grammar, intonation, gesture, and eye movements may all be overtly copied or covertly imitated (Clark 2015: 285).”.

Though it is an open and important question if there are some stylistic features that uniquely capture only one level of identity.

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Wyatt, D., Choudhury, T., Bilmes, J.A.: Learning hidden curved exponential family models to infer face-to-face interaction networks from situated speech data. In: AAAI, pp. 732–738 (2008)

Zimmerman, D.: Identity, context, and interaction. In: Antaki, C., Widdicombe, S. (eds.) Identities in Talk, pp. 87–106. Sage, Thousand Oaks (1998)

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Diehl, D.K. Language and interaction: applying sociolinguistics to social network analysis. Qual Quant 53 , 757–774 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-018-0787-5

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Victor M. Mukhin was born in 1946 in the town of Orsk, Russia. In 1970 he graduated the Technological Institute in Leningrad. Victor M. Mukhin was directed to work to the scientific-industrial organization "Neorganika" (Elektrostal, Moscow region) where he is working during 47 years, at present as the head of the laboratory of carbon sorbents.     Victor M. Mukhin defended a Ph. D. thesis and a doctoral thesis at the Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia (in 1979 and 1997 accordingly). Professor of Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia. Scientific interests: production, investigation and application of active carbons, technological and ecological carbon-adsorptive processes, environmental protection, production of ecologically clean food.   

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Toxic metal particles can be present in cannabis vapes even before the first use

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW ORLEANS, March 19, 2024 — Vapes have often been heralded as a “safer” way to consume either nicotine or cannabis, where legal to do so. But the devices present their own suite of risks that are slowly being revealed as they undergo increasing research and regulation. Now, researchers have discovered that nano-sized toxic metal particles may be present in cannabis vaping liquids even before the vaping device is heated, and the effect is worse in unregulated products.

The researchers will present their results today at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). ACS Spring 2024 is a hybrid meeting being held virtually and in person March 17-21; it features nearly 12,000 presentations on a range of science topics.

While cannabis regulation and legalization are still growing in the U.S., it was made federally legal in Canada under its Cannabis Act in 2018. “Cannabis vapes are newly regulated products in Canada, so we don’t yet have much scientific data about them,” says Andrew Waye, who will present the work at the meeting. “This is an opportunity for us to look at some of the questions concerning the risks and unknowns of cannabis vapes.” Waye manages the research program at the Office of Cannabis Science and Surveillance at Health Canada.

Unlike smoking, vaping does not involve a combustion reaction, which produces harmful byproducts. Instead, a vaping device heats a liquid until it evaporates into an inhalable vapor. As a result, it is often seen as a safer method to consume cannabis or nicotine. But research on nicotine vapes has shown that the metal components that heat the vape liquid may release harmful elemental metals, including nickel, chromium and lead, which can then be transported into the aerosol and deposited into the user’s body.

Waye’s team wanted to investigate whether this was also true for cannabis vapes. To do so, the group collaborated with Zuzana Gajdosechova, who is a scientist at the Metrology Research Centre of the National Research Council of Canada, which has been involved in cannabis testing and standardization for several years.

The team gathered 41 samples of cannabis vape liquids — 20 legal, regulated samples from the Ontario Cannabis Store and 21 samples from the illicit market provided by the Ontario Provincial Police. The liquids were analyzed by mass spectrometry to look for the presence of 12 metals. Regulated cannabis products are routinely tested for some of the analyzed metals, as well as other contaminants.

To verify the team’s findings, Gajdosechova collaborated with imaging experts and used techniques such as scanning electron microscopy to provide a visual confirmation of the metal particles. While some metals, such as arsenic, mercury and cadmium, were within the generally accepted tolerance limits for cannabis products, others were detected in concentrations considered to be very high. The most striking example proved to be lead: Some unregulated samples contained 100 times more lead than the regulated samples, far exceeding the generally accepted tolerance limit.

Importantly, this metal contamination was found in the liquid of cannabis vapes that had never been used and were less than six months old.  "The evidence strongly suggests that metal contamination can come from the device when it’s produced, and not from the heating of the coils,” explains Gajdosechova. “But depending on the quality of the device, the contamination may be increased by that heating.”

