Reading Notes of the Rise of the Network Society by M Castells
Preface to the 2010 Edition
Xxiv: Information and communication technologies have had a powerful effect on the transformation of labor markets and of the work process. However, their effects have been substantially mediated by the strategies of firms and the policies of governments. … But the processes and forms of this transformation have been the result of the interaction between technological change, the institutional environment and the evolution of relationships between capital and labor in each specific social context. [Classical perspective social construction]
Xxx: The key feature of wireless communication is not mobility but perpetual connectivity… [The ICTs improve the CONNECTIVITY of spatial temporal elements, rather than increase mobility]
Xxxi: All major social changes are ultimately characterized by a transformation of space and time in the human experience.
I proposed a theory of urbanism in the Information Age based on the distinction between the space of places and the space of flows.
Cities are from their onset, communication systems, increasing the chances of communication through physical contiguity. I call space of places the space of contiguity.
This new form of spatiality is what I conceptualized as the space of flows: the material support of simultaneous social practices communicated at a distance.
Xxxiii: The most important characteristic of this accelerated process of global urbanization is that we are seeing the emergence of a new spatial form that I call the metropolitan region, to indicate that it is metropolitan though it is not a metropolitan area, because usually there are several metropolitan areas included in this spatial unit… But often there are no clearly dominant urban centers.
Xxxv: The key spatial feature of the network society is the networked connection between the local and the global. The global architecture of global networks connects places selectively, according to their relative value for the network… Every one of these infrastructures needs to be served by highly skilled personnel, whose needs have to be catered to by service workers. [“Be selected” by the global networks – global cities with international functions – attracted highly skilled worked – be served by low skilled workers – who lived in the edge of the global cities]
[The reason why geography is still important to the global function and global cities] What is important in the location of advanced services is the micro-network of the high-level decision-making process, based on face-to-face relationships, linked to a macro-network of decision implementation, which is based on electronic communication networks. [Both micro-network (local, space of places) and macro-network (global, space of flows) are important]
Xxxvii: Communication infrastructures are decisive components of the process of mega-metropolitanization but they are not the origin of the process [logically]. Infrastructure of communication develops because there is something to communicate. [Not only between abstract cities, but also people.]
Xxxviii: Now, the most strategically important observation for an analysis in terms of spatial networks is that these global networks do not have the same geography; they usually do not share the same nodes. [and the nodes can also change from time to time]
Xxxix: There is an increasing contradiction between the space of flows and the space of places. These mega nodes concentrate more and more wealth, power and innovation on the planet. A t the same time, few people in the world feel identified with the global… In contrast, most people feel a strong regional or local identity. Thus global networks integrate certain dimensions of human life and exclude other dimensions… Although there are places in the space of flows and flows in the space of places, cultural and social meaning is defined in place terms, while functionality, wealth, and power are defined in terms of flows. And this is the most fundamental contradiction emerging in our globalized, urbanized, networked world: in a world constructed around the logic of the space of flows, people make their living in the space of places.
(V) Humans experience time in different ways depending on how their lives are structured and practiced.
Xl: Organizing time was a mark of sovereign power of kings and priests… Everything changed with the invention of the clock and the industrial age. Working time defined life time. The strict definition of time became a major tool to discipline society, as the rhythm of everything was counted and valued… [Maybe the perception of sequential time was the result of science (Newton) and the industrial revolution.]
The clock time of the industrial age is being gradually replaced by what I conceptualized as timeless time: the kind of time that occurs when in a given context.
… every time sequence was cancelled or blurred…. As in the penetration of all time/spaces by wireless communication devices that blur different practices in a simultaneous time frame through the massive habit of multi-tasking. The attempt to annihilate time is also present in our everyday life: everybody rushes to do more in less time.
We try to be present and on time everywhere by using technology and pumping up ourselves to the frantic race of everyday life. Because organizations continue to be clock-based but people are increasingly on flex-time and move between different time regimes, multi-tasking and multi-living through acceleration by the means of technology epitomizes the trend to reach timeless time… Why do people rush all the time? Because they can beat their time constraints, or so they think. Because the availability of new communication and transportation technologies encourages them to pursue the mirage of transcending time.
