Review of Castells, "The Information Age" (original) (raw)

Revising Theories of International Politics in the Information Age

Introduction Theories of international politics are likely to be revised in the information age as they have been in the past when new major technologies were introduced. For example, the rise of wind power and wind-powered ocean-going vessels permitted some nations to project power over much greater distances and over short time spans than was possible prior to the introduction of those technologies. One could argue that mercantilist approach to understanding international affairs as a consequence of an appreciation for the importance of sea power. Similarly for the geo-political theories of Ratzel, Mahan, Mackinder, Spykman, and others arose as a consequence of the perceived importance of sea power and other transportation technologies. 1 In the area of communications technology, waves of innovation in telegraphy, telephony, and more recently digital communications networks have occasioned a rethinking of strategic and economic strategies which in turn stimulated IR theorists to r...

Geopolitical Structuring in the Age of Information: Imagining Order, Understanding Change

Ordering principles, both explicit and implicit, have provided some of the central threads for theoretical contestation in the discipline of international relations. The protagonists predominantly coalesce around principles of survival, a state of nature, or a fundamental economic logic. Through an analysis of the globalization of a logic of the private right to intellectual property, this article attempts to expose a powerful, and at times under recognized, structuring movement within a global geopolitical space that is ever increasingly shaped by the " information age. " In doing so, the aim is to problematize and suggest an alternative way of approaching ordering principles as theoretical prisms for interpreting action and actors in global politics. Whether or not they explicitly present an ordering principle to contextualize actors and action, all theoretical approaches to the nature of global politics embody ordering principles. Looking outward, these ordering principles reveal themselves in paradigmatic ways of seeing global politics, representative of ontological imaginaries of political life: framing, interpreting, and forecasting action and actors. Looking inward, these principles discipline epistemological boundaries, defining different ways of seeing the task of international relations as a field of study. Contestations in international relations theory, epochs even, are marked by battlegrounds of competing ontological imaginations and their epistemologically disciplining methods. How we carve up theoretical space has ramifications for our capacity to decipher modes of political action. My aim is to investigate the relationship between ordering principles, as found in theories of international relations, and the structuring power of political movements in global politics in order to ask; how might political movements produce order in and of themselves, and in turn, is there a generative logic to political movements that necessitates a recasting of how we understand the ways in which structuring occurs in geopolitics?

Manuel Castells - AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INFORMATION AGE, 1997

IN THE LAST DECADE Iwasstruck,asmanyhavebeen,byaseriesof major historical events that have transformed our world/our lives. Just to mention the most important: the diffusion and deepening of the information technology revolution, including genetic engineering; the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the consequent demise of the international Communist movement, and the end of the Cold War that had marked everydung for the last half a century; the restructuring of capitalism; the process of globalization; emergence of the Pacific as the most dynamic area of the global economy; the paradoxical combination of a surge in nationalism and the crisis of the sovereign nation-state; the crisis of democratic politics, shaken by periodic scandals and a crisis of legitimacy; the rise of feminism and the crisis of patriarchalism; the widespread diffusion of ecological consciousness; the rise of communalism as sources of resistance to globalization, taking in many contexts the form of religious fundamentalism; last, but not least, the development of a global criminal economy that is having sigdicant impacts in international economy, national politics, and local everyday life. I grew increasingly dissatisfied with the interpretations and theories, certainly including my own, that the social sciences were using to make sense of this new world. But I did not give up the rationalist project of understanding all this, in a coherent manner, that could be somewhat empirically grounded and as much as possible theoretically oriented. Thus, for the last 12 years I undertook the task of researching and understanding this wide array of social trends, working in and on the United States, Western Europe, Russia, Asian Pacific, and Latin America. Along the way, I found plenty of company, as researchers from all horizons are converging in this collective endeavour. My personal contribution to this understanding is the book in three volumes that I have now completed, The Information Age, with the first volume already published, and the two others scheduled for publication in 1997. The first volume analyses the new social structure, the network society. The second volume studies social movements and political processes, in the framework of and in interaction with the network society. The third volume attempts an interpretation of macro-social processes, as a result of the interaction between the power of networks and the power of identity, focusing on themes such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the emergence of the Pacific, or the ongoing process of global social exclusion and polarization. It also proposes a general theoretical synthesis. I will take this opportunity to share with you the main lines of my argument, hoping that this wiU help a debate that I see emerging from aU directions in the whole world. I see coming a new wave of intellectual innovation in which, by the way, British researchers are at the forefront.