Additionally, the team found that vapes belonging to the same production lot could contain different levels of metal contamination, demonstrating a high level of variability between samples. This could have implications for testing procedures, as Canadian regulations require samples to be representative of the whole lot or batch and that testing be done at or after the last step where contamination can occur. “If contamination is happening when the device is assembled, you should be testing at that stage rather than earlier,” says Waye.

Next, the team wanted to investigate the size of the metal particles to understand their potential health risks. Using single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, the researchers found many particles that were of nanoscale size. “Some nano-sized metal particles are highly reactive and potentially harmful,” says Gajdosechova.

Moving forward, the team wants to determine how many of these particles are transmitted into the vape aerosol when a device is used. This is when the metals could get into users’ lungs, which will be important to determine the public health implications of these findings. The effect has been demonstrated in nicotine vapes, and the researchers expect that cannabis vapes could show the same.

“Different types of cannabis products present different risks. Our research doesn’t answer whether vaping is riskier than smoking, it just underlines that the risks may be different. Previously uncharacterized risks with cannabis vaping are still being identified,” concludes Waye. So, while there isn’t necessarily one way to “safely” consume these products, this research demonstrates that regulation can help create safer cannabis products overall.

This research was funded by Health Canada.

Visit the  ACS Spring 2024 program  to learn more about this presentation, “Use of advanced imaging techniques for the identification and analysis of metal particles in unused legal and illegal cannabis vaping products,” and more scientific presentations.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress. ACS’ mission is to advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and all its people. The Society is a global leader in promoting excellence in science education and providing access to chemistry-related information and research through its multiple research solutions, peer-reviewed journals, scientific conferences, eBooks and weekly news periodical Chemical & Engineering News . ACS journals are among the most cited, most trusted and most read within the scientific literature; however, ACS itself does not conduct chemical research. As a leader in scientific information solutions, its CAS division partners with global innovators to accelerate breakthroughs by curating, connecting and analyzing the world’s scientific knowledge. ACS’ main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.

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This Fond du Lac society of HR professionals helps businesses align strategy with people and culture

Fdl shrm meets regularly to dialogue and learn..

In the 19th century, through the Industrial Revolution , it became apparent there was a need for a role within an organization that would deal with the most important aspect of business: people.

During the 20th century, the role now known as human resources was officially woven into the fabric of business.

Simply put, human resources — or HR — is the division of a business responsible for finding, recruiting, screening and training job applicants. Today, this can encompass so much more.

Dating back decades, there was an organized presence of HR professionals in Fond du Lac. Called a few different names along the way, today we refer to this group as FDL SHRM, or Fond du Lac Society for Human Resource Management .

Journalism awards: Fond du Lac Reporter wins pair of statewide journalism awards

FDL SHRM is a program of Envision Greater Fond du Lac and a chapter of the Society for Human Resource Management . The purpose of FDL SHRM is to: promote and professionalize Human Resources administration and encourage good HR practices; further the education of members in current Human Resources practices and philosophies; discuss problems of mutual interest to those engaged in the Human Resources field in the areas of business, industry, education and government; and establish a free communication process among members of the association.

The organization provides support to area employers on human resource management issues. The council provides educational seminars and networking opportunities for human resource specialists. Services offered include networking opportunities; monthly continuing education programs; study groups for certification testing facilitated by a certified HR professional; speakers for Human Resources curriculum classes at local colleges; HR consultations to non-profit organizations; social events; and HR scholarship opportunities.

The role of human resources touches every business. Organizations such as FDL SHRM are not exclusive to big companies or people with fancy titles, rather it is an inclusive place for all those who have any hand in effectively handling any aspect of human resources, whether your company is a multi-million-dollar one or a small shop with two employees. The topics, issues, rules and regulations can all apply.

Being part of an organized group such as FDL SHRM can arm individuals with the necessary tools to survive and thrive in your role. Having access to a network of professionals for networking, problem-solving and creative solutions is priceless. The support and collaboration aspect of a group such as this can provide invaluable insight into the interworking of organizations that are dealing with (or have dealt with) similar situations. One does not have to travel this path alone. 

More Envisioning Greater: Click here to read more Envisioning Greater columns

FDL SHRM meets regularly to dialogue and learn. In the coming months, the following topics will be covered:

• Sharpen Your Positive Edge – Shifting your thoughts for more positivity and success;
• Networking event at the Dock Spiders;
• Compensation and Benefits;
• Personal Branding; and
• Superhero Training – Discover your Powers.