Prologue
P12 What must be retained for the understanding of the relationship between technology and society is that the role of the state, by either stalling, unleashing, or leading technological innovation, is a decisive factor in the overall process, as it expresses and organizes the social and cultural forces that dominate in a given space and time. To a large extent, technology expresses the ability of a society to propel itself into technological mastery through the institutions of society, including the state.
P13 Current technological revolution originated and diffused, not by accident, in an historical period of the global restructuring of capitalism, for which it was an essential tool. Thus, the new society emerging from this process of change is both capitalist and informational, while presenting considerable historical variation in different countries.
P13-17 Modes of development: Informationalism, industrialism; Modes of production: capitalism and statism. [Difference of capitalism and statism: the owner of production resources and surplus]
Industrialism is oriented toward economic growth, that is toward maximizing output; informationalism is oriented towards technological development, that is toward the accumulation of knowledge and towards higher levels of complexity in information processing.
P19 Technological innovation and organizational change, focusing on flexibility and adaptability, were absolutely critical in ensuring the speed and efficiency of restructuring (of capitalism).
P21 Thus, all societies are affected by capitalism and Informationalism, and many societies (certainly all major societies) are already informational, although of different kinds, in different settings, and with specific cultural/institutional expressions.
The term “informational” indicates the attribute of a specific form of social organization in which information generation, processing and transmission become the fundamental sources of productivity and power because of new technological conditions emerging in this historical period.
Chapter 1 The Information Technology Revolution
P31 What characterizes the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communicating devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation.
An additional feature is… new information technologies have spread throughout the globe with lightning speed in less than two decades, (however still is selective)
[A valuable perspective to learn is to compare informational society and industrial society, which can also be used in behavior and lifestyle change: what happen in the introduce of we have currently familiar technologies (like car) and what happen during the brand new technology]
P34-38 Lessons from the Industrial Revolution:
First of all, in both cases [the first and second industrial revolution], we witness what Mokyr describes as a period of “accelerating and unprecedented technological change”.
The interactivity of systems of technological innovation and their dependence on certain “milieux” of exchange of ideas, problems, and solutions are critical features that can be generalized from the experience of past revolutions to the current one.
[The second feature is the positive effect on social welfare of new industrial technologies are always later than the quick diffusion of new technologies. And] the closer the relationship between the sites of innovation, production, and use of new technologies, the faster the transformation of societies, and the greater the positive feedback from social conditions on the general conditions for further innovation.
A last and essential lesson from the industrial revolutions is: although they both brought a whole array of new technologies that actually formed and transformed an industrial system in successive stages, at their core there was fundamental innovation in the generation and distribution of energy. (The first industrial revolution is steam engine, the second is electricity.) [What about current information revolution?]
P65 First, the development of the information technology revolution contributed to the formation of the milieu (social context) of innovation where discoveries and applications would interact; these milieu required the spatial concentration of research centers, higher-education institutions, advanced-technology companies… Second, once a milieu is consolidated, it tends to generate its own dynamics, and to attract knowledge, investment, and talent from around the world.
P66 Our most striking discovery is that the largest, old metropolitan areas of the industrialized world are the main centers of innovation and production in information technology outside the United States.
P69: It is indeed by this interface between macro-research programs and large markets developed by the state, on the one hand, and decentralized innovation stimulated by a culture of technological creativity and role models of fast personal success, on the other hand, that new information technologies came to blossom.
Chapter 2: The New Economy
P94 Profitability and competitiveness are the actual determinants of technological innovation and productivity growth.
P95 To increase profits, for a given financial environment and with prices set by the market, there are four main ways: to reduce production costs (starting with labor costs); to increase productivity; to broaden the market; and to accelerate capital turnover.
