Politics of the Network Society :: What is Politics?

In End of Millennium (2nd. ed., Malden, MA Blackwell, 2000), Manuel Castells makes much of the castrate from Industrialism (which he defines as a agency of development in which the main sources of productivity are the quantitative increases of factors of production and the use of new sources of energy) to Informationism (defined as the mode of development in which the main source of productivity is the qualitative capacity to optimize the combination and use of the factors of production on the basis of fellowship and information). This transformation of economics, he says, is inseperable from the rise of a new social structure, the vane SOCIETY. Here, he says, the primary elusion is located in the material foundations of our being that is, space and time. We have foregone from a conception of space as place to a conception of space as flows. Similarly, we have gone from a conception of time as clock time to a conception of time as timeless time. Additionally, he makes much of the shift from the POLITICS of space/time to the government activity of information that is, a politics enacted by symbol manipulation rather than material manipulation. This symbol manipulation, he says, occurs in the abstract space of the media in the form of representation, etc. Basically, he takes this idea and applies it to current conflicts in the humans today. He makes a huge, conglomerate argument that the USSR fell because of statism/communisms inability to adapt to this system and he likewise argues that China, etc. have surged economically in recent years barely because they were able to incorporate their old political ideologies with this very real change that has ocurred in the world market. More importantly for our project, he brings in the archetype (based on what seems to me like neoMarxism) of SOCIAL EXCLUSION that is, the new form of heathen imperialism in which the First human systemmatically excludes what he calls the New Fourth World by keeping them fro m the mainstream technology and markets which are the driving forces behind informational capitalism. In doing so, the fourth world are forced into a position of inutility compared with the rest of the world and they are quickly forced into a waste pattern of exporting only their raw materials (the only resources left after(prenominal) exclusion) to the first world. This, of course, leads to intense nationalism, hatred, and anything other tactic that allows the new fourth world to hold on to anything resembling an identity.