153
See also: Karl Marx 28–31 ■ Niklas Luhmann 110–11 ■ Zygmunt Bauman 136–43 ■ Anthony Giddens 148–49 ■
Ulrich Beck 156–61 ■ Daniel Bell 224–25 ■ Harry Braverman 226–31
During the 1970s, US sociologist
Daniel Bell invoked the term
“post-industrialism” to designate
the shift toward a service-led
economy. Castells argues that the
rise to prominence of Internet-
based technologies means
capitalism now centers on
information and knowledge. Human
societies, he claims, have left
behind the Industrial Age and
entered the Information Age, the
social–structural expression of
which is the “network society.”
A networked world
The Information Age is defined by
the creation and dissemination of
various specialist knowledges such
as fluctuations in world oil prices,
the financial markets, and so on.
In advanced capitalist societies,
networks of financial capital and
information are now at the heart of
productivity and competitiveness.
The shift from the production of
goods and services to information
and knowledge has profoundly
altered the nature of society and
social relations. Castells claims that
the dominant mode of organizing
interpersonal relations, institutions,
and whole societies is networks.
Moreover, the malleable and open-
ended nature of these networks
means that they span the globe.
When classical sociologists
such as Karl Marx, Émile
Durkheim, and Max Weber use
the term “society,” it refers
primarily to that of a given nation-
state. So, for example, it is possible
to talk of US society as something
different from, as well as sharing
similarities with, say, British
society. However, in Castells’ work,
the nation-state has become the
globe and everything in it. The
world of relatively autonomous
nation-states, with their own
internally structured societies, is
no longer—it has been reimagined
as multitudes of overlapping and
intersecting networks.The idea of a fully connected
world, wired through the Internet,
conjures up images of people in
all corners of the planet engaging
productively in different types
of relations with one another in
constantly shifting networks—
constrained not by geography or
nationality, but only by the capacity
of human imagination. It is now
possible to access information
24 hours a day through search
engines such as Google, and to join
chat rooms with people thousands
of miles away and engage in
instantaneous communication.
Castells elaborates on the
concept of networks in a variety
of ways. Microelectronics-based
networks define the network
society and have replaced
bureaucracy as the main way of ❯❯LIVING IN A GLOBAL WORLD
The “network society”
is an interconnected
global community
of interests......where access to the
network, or the “space of
flows,” is no longer the
preserve of a dominant
social group.This means almost
anyone, anywhere,
can use telecommunications-
based technology for any
creative purpose.BM&FBOVESPA in São Paulo, Brazil,
is the largest stock exchange in Latin
America. The exclusively electronic
trading environment exemplifies the
global economy in the Information Age.