In all of them, new information technologies were essential tools. But I propose the hypothesis that one strategy was implemented earlier and with more immediate results: the broadening of markets and the fight for market share… While some short-term answer to the profitability crisis focused on labor trimming and wage attrition, the real challenge for individual firms and for capitalism as a whole was to find new markets able to absorb a growing productive capacity of goods and services. [Here comes the spatial and temporal fix. Maybe it is not the growth of productivity because of technology, but the technology lets productivity grow more rapidly, by create/obtain more markets.]
P100 What changed is not the kind of activities humankind is engaged in, but its technological ability to use as a direct productive force what distinguishes our species as a biological oddity: its superior capacity to process symbols.
P101 A global economy is an historically new reality, distinct from a world economy. A world economy – that is, an economy in which capital accumulation proceeds throughout the world – has existed in the West at least since the sixteenth century. A global economy is an economy with the capacity to work as a unit in real time, or chosen time, on a planetary scale… on the basis of the new infrastructure provided by information and communication technologies… Thus, I will define more precisely the global economy as an economy whose core components have the institutional, organizational, and technological capacity to work as a unit in real time, or in chosen time, on a planetary scale. [And other components are dependent on these global core components]
P104 The global interdependence of financial markets is the result of five main developments: 1) deregulation of financial markets in most countries; 2) development of a technological infrastructure; 3) connectedness results from the nature of new financial products (derivatives [金融衍生品]; 4) integration of financial markets comprises speculative movements of financial flows, moving swiftly in and out of a given market, security, or currency, either to take advantage of differences in valuation or to avoid a loss, thus amplifying market trends.; 5) Market valuation firms, such as Standard & Poor, or Moody’s are also powerful elements of interconnection between financial markets.
P111 Regionalized global economy, a global system of trade between trading areas, with increasing homogenization of customs within the area, while maintaining trade barriers vis-à-vis the rest of the world.
In sum, what we observe is the growing integration of Asian Pacific trade in the global economy, rather than a Pacific intra-regional implosion.
P115 In sum, the process of regionalization of the global economy has largely dissolved, in favor of a multilayered, multi-networked structure of trade patterns.
P118 FDI is associated with the expansion of multinational corporations as major producers of the global economy.
P131 However, beyond the actual movements of people across borders, there is a growing interconnection between workers in the country where they work, and the rest of the world, through global flows of production, money (remittances), information, and culture. [We should never underestimate the effect of culture]…. Networks of family, friends, and acquaintances grow over time, and advanced communication and transportation systems allow millions to live in-between countries.
P134 In sum, the global economy is characterized by a fundamental asymmetry between countries, in terms of their level of integration, competitive potential, and share of benefits from economic growth. This differentiation extends to regions within each country.
This pattern of segmentation is characterized by a double movement: on the one hand, valuable segments of territories and people are linked in the global networks of value making and wealth appropriation [valuable resources are concentrated]; one the other hand, everything, and everyone, which does not have value, is switched off the networks, and ultimate discarded. [Highly selected networks – the network society is not to link everybody, but only the valuable ones.]
The new economy system is at the same time highly dynamic, highly selective, highly exclusionary, and highly unstable in its boundaries. Powered by new communication, and trade are able to identify sources of value making anywhere in the world, and link them up.
P137 Yet, neither technology nor business could have developed the global economy on its own… Three interrelated policies created the foundations for globalization: deregulation of domestic economic activity (starting with financial markets); liberalization of international trade and investment; and privatization of publicly controlled companies (often sold to foreign investors).
[** Which should be noticed is that deregulation means less taxes, especially those on rich people, and thus the welfare system must be reduced.]
