Communication Power [Hardcover]

Manuel Castells (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0199567042 | ISBN-13: 978-0199567041

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

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Of much value... Manuel Castells has shaped himself into the most prominent and influential theorist and analyst of the modern communications and network age."--Financial Times

"Provides a bevy of illustrious examples of how grassroots campaigns could use the internet to bring public attention to issues as diverse as climate change and the war in Iraq."--Forbes

"Castells is a synthesizer and meta-theoretician. He reaches far and wide to bring together disparate elements to his arguments. This is his amazing strength as a seminal figure in modern scholarship.... Reading Communication Power is rather like taking a great birding dog out for a walk: every nook and cranny must be sniffed and explored with endearing enthusiasm before moving on in a bound to the next point of discovery."--Political Communication

"Manuel Castells unites the mind of a social scientist with the soul of an artist. His trilogy took us to the edge of the millennium. This book takes us beyond to the critical crossroads of the 21st century, where technology, communication, and power converge."--Rosalind Williams, Dibner Professor and Director, Program on Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Castells has done it again, a masterpiece of global perspective and enviable erudition. Moving beyond his trilogy on the information age, Castells focuses on how cultural, economic and particularly political power relationships are constituted and sustained through systematic communication flows. ... Case studies include global media deregulation, the politics of scandal, framing the war in Iraq, ecological social movements, the Obama presidential candidacy and a fascinating comparison of media control dynamics in Russia and China."--W. Russell Neuman, Evans Professor of Media Technology, University of Michigan

"How could Manuel Castells have predicted that now is the time of the perfect storm? I do not know. But I do know that his new book coincides with the largest downturn in global economies since the 1930s, with the most important American election since the 1960s, with a most radical transformation of world politics in many generations, and with the most profound reevaluation of the lives of modern citizens, from what they value to how they communicate. ... This is a powerful and much needed book for a world in crisis."--Antonio Damasio, David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience, Director, Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California

"That Manuel Castells' new book raises so many difficult questions is testimony to both its richness and timeliness." -- The British Journal of Sociology

"An impressive, interdisclipinary narrative about the politics of contemporary communication that confirms [Castell's] status as one of the world's leading media scholars."
--Contemporary Sociology

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 608 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (August 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199567042
• ISBN-13: 978-0199567041
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #596,318 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 39 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Are Communication Networks Mainly Liberating? September 18, 2009

By Jan Van Dijk

Format:Hardcover

This book makes the same arguments as the 12 year older book The Power of Identity. In two respects Castells has made considerable progress. The former book was talking about human selves and identities. Now the author has really discovered psychology. Meaning has become a core concept in the analysis of this structural thinker. He borrows from the currently popular work of neuropsychologists such as Antonio Damasio that have made the turn from cognition and reasoned action to biology and emotions. This enables him to make splendid analyses of media politics and political campaigns, mainly in the United States as a combination of rationality and emotions. For example, he describes the systematic campaign of misinformation in the mass media of the Bush administration dragging the American population into the Iraq war and tries to explain why this was successful.
The second advance is more attention to the struggle over networks: they are programmed and reprogrammed. In a 1999 review of the trilogy The Information Age I accused Castells of completely neglecting the design dimension and the social struggle over networks . At that time, his view was that with networks we have created a machine that is dynamic, full of opportunities but controlled be no one. Now he clearly argues that the `logic' of networks could be transformed (p. 36). He tries to show this in a number of case studies in which communication networks are reprogrammed.
The first study is about the environmental movement and the `new culture of nature' (environmental consciousness). `It was the networking between the scientific community, environmental activists and celebrities that brought the issue to the media, and communicated it to the public at large via multimedia networks' (p. 321). The second study describes the global movement against corporate globalization that is predominantly organized via the Internet (e.g. Indymedia) and mobile telephony. The third study reports the use of mobile telephony (SMS) to launch a public outcry against the deliberate manipulation of the Aznar government after the 2004 terrorist attack in Madrid that accused the ETA in stead of Al Qaeda. The final study analyses the Obama presidential primary campaign amply using the Internet. All these cases are used to demonstrate the potential of the media of mass self communication and the Internet generally to organize counter power or change power relationships.
In my view these studies do not convincingly prove Castells' point despite all descriptive evidence supplied. He gives no detailed information about the networks of scientists, activists and celebrities that are supposed to have brought the issue to the media. Public pressure and the own initiative of the traditional mass media played a role at least as important, and the Internet's role was not more relevant than that of the mass media. The organization of the anti- or other globalization movement certainly depends on counter-networking via the new media. However it has proved to be relatively powerless as is testified by the fact that when its `finest' hour came with the bankruptcy of neo-liberalism and the discredit of global capitalism in the credit crisis, it was virtually absent in public opinion and on the streets. A particular SMS call for a demonstration against the Spanish government's misinformation certainly contributed to the mobilization that stirred a part of the electorate to vote against Aznar. However, a number of old media (newspapers and radio-stations) also played an important role in the public outcry, and they had a larger audience. The role of the Internet in the Obama campaign also is exaggerated . Reading about the superiority of the use of the Internet in this campaign on Castells' account one wonders why Obama did not win with a landslide of 10 to 15 percent. In fact Obama did not win the presidency by means of the Internet but by his personal quality as a candidate attracting many new voters. He was saved by his reaction to the credit crisis at the start of September 2008, just two months before the election when he was at the losing end according to the polls. Despite all Internet use.