Syllabus: Geopolitics of Information

Description of course: The world’s information technology infrastructure has, until recently, been a relatively contained area of contestation in international relations. Technologies capable of reaching mass global audiences were few (for example, shortwave radio, undersea cables, satellites, and the like); those available for person-to-person communication (such as the telephone) were limited, and a relatively small number of actors were involved in their development and governance. This, of course, has changed with the advent of the personal computer, the proliferation of mobile and internet technologies, and the rise of the information age. The diversity, diffusion, sophistication, and reach of the technologies enabling global communications are drastically different from those available just twenty years ago. Whereas the second half of the twentieth century witnessed extensive debates about the costs and benefits of protecting a state’s media system from floods of foreign cultural exports, today’s states—fearful of losing all control over the flow of information within their sovereign borders—are acting quickly to build, secure, and control the infrastructures that enable information to flow from one nation to another. In the West, these contests are typically framed in the context of freedom expression, protection of intellectual property rights, and national security. Foreign policies enacted in non-Western states to better monitor or control the flow of information are often characterized as efforts at state censorship, antidemocratic, and contrary to fundamental human rights codified in international law. Heavy-handed efforts by China, Iran, and Russia, for example, to create state-level information infrastructures are contrasted to “a freedom to connect,” a phrase Secretary of State Clinton used to describe a proposed fundamental, universal human right. This framing is, of course, strategic. Portraying efforts to control the flow of information via crude policy mechanisms as censorship normalizes the status quo, portraying the existing communications infrastructures and policies as preserving the global citizen’s freedom to connect. In reality, all states enact policies to preserve sovereignty, and the emergence of the information age and knowledge-based societies requires greater control of information to preserve government legitimation and power projection. In the 1980s and 1990s, the United States, the birthplace of the internet, benefited from a first-mover advantage, establishing the Global Information Infrastructure, driving the Telecommunications Annex to the GATTs Agreement and, for a time, dominating the ascendance of a global, information and data-driven economy. As a result, the United States, often through its private sector, drove the information technology policy agenda at the global level. The debates surrounding the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) and 2014 NetMundial meeting, both discussed throughout the class, reflect the growing significance and tensions around a foundational question in international communication: to what extent can and should states act to manage the flow of information within their sovereign territories?

The Impact of the Information Revolution on International Relations

Vol.2, No.5, pp. 1-22, December 2014, 0

ABSTRACT: The information revolution became recently one of the most sensitive topics in the context of the ongoing international dialogue to analyze the effects of the information revolution and the different ways to control on the development events in the international arena. This is being done at a time when some questions are raise regarding the advantages of globalization on the financial aspects of economic, political, cultural, ideological, media and communication on contemporary international relations. The global economic crisis came recently to support their suspicions. The technology revolution of communications and informatics, which began its first steps with the invasion of human space globally after the launch of the former Soviet Union for the first satellite belonging to the land in 1957 to become the move of the main driving forces of globalization, the sequel to the stages of economic successes in the history of mankind since the Industrial Revolution , which did not came down live successes every day, to be brought about discoveries revolution in the field of telecommunications and informatics exceeded the capabilities of the invention of the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the telephone wire, radio, and Alcinmagrav at the end of the nineteenth century, to come after the invention of television, which has become the slogan of the twentieth as well as the twenty first century to work on the development of qualitative and quantitative methods communication and mass media of internet and the number technology. The international newspapers and magazines are considered one of the important means in the process of exchanging the international media, because of the enormous potential that is owned, whether that potential is technical, human, or financial, and they are considered effective means to implement the foreign policy of all over the world. KEYWORDS: Information Revolution, International Media, Technology Revolution, International Relations.

GLOBAL STRUCTURAL CHANGES AND EMERGING A NEW STRUCTURE OF POWER

The growing importance of technological development and mobility of capital and labor are not unprecedented in world economy and political phenomenon. However, the redirection of the use of military power with a dramatic growth of transport and information technology, and a rapid growth of social networks are diminishing the importance of state borders, state hegemony and autocracy. The globalization imperatives of high levels of technological inter-relationships and innovations, high resonance of capital and labor mobility, and lately counterterrorism has led to a pronounced increase of interdependence in the international community, reducing the possibilities of inter-state conflict resolution by military means, especially between the developed countries. The change of courses in the Eastern European countries- countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union and the Third World countries and the recent political trends in the Middle Eastern countries towards the model of a market economy and democratic government brought about new changes with political designations within which economic bonding is pushing back the military factor as a means of resolving inter-state problems in many parts of the world..