P140 The mechanism to bring in the globalization process to most countries in the world was simple: political pressure wither through direct government action or through imposition by the IMF/World Bank/World Trade Organization. Only after economies were liberalized would global capital flow in. The Clinton administration was in fact the true political globalizer… The goal was the unification of all economies around a set of homogeneous rules of the game, so that capital, goods, and service could flow in and out, as determined by the judgment of the markets [Which, actually, is more beneficial for the already mature companies in the US and Britain than the just beginning entities in developing countries. It is the globalization need of capital, rather than the true prescriptions for economic health.] 【因此需要理解的是，中国如何在加入国际分工体系（WHO）的同时又能维持强管制和独立自主，这个是实力，而非必然。很多国家在被迫接受IMF疗法后只能被国际资本“割韭菜”——被迫是因为不加入只能被排除在国际分工体系之外，必然失败；被割韭菜是因为相比起已经成熟的发达国家企业，很多发展中国家企业都是不成熟的、缺乏竞争力的，贸然开放只能被置于不利地位，这和当时中国被迫打开国门以及民族资本企业家难以为继是一样的。】【另外，如果说上述已经是common sense的话，我们这里更需要关注的是技术进步在global economy形成过程中的作用，以及global economy的形成历史。】
P142 The more countries join the club, the more difficult it is for those outside the liberal economic regime to go their own way. So in the last resort, locked-in trajectories of integration in the global economy, with its homogeneous rules, amplify the network, and the networking possibilities for tis members, while increasing the cost of being outside the network. [However, we should also notice the core member of this global network, the US. When it feels the global network is bad for it, it decide to quit.]
P147 Any individual decoupling from the global economy implies a staggering cost: the devastation of the economy in the short term, and the closing of access to sources of growth. [The current COVID-19 is forced many individuals to disconnect with the whole world, at least physically.] [Another sudden idea is what about individual people connect with the global world? Different context and different culture may differ.]
P160 The new economy is certainly, for the time being, a capitalist econmy. But this is a new brand of capitalism, technologically, organizationally, and institutionally distinct from both classical capitalism and Keynesian capitalism.
Network-based productivity growth and network-based globalization are spearheaded by a specific industry: the information technology industry (increasingly organized around the Internet) and the finance industry (global financial market).
Chapter 3: The Network Enterprise: the Culture, Institutions, and Organizations of the Informational Society
P164 Global economy is characterized by the development of a new organizational logic which is related to the current process of technological change, but not dependent upon it.
Organization evolution: 1) Mass production to flexible production; 2) the crisis of the large corporation, and the resilience of small and medium firms as agents of innovation and source of job creation (still in debates); 3) new methods of management (vivid example of Toyota), including just in time system of supplies, total quality control, and workers’ involvement in the production process. 4)… 5) multidirectional network model enacted by small and medium businesses and the licensing-subcontracting model of production under an umbrella corporation. 6) the intertwining of large corporations in what has come to be known as strategic alliances.
P171 In fact, the truly distinctive character of Toyotism, as distinct from Fordism, does not concern relationships between firms, but between management and workers… The central and distinctive feature of the Japanese path was to de-specialize the professional workers, and, instead of scattering them, to turn them into multi-functional specialists.
P178 Provided the large corporation can reform itself, transforming its organization into an articulated network of multifunctional decision-making centers, it could actually be a superior form of management in the new economy. (Which is enhanced by new information technologies.)
P180 Under different organizational arrangements, and through diverse culture expressions, they are all based on networks. Networks are the fundamental stuff of which new organizations are and will be made.
P182 By networking its operation internally and externally, using the equipment it designs and sells, Cisco Systems epitomizes the virtuous circle of the information technology revolution: the use of information technologies to enhance the technology of information, on the basis of organizational networking powered by information networks.
P184 The new organizational trajectories I have described were not the mechanical consequence of technological change… The most important obstacle in adapting the vertical corporation to the flexibility requirements of the global economy was the rigidity of traditional corporation culture.
Thus, organizational change happened, independently of technological change, as a response to the need to cope with a constantly changing operational environment. Yet, once it started to take place, the feasibility of organizational change was extraordinarily enhanced by new information technologies. [Avoid the mistaken technological determination.]
P186 The convergence between organizational requirements and technological change has established networking as the fundamental form of competition in the new, global economy.
P187 Under the conditions of fast technological change, networks, not firms, have become the actual operating unit… A new organizational form has emerged as characteristic of the informational, global economy: the network enterprise.
The definition of network enterprise: that specific form of enterprise whose system of means is constituted by the intersection of segments of autonomous systems of goals.
