Manuel Castells Quotes

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Each 'urban struggle' must have its structural content specified, and be considered in terms of the role it plays vis-à-vis the various social classes involved. Then and only then will we know what we are talking about.

Manuel Castells
Theories are just disposable tools in the production of knowledge

Manuel Castells
This article aims at proposing some elements for a grounded theory of the network society. The network society is the social structure characteristic of the Information Age, as tentatively identified by empirical, cross-cultural investigation. It permeates most societies in the world, in various cultural and institutional manifestations, as the industrial society characterized the social structure of both capitalism and statism for most of the twentieth century.

Manuel Castells
Traditional media companies are not generating any profits from their Internet ventures.

Manuel Castells
The e-economy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process.

Manuel Castells
Indeed, in 1999, over half the people on the planet had never made or received a telephone call, although this is changing fast.

Manuel Castells
My main statement in that it does not really matter if you believe that this world, or any of its features, is new or not. My analysis stands by itself. This is our world, the world of the Information age. And this is my analysis of this world, which must be understood, used, judged, by itself, by its capacity, or incapacity, to identify and explain the phenomena that we observe and experience, regardless of its newness.

Manuel Castells
By social movements we mean a certain type of organisation of social practices, the logic of whose development contradicts the institutionally dominant social logic

Manuel Castells
The Internet is no longer a free realm, but neither has it fulfilled the Orwellian prophecy. It is a contested terrain, where the new, fundamental battle for freedom in the Information Age is being fought.

Manuel Castells
In the network society, the space of flows dissolves time by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous in the communication networks, thus installing society in structural ephemerality: being cancels becoming.

Manuel Castells
The Internet is indeed a technology of freedom - but it can free the powerful to oppress the uninformed, it may lead to the exclusion of the devalued by the conquerors of value. In this general sense, society has not changed much.

Manuel Castells
Power is based on the control of communication and information, be it the macro-power of the state and media corporations or the micro-power of organizations of all sorts.

Manuel Castells
Literally everything is based on the capacity to attract, retain, and efficiently use talented workers.

Manuel Castells
"The city" is not a framework but a social practice in constant flux the more it becomes an issue, the more it is a source of contradictions and the more its social manipulation is linked to the ensemble of social and political conflicts.

Manuel Castells
As for the employees, the payment in stock options revives, somewhat ironically, the old anarchist ideology of self-management of the company, as they are co-owners, co-producers, and co-managers of the firm.

Manuel Castells
We must conceive of opposition to decisions relating to urban planning as something more than "consumer-reaction" and, consequently, we must link it to the whole range of social contradictions and look into the conditions for the emergence and the determination of the objectives of social movements in the urban field."

Manuel Castells
Politics becomes a horse race, and a tragicomedy motivated by greed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals, and, often, sex and violence – a genre increasingly indistinguishable from TV scripts.

Manuel Castells
Internet use enhanced sociability both at a distance and in the local community.

Manuel Castells
The most blatant illustration of this statement is the fact that in 1972, Larry Roberts, the director of IPTO, sought to privatize ARPANET, once it was up and running. He offered to transfer operational responsibility to ATT. After considering the proposal, with the help of a committee of experts from Bell Laboratories, the company refused.

Manuel Castells
The promise of the Information Age is the unleashing of unprecedented productive capacity by the power of the mind. I think, therefore I produce. In so doing, we will have the leisure to experiment with spirituality, and the opportunity of reconciliation with nature, without sacrificing the material wellbeing of our children. The dream of the Enlightenment, that reason and science would solve the problems of humankind, is within reach.

Manuel Castells
An analysis [of urban space] is possible only if one reduces social action to a language and social relations to systems of communication. The ideological displacement carried out in this perspective consists in passing from one method of mapping traces of social practice through its effects on the organization of space to a principle of organization deduced from the formal expression listed, as if social organization were a code and urban structure a set of myths.

Manuel Castells
Technological systems are socially produced. Social production is culturally informed. The Internet is no exception.

Manuel Castells
There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media.

Manuel Castells
Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an over-arching conclusion: as an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.

Manuel Castells
The way people think determines the fate of norms and values on which societies are constructed. While coercion and fear are critical sources for imposing the will of the dominants over the dominated, few institutional systems can last long if they are predominantly based on sheer repression.

Manuel Castells