There is no better time than now to invest in professional development. If you or someone in your organization serves as a human resource professional, check out what the FDL SHRM  has to offer.

Tracy Qualmann  is senior director of marketing & communication for Envision Greater Fond du Lac.

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40 facts about elektrostal.

Written by Lanette Mayes

Modified & Updated: 02 Mar 2024

Reviewed by Jessica Corbett

Elektrostal is a vibrant city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia. With a rich history, stunning architecture, and a thriving community, Elektrostal is a city that has much to offer. Whether you are a history buff, nature enthusiast, or simply curious about different cultures, Elektrostal is sure to captivate you.

This article will provide you with 40 fascinating facts about Elektrostal, giving you a better understanding of why this city is worth exploring. From its origins as an industrial hub to its modern-day charm, we will delve into the various aspects that make Elektrostal a unique and must-visit destination.

So, join us as we uncover the hidden treasures of Elektrostal and discover what makes this city a true gem in the heart of Russia.

Key Takeaways:

• Elektrostal, known as the “Motor City of Russia,” is a vibrant and growing city with a rich industrial history, offering diverse cultural experiences and a strong commitment to environmental sustainability.
• With its convenient location near Moscow, Elektrostal provides a picturesque landscape, vibrant nightlife, and a range of recreational activities, making it an ideal destination for residents and visitors alike.

Known as the “Motor City of Russia.”

Elektrostal, a city located in the Moscow Oblast region of Russia, earned the nickname “Motor City” due to its significant involvement in the automotive industry.

Home to the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Elektrostal is renowned for its metallurgical plant, which has been producing high-quality steel and alloys since its establishment in 1916.

Boasts a rich industrial heritage.

Elektrostal has a long history of industrial development, contributing to the growth and progress of the region.

Founded in 1916.

The city of Elektrostal was founded in 1916 as a result of the construction of the Elektrostal Metallurgical Plant.

Located approximately 50 kilometers east of Moscow.

Elektrostal is situated in close proximity to the Russian capital, making it easily accessible for both residents and visitors.

Known for its vibrant cultural scene.

Elektrostal is home to several cultural institutions, including museums, theaters, and art galleries that showcase the city’s rich artistic heritage.

A popular destination for nature lovers.

Surrounded by picturesque landscapes and forests, Elektrostal offers ample opportunities for outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and birdwatching.

Hosts the annual Elektrostal City Day celebrations.

Every year, Elektrostal organizes festive events and activities to celebrate its founding, bringing together residents and visitors in a spirit of unity and joy.

Has a population of approximately 160,000 people.

Elektrostal is home to a diverse and vibrant community of around 160,000 residents, contributing to its dynamic atmosphere.

Boasts excellent education facilities.

The city is known for its well-established educational institutions, providing quality education to students of all ages.

A center for scientific research and innovation.

Elektrostal serves as an important hub for scientific research, particularly in the fields of metallurgy, materials science, and engineering.

Surrounded by picturesque lakes.

The city is blessed with numerous beautiful lakes, offering scenic views and recreational opportunities for locals and visitors alike.

Well-connected transportation system.

Elektrostal benefits from an efficient transportation network, including highways, railways, and public transportation options, ensuring convenient travel within and beyond the city.

Famous for its traditional Russian cuisine.

Food enthusiasts can indulge in authentic Russian dishes at numerous restaurants and cafes scattered throughout Elektrostal.

Home to notable architectural landmarks.

Elektrostal boasts impressive architecture, including the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord and the Elektrostal Palace of Culture.

Offers a wide range of recreational facilities.

Residents and visitors can enjoy various recreational activities, such as sports complexes, swimming pools, and fitness centers, enhancing the overall quality of life.

Provides a high standard of healthcare.

Elektrostal is equipped with modern medical facilities, ensuring residents have access to quality healthcare services.

Home to the Elektrostal History Museum.

The Elektrostal History Museum showcases the city’s fascinating past through exhibitions and displays.

A hub for sports enthusiasts.

Elektrostal is passionate about sports, with numerous stadiums, arenas, and sports clubs offering opportunities for athletes and spectators.

Celebrates diverse cultural festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal hosts a variety of cultural festivals, celebrating different ethnicities, traditions, and art forms.

Electric power played a significant role in its early development.

Elektrostal owes its name and initial growth to the establishment of electric power stations and the utilization of electricity in the industrial sector.

