My thoughts on "The contours of the network society" by Manuel Castells

I have recently read quite an interesting article by Manuel Castells entitled “The contours of the network society”.

Let me start off by saying  that I was positively surprised about the information contained in the article. Mainly, I really appreciated all of the observations the author made about the contemporary society as I never wondered how it actually works and never tried analyzing different aspects of it. I also liked how easy it was to individually assess the validity of his observations since all of us live in contemporary society – I don’t know about other students but personally, I had many moments where I thought “Oh yeah, that’s indeed how it works”. Then again, perhaps that is the nature of reading one’s scientific observations.

At any rate, the article has definitely opened my eyes in terms of educating what is the current structure of our society and noticing how well-chosen was the term “network society”, coined by Castells. He argued that “network is by definition an instrument of cooperation and competition with other networks and cooperation within the network, in which every node needs the other node for the function of the network” (Castells, 2000), which sounds similar to how modern society works.

The article also made me think about the future and where our society is heading. Castells (2000) argues that:

 “The fact that we have new technologies allows possibilities of social and economic organization that did not exist before. In other words, the new information technologies are not the cause of the social transformation, but without these technologies the processes that lead to social transformation could not happen.”

This is definitely a valid point as it is fairly easy to deduce how technology played a vital role in changing our society – computers, internet, various social media such as Facebook or Twitter, VoIP communication software allowing real-time audio and video calls to virtually anywhere around the world – you name it. Perhaps most importantly, all of it allowed faster access to various types of information.

Now, in the light of Castells’s observations I cannot help but wonder: What happens if the technological development goes even further? What if it opens more doors for new processes leading to new social transformations? How different will our society be in 20 years if it has already been impacted to such extent by technologies present for roughly 20 years?

I am afraid there is no way of objectively assessing it at this point (at least none that I can think of) but it will definitely be something for me to ponder on.

References:

Castells, M. (2000) The Contours of the Network Society. The Journal of Futures Studies, Strategic Thinking and Policy, 02 (02), pp. 151-157. Camford Publishing Ltd