The network enterprise makes material the culture of the informational, global economy: it transforms signals into commodities by processing knowledge.
P208 My hypothesis is that, as the process of globalization progresses, organizational forms evolves from multinational enterprises to international networks, actually bypassing the so-called “transnationals” that belong more to the world of mythical representation (or self-serving image-making by management consultants) than to the institutionally bounded realities of the world economy.
P209 While market size was supposed to induce the formation of the vertical, multiunit corporation, the globalization of competition dissolves the large corporation in a web of multidirectional networks, which become the actual operating unit. The increase of transaction costs, because of added technological complexity, does not result in the internalization of transactions within the corporation but in the externalization of transactions and sharing of costs throughout the network, obviously increasing uncertainty, but also making possible the spreading and sharing of uncertainty. Thus, either the mainstream explanation of business organization, based on neoclassical market theory, is wrong, or else available evidence on the emergence of business networks is faulty. I am inclined to think the former.
P210 Since most multinational firms participate in a variety of networks depending on products, processes, and countries, the new economy cannot be characterized as being centered any longer on multinational corporations, even if they continue to exercise jointly oligopolistic control over most market. This is because corporations have transformed themselves into a web of multiple networks embedded in a multiplicity of institutional environments.
P210-212 The spirit of Informationalism: 1) business network; 2) technological tools; 3) global competition; 4) the state (always there)
The emergence and consolidation of the network enterprise, in all its different manifestations, may well be answer to the “productivity enigma”: Realizing the potential of Information Technology requires substantial re-organization.
P215 The “spirit of Informationalism” is the culture of “creative destruction” accelerated to the speed of the optoelectronic circuits that process its signals.
Chapter 4: The Transformation of Work and Employment: Networkers, Jobless, and Flex-timers
P219-220 Criticize the “post-industrialism”:
1) The appropriate distinction is not between an industrial and a post-industrial economy, but between two forms of knowledge-based industrial, agricultural and service production (because knowledge-based productivity growth was the same, however, current it is Informationalism).
2) Although the percentage of service is increased, industry is not dead, for part of service is directly linked with manufacturing activity, and new manufacturing jobs elsewhere (in developing world) largely exceeds the losses in the developed world.
3) The definition of services is ambiguous. Different types of services should be clearly distinguished from each other.
4) The expansion of information-rich occupations, such as managerial, professional, and technical positions is true, but it also accompanied by the growth of low-end, unskilled, service occupations.
P222 Only if we open up the cultural and institutional scope of our observation can we separate what belongs to the structure of the informational society (as expressing a new mode of development) from what is specific to the historical trajectory of a given country. [Which is also true in behavior studies: comparative perspective provide the opportunities to separate the effects from informational society from the cultural and historical background of a given contexts.]
P226 What is probably the society which puts the strongest emphasis on informational technologies, and in which high technology plays a most significant role in productivity and competitiveness, also appears to have the lowest level of information-processing employment, and the lowest rate of progression of such employment. [Information processing, probably the most valuable jobs in the value chain (like research, design, law, finance…), but manufactory is relatively more equivalent and can provide more jobs. Besides, information processing is harder to replace.]
I suggest the idea that information processing is most productive when it is embedded in material production or in the handling of goods, instead of being disjointed in a stepped-up technical division of labor. 【避免脱实入虚，信息技术要与实体经济相结合】
P230 Thus, we observe two different paths in the expansion of “post-industrial” services’ employment: one, the Anglo-Saxon model, which shifts from manufacturing to advanced services, maintaining employment in the traditional services; the other, the Japanese/German model, which both expands advanced services and preserves a manufacturing basis, while internalizing some of the service activities in the industrial sector. France is in-between, although leaning toward the Anglo-Saxon model. [What about China? We can say China is industrial and informational driven at the same time, what about China’s future?]
