After a brief break (tending to family as well as other academic and creative pursuits), I’m hitting the books again to read Manuel Castells’ updated version of The Rise of the Network Society. My dissertation studies glean a lot from Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome model, so whenever I hear the words “network,” “hub,” or “node,” I perk up. So over the next several weeks, I will be reading a chapter each week from Castells’ rather massive volume. This is actually the first of three that he’s written in his larger work The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. I’m only sticking to Volume One; too much is tugging at me to take it any further this summer.
As this latest edition includes an updated preface to the 2000 edition, there are just under 60 pages of introduction, plus a 26-page prologue. Granted, this isn’t the brilliant analysis or encapsulation I’m sure readers were hoping for, but I point it out because so far, I think his sense of pacing is a little lacking– even though his research is obviously vast and deep. Because he is not prone to succinctness, coupled primarily with the fact that I am looking at hubs and nodes (etc) in my dissertation ideas, the overview of chapter 1 which basically covers (in the minutest of detail) how we have technologically got to where we are today (or rather in 2000) was not useful for my purposes. I would recommend it though for teachers of New Media to get their students to read as it really does include EVERY aspect of the growth of technological inter-connectivity, the Internet, the Web, and even the developments of the Genome Project. Furthermore, there were actually moments where I not only perked up, but dare I say it I even felt a quickening of the heart.
For instance, Castells’ observations concerning clusters is very useful to me. I’ve read in other tomes such as Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and Steven Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation that in spite of the somewhat foregrounding of technological advancement in the discussion of society and social media, the fact remains that movements, information and the sharing and critique of information still remain solidly in the control of human beings.
More to come, but that’s all for now.