Boasts a thriving economy.

The city’s strong industrial base, coupled with its strategic location near Moscow, has contributed to Elektrostal’s prosperous economic status.

Houses the Elektrostal Drama Theater.

The Elektrostal Drama Theater is a cultural centerpiece, attracting theater enthusiasts from far and wide.

Popular destination for winter sports.

Elektrostal’s proximity to ski resorts and winter sport facilities makes it a favorite destination for skiing, snowboarding, and other winter activities.

Promotes environmental sustainability.

Elektrostal prioritizes environmental protection and sustainability, implementing initiatives to reduce pollution and preserve natural resources.

Home to renowned educational institutions.

Elektrostal is known for its prestigious schools and universities, offering a wide range of academic programs to students.

Committed to cultural preservation.

The city values its cultural heritage and takes active steps to preserve and promote traditional customs, crafts, and arts.

Hosts an annual International Film Festival.

The Elektrostal International Film Festival attracts filmmakers and cinema enthusiasts from around the world, showcasing a diverse range of films.

Encourages entrepreneurship and innovation.

Elektrostal supports aspiring entrepreneurs and fosters a culture of innovation, providing opportunities for startups and business development.

Offers a range of housing options.

Elektrostal provides diverse housing options, including apartments, houses, and residential complexes, catering to different lifestyles and budgets.

Home to notable sports teams.

Elektrostal is proud of its sports legacy, with several successful sports teams competing at regional and national levels.

Boasts a vibrant nightlife scene.

Residents and visitors can enjoy a lively nightlife in Elektrostal, with numerous bars, clubs, and entertainment venues.

Promotes cultural exchange and international relations.

Elektrostal actively engages in international partnerships, cultural exchanges, and diplomatic collaborations to foster global connections.

Surrounded by beautiful nature reserves.

Nearby nature reserves, such as the Barybino Forest and Luchinskoye Lake, offer opportunities for nature enthusiasts to explore and appreciate the region’s biodiversity.

Commemorates historical events.

The city pays tribute to significant historical events through memorials, monuments, and exhibitions, ensuring the preservation of collective memory.

Promotes sports and youth development.

Elektrostal invests in sports infrastructure and programs to encourage youth participation, health, and physical fitness.

Hosts annual cultural and artistic festivals.

Throughout the year, Elektrostal celebrates its cultural diversity through festivals dedicated to music, dance, art, and theater.

Provides a picturesque landscape for photography enthusiasts.

The city’s scenic beauty, architectural landmarks, and natural surroundings make it a paradise for photographers.

Connects to Moscow via a direct train line.

The convenient train connection between Elektrostal and Moscow makes commuting between the two cities effortless.

A city with a bright future.

Elektrostal continues to grow and develop, aiming to become a model city in terms of infrastructure, sustainability, and quality of life for its residents.

In conclusion, Elektrostal is a fascinating city with a rich history and a vibrant present. From its origins as a center of steel production to its modern-day status as a hub for education and industry, Elektrostal has plenty to offer both residents and visitors. With its beautiful parks, cultural attractions, and proximity to Moscow, there is no shortage of things to see and do in this dynamic city. Whether you’re interested in exploring its historical landmarks, enjoying outdoor activities, or immersing yourself in the local culture, Elektrostal has something for everyone. So, next time you find yourself in the Moscow region, don’t miss the opportunity to discover the hidden gems of Elektrostal.

Q: What is the population of Elektrostal?

A: As of the latest data, the population of Elektrostal is approximately XXXX.

Q: How far is Elektrostal from Moscow?

A: Elektrostal is located approximately XX kilometers away from Moscow.

Q: Are there any famous landmarks in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to several notable landmarks, including XXXX and XXXX.

Q: What industries are prominent in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal is known for its steel production industry and is also a center for engineering and manufacturing.

Q: Are there any universities or educational institutions in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal is home to XXXX University and several other educational institutions.

Q: What are some popular outdoor activities in Elektrostal?

A: Elektrostal offers several outdoor activities, such as hiking, cycling, and picnicking in its beautiful parks.

Q: Is Elektrostal well-connected in terms of transportation?

A: Yes, Elektrostal has good transportation links, including trains and buses, making it easily accessible from nearby cities.

Q: Are there any annual events or festivals in Elektrostal?

A: Yes, Elektrostal hosts various events and festivals throughout the year, including XXXX and XXXX.

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