It does not seem that great productivity, social stability, and international competitiveness were directly associated with the highest degree of service-related or information-processing jobs. On the contrary, those societies in the G-7 group that have been at the forefront of economic progress and social stability in recent years (Japan and Germany) seem to have developed a more efficient linkage system between manufacturing, producer services, social services and distributive services than Anglo-Saxon societies… In all of these societies, informationalization seems to be more decisive than information processing. [If it is true, then China would be the most competitive societies in this world, at least right now.]
P234 Overall, the tendency toward a predominantly white-collar labor force skewed toward its higher tier seems to be the general trend. However, Japan and Germany still hold on to a broader craft and commercial basis than in other counties.
Thirdly, the widespread argument concerning the increasing polarization of the occupational structure of informational society does not seem to fit with this data set. [The polarization might happen in the major cities!]
P235 We know from other sources that there has been a polarization of income distribution in the United States and in other countries in the past two decades.
However, here I am objecting to the popular image of the informational economy as providing an increasing number of low-level service jobs at a disproportionately higher rate than the rate of increase in the share of the professional/technical component of the labor force. [Actually it is lower rate].
P239 Thus, overall, the projected employment structure for the United States closely fits the original blueprint for the informational society:
P241 Two facts deserve comment: on the one hand, there is at the same time relative upgrading of the stratification system and a moderate tread toward occupational polarization. This is because there are simultaneous increases at both the top and the bottom of the social ladder, although the increase at the top is of greater magnitude.
P245 The analysis of the differential evolution of the G-7 countries clearly shows some variation in their employment and occupational structures. At the risk of oversimplifying, we can propose the hypothesis of two different informational models:
1) The service economy model (US, UK, Canada): an entirely new employment structure where the differentiation among various service activities becomes the key element to analyze social structure. Capital management services over producer services, dramatic rise in social service sector, especially health and educational service. [Probably related with the privatization of medical service and education??]
2) The industrial production model (Japan, Germany)
P246 The different expression of such models in each one of the G-7 countries are dependent upon their position in the global economy. [The global division of labor]… The employment structure of the US and of Japan reflect their different forms of articulation to the global economy, and not just their degree of advancement in their informational scale.
P251 There is an historical tendency toward increasing interdependence of the labor force on a global scale, through three mechanisms: global employment in the multinational corporations, international trade on employment and labor conditions, and effects of global competition. [For example, the increased advantages of skilled workers in the North and relatively decreased advantage of unskilled workers, but also push industrialization through FDI…]
P259 The informational work process is determined by the characteristics of the informational production process. 1) Value added is mainly generated by innovation, both of process and products. 2) Innovation is itself dependent upon two conditions: research potential and specification capability. 3) Task execution is more efficient. 4) Most production activity takes place in organizations. 5) Information technology becomes the critical ingredient of the process of work.
This specific production process introduces a new division of labor, which can be better understood by presenting a typology constructed around three dimensions: 1) actual tasks performed in a given work process (value-making); 2) the relationship between a given organization and its environment, including other organizations (relation-making); 3) the relationship between managers and employees in a given organization or network (decision-making).
P265 The net result was a bipolar labor force composed of highly skilled designers and telecommunicating sales managers on the one hand, and low-skilled, low-paid manufacturing workers, located wither offshore or in American, often illegal, domestic sweatshops.
P266 The resulting bifurcation of work patterns and polarization of labor is not the necessary result of technological progress of inexorable evolutionary trends. It is socially determined and managerially designed in the process of the capitalist restructuring taking place at the shopfloor level, within the framework and with the help of the process of technological change at the roots of the informational paradigm. Different conditions may have different results.
P270 The high unemployment problem for some European countries was mainly caused not by the introduction of new technologies, but by mistaken macro-economic policies and by an institutional environment that discouraged private job creation.
Higher technological level is generally associated with lower unemployment rate.
P271 On the other hand, what is really going on is a remarkable trend: the substitution of women for men in large segments of the labor market.
P272 There would be a potential reduction of employment as a consequence of the diffusion of new information technologies only if:
1) Expansion in demand does not offset the increase in labor productivity; and 2) there is no institutional reaction to such a mismatch by reducing working time, not jobs.
