Communication Power » (New Edition)

Manuel Castells is Wallis Annenberg Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and Research Professor of Information Society at the Open University of Catalonia, Barcelona. He is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the author of twenty-two books, including the three-volume The Information Age.

Hailed by The Financial Times as "the most prominent and influential theorist and analyst of the modern communications and network age," Manuel Castells here offers a ground-breaking account of the modern communication revolution, a dramatic transformation of technology--and of the signals we receive--that is changing the way we feel, think, and behave. And that, writes Castells, is creating a revolution in power.

With his landmark trilogy, The Information Age, Castells offered one of the first comprehensive analyses of how the Internet was creating a networked society. Now he draws on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and case histories from around the world to explore the psychology of decision making in the new communications environment, highlighting the rise of communication power. He ranges widely, exploring global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the Internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China. In a network society, he writes, politics is fundamentally media politics--and the politics of scandal is its epitome. That fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world. More fundamentally, Castells argues, the Internet's instant messaging, social networking, and blogging have given rise a new communication system, mass self-communication, that is profoundly altering power relationships.
Deeply researched, far-reaching in scope, and incisively argued, Communication Power offers a profound new understanding of implications of the information revolution.

"Castells has done it again, a masterpiece of global perspective and enviable erudition."
--W. Russell Neuman, Evans Professor of Media Technology, University of Michigan

"A powerful and much needed book for a world in crisis."
--Antonio Damasio, Director, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

List of Figures

List of Tables

Opening 1

1 Power in the Network Society 10

2 Communication in the Digital Age 54

3 Networks of Mind and Power 137

4 Programming Communication Networks: Media Politics, Scandal Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy 193

5 Reprogramming Communication Networks: Social Movements, Insurgent Politics, and the New Public Space 299

Conclusion: Toward a Communication Theory of Power 416

Appendix 433

Bibliography 489

Index 543