The Information Age According to Manuel Castells

The terms “information age” and “information society” are used by many writers as shorthand to refer to the confluence of an incalculable number of contemporary social and structural transformations. A sizeable chunk of these events have been described and analyzed by Manuel Castells in The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. Castells is professor of city and regional planning and professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He has had appointments at many universities worldwide, and has served on the high level expert group on the social and societal aspects of the information society, an advisory board to the European Commission. The Information Age is a culminating work by a sociologist whose widely recognized contributions to the interdisciplinary discourse about the information society touch significantly on many of the central concerns of social theory today. Before Castells began reflecting on information technology and the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions that have shaped and been shaped by its development and use, he gained distinction for his contributions to the study of urban poverty and grassroots social movements (e.g., Castells, 1977, 1983). Although he has not abandoned those interests, his work on the information society has been a focal point through which he examines them. In his recent work, poverty is shown to have been restructured and exacerbated by the rise of a global network society, and the prospects for grassroots social mobilization are seen to be greatly enhanced by those same sociotechnical developments. Castells has presented a work that seems intended to serve, for its time, as a definitive account of the transition to an information society, in much the same way that Max Weber provided an authoritative depiction of the shift from traditional to bureaucratic-industrial society. Indeed, Castells pays homage to Weber in coining the phrase “the spirit of informationalism” (pp. 195–200). Whether intellectual historians will assign The Information Age a place on the shelf next to