P280 In sum, as a general trend, that there is no systematic structural relationship between the diffusion of information technologies and the evolution of employment levels in the economy as a whole. Jobs are being displaced and new jobs are being created, but the quantitative relationship between the losses and the gains varies among different contexts.
[The relationship between daily time allocation and technologies might be the same: some place was displaced (like unnecessary offline shopping), while other demand will be created (like to pick up parcels); or the time spent in the same sectors, but with different means (entertainment in different methods)
P281 Institution and social organizations of work seem to play a greater role than technology in inducing job creation or destruction. However, if technology per se does not create or destroy employment, it does profoundly transform the nature of work and the organization of production – the individualization of labor in the labor process.
The new social and economic organization based on information technologies aims at decentralizing management, individualizing work, and customizing markets, thereby segmenting work and fragmenting societies, while coordination in an interactive network of communication in real time.
P289 Just-in-time labor seems to be substituting for just-in-time supplies as the key resource of the informational economy.
P290 The logic of this highly dynamic work system interacts with the labor institutions of each country: the greater the constraints to such flexibility, and the greater the bargaining power of the labor unions, the lesser will be the impact on wages and benefits, and the greater will be the difficult for newcomers to enter the core labor force, thus limiting job creation.
While the social costs of flexibility can be high, a growing stream of research emphasizes the transformative value of new work arrangements for social life, and particularly for improved family relationships, and greater egalitarian patterns between genders.
P296 As argued above, these trends [deterioration of living and working conditions, including rise of unemployment (in Europe); declining real wages, increasing inequality (US); stepped-up segmentation of the labor force (Japan); informalization and downgrading of newly incorporated urban labor in industrializing countries; increasing marginalization of the agricultural labor force in stagnant, underdeveloped countries] do not stem from the structural logic of the informational paradigm, but are the result of the current restructuring of capital-labor relations, helped by the powerful tools provided by new information technologies, and facilitated by a new organizational form, the network enterprise. Furthermore, although the potential of information technologies could have provided for higher productivity, higher living standards, and higher employment simultaneously, once certain technological choices are in place, technological trajectories are “locked in”, and informational society could become at the same time (without the technological or historical necessity to do so) a dual society.
P300 The logic of this highly dynamic labor market model interacts with the specificity of labor institutions in each country… This institutional variation is what explains the difference we have shown between the United States and the European Union. Social restructuring takes the form of pressuring wages and labor conditions in the US. In the European Union, where labor institutions defend better their historically conquered positions, the net result is increasing unemployment, because of limited entry to young workers and because of the early exit from the labor force for the oldest, or for those trapped in noncompetitive sectors and firms.
Chapter 5 The Culture of Real Virtuality: the Integration of Electronic Communication, the End of the Mass Audience, and the Rise of Interactive Networks
P359 (In mass media,) the audience was seen as largely homogeneous, or susceptible to being made homogeneous. [Which is the same as the production system (Taylorism) at that moment, the standardized mass production system]
P362 Media watching/listening is by no means an exclusive activity. It is generally mixed with the performance of home tasks, with shared meals, with social interaction.
P370 While the media have become indeed globally interconnected, and programs and messages circulate in the global network, we are not living in a global village, but in customized cottages globally produced and locally distributed.
P388 Social networks substitute for communities, with locally based communities being one of the many possible alternatives for the creation and maintenance of social networks, and the Internet providing another such alternative.
A key distinction in the analysis of sociability is that between weak ties and strong ties. The Net is particularly suited to the development of multiple weak ties… The Internet may contribute to expanding social bonds in a society that seems to be in the process of rapid individualization and civic disengagement.
P390 In the context of the present analysis of cultural impacts, what should be considered is the symbolic isomorphism in the processes of work, home, services, and entertainment in the new structure of communication. [The contexts of using ICTs.]
Let us say, as a hypothesis, that the convergence of experience in the same medium blurs somewhat the institutional separation [not only physical separation] of domains of activity, and confuses codes of behavior.