Clearly, the Internet and other digital media are getting more important in these, and many other cases. Certainly, they have a liberating potential as was recently demonstrated by the oppositional movement in Iran. However, this case also proves the opposite: the remaining control of the far more important mass media by the regime and the attempts to censor the new media. So, my biggest problem with Castells' analysis is that he is very one-sided in highlighting the liberating potential instead of opposite tendencies. For me it is unacceptable to talk about communication power in networks without any treatment of privacy, security and surveillance issues (with the partial exception of Internet censorship in China). Unfortunately, central registration and control also are important potentials of power in networks. Further, Castells completely ignores the problems of the digital divide and the lack of digital skills among at least half of Internet users, even in high-access countries. The liberating potential of mass self-communication will be seen in another light when Internet use in practice would lead to a reinforcement of the `information elite' and big problems to catch up for large parts of the population.

The theoretical parts of this book are very tough reading for non-academic readers of this book, as the author tries to summarize his former work of the Information Age in a very condensed way. Opposed to that, the descriptive parts are relatively easy to read and well written.

In his conclusions Castells claims to present the beginnings of a general communication theory of power. However, it is utterly disappointing that he does so by only presenting a `methodological approach' and a number of very general hypotheses for others to investigate (p. 430). One wonders why he did not do this himself in the 500 plus pages at his disposal. His hypotheses lack sufficient specification for empirical test as he admits himself: `I am not identifying the concrete social actors who are power-holders' (p. 430). This book contains many well-documented and sharply analysed case studies as we are used to read in Castells' work marked by a very high level of expertise. However, the gap between these cases and a real theory of communication power remains large.

Jan A.G.M. van Dijk
Professor of Communication Science and the Sociology of the Information Society University of Twente, The Netherlands

A longer and more academic version of this review will appear in Communications, The European Journal of Communication

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Everything bar the kitchen sink March 10, 2010

By John Harpur

Format:Hardcover

Does Castells ever write books of less than 600 pages? He should try. This book is far too too long for the points it makes - power, money media manipulation mixed with new technologies. C.Wright Mills, Chomsky, Habermas and the rest of recent western thought stampede onto the page with little evidence of any theoretical bridle. It is not quite a mess but not quite not one either. A lot of the detail is good and interesting but the overview never comes together. I found myself pushing quickly through blocks of twenty and thirty pages at a time just to get on with it. A much shorter book with a more specific agenda would have been better. I still am undecided whether this worked contributed anything to the debate on media and power or merely rehashed established ideas.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Castells is overrated January 21, 2013

By Lara

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Castells is a big name in communications today, but I was underwhelmed by his book. It seems more suitable for the general public than the scholarly world. I thought it was rather thin conceptually - provocative, but thin. It's worth having a look at to understand what the hype about Castells it, but for that you could also get it from your local library.