P393 People shape technology to fit it to their own needs… The many-to-many electronic communication mode represented by CMC (computer-mediated communication) has been used in different ways and for different purposes, as many as in the range of social and contextual variation among its users… What is common to CMC is that it does not substitute for other means of communication: it reinforces pre-existing social patterns.
P400 A “scanning report” emphasizes two critical features of the new lifestyles: its “home centeredness”, and its individualism. [It could be a huge difference when in the mobile age.]
P402 Overall, multimedia appear to be supporting a social/cultural pattern characterized by the following features: 1) widespread social and cultural differentiation, leading to the segmentation of the users/viewers/readers/listeners; 2) increasing social stratification among the users (especially the interacting and the interacted groups); 3) the communication of all kinds of messages in the same system, even if the system is interactive and selective, induces an integration of all messages in a common cognitive pattern. 4) Finally, perhaps the most important feature of multimedia is that they capture within their domain most cultural expression, in all their diversity.
P404 It is a system in which reality itself (that is, people’s material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience is communicated, but they become the experience.
Chapter 6: The Space of Flows
P407 Both space and time are being transformed under the combined effect of the information technology paradigm, and of social forms and processes induced by the current process of historical change, as presented in this book.
P408 While working at home part-time seems to be emerging as a mode of professional activity in the future, it develops out of the rise of the network enterprise and of the flexible work process, as analyzed in preceding chapters, not as the direct consequence of available technology. [Various factors intertwined with each other for a certain phenomenon.]
P417 The global city is not a place, but a process. A process by which centers of production and consumption of advanced services, and their ancillary local societies, are connected in a global network, while simultaneously down playing the linkages with their hinterlands, on the basis of information flows.
P426 How do these tendencies affect cities? Scattered data seem to indicate that transportation problems will get worse, not better, because increasing activity and time compression allowed by new networking organization translate into higher concentration of markets in certain areas, and into greater physical mobility for a labor force that was previously confined to its working sites during working hours.
P427 Nevertheless, the growing importance of on-line transactions does not imply the disappearance of shopping centers and retail stores. In fact, the trend is the opposite: shopping areas proliferate around the urban and suburban landscape, with showrooms that address customers to on-line ordering terminals to get the actual goods, often home-delivered.
P428 What emerges from different observations is a similar picture of simultaneous spatial dispersion and concentration via information technologies. People increasingly work and manage services from their home… Thus, “home centeredness” is an important trend of the new society… People will shuttle between all these places with increasing mobility precisely because of the newly acquired looseness of working arrangements and social networking: as time becomes more flexible, places become more singular, as people circulate among them in an increasingly mobile pattern.
However, the interaction between new information technology and current processes of social change does have a substantial impact on cities and space. On the one hand, the urban form is considerably transformed in its layout… it shows considerable variation depending upon the characteristics of historical, territorial, and institutional contexts. On the other hand, the emphasis on interactivity between places breaks up spatial pattern of behavior into a fluid network of exchanges that underlies the emergence of a new kind of space, the space of flows.
P429 Because of the nature of the new society, based upon knowledge, organized around networks, and partly made up of flows, the informational city is not a form but a process, a process characterized by the structural domination of the space of flows.
P431 The development of these loosely interrelated ex-urban constellations emphasizes the functional interdependence of different units and processes in a given urban system over very long distances, minimizing the role of territorial contiguity, and maximizing the communication networks in all their dimensions. Flows of exchange are ate the core of the American Edge City.
P433 The lower their position in the new informational network, the greater the difficulty of their transition from the industrial stage, and the more traditional will be their urban structure, with old-established neighborhoods and commercial quarters playing the determinant role in the dynamics of the city.
The critical factor in the new urban processes, in Europe as elsewhere, is the fact that urban space is increasingly differentiated in social terms, while being functionally interrelated beyond physical contiguity. There follows the separation between symbolic meaning, location of functions, and the social appropriation of space in the metropolitan area.
P434 The global economy and the emerging informational society have indeed a new spatial form, which develops in a variety of social and geographical contexts: mega-cities.
They are the nodes of the global economy, concentrating the directional, productive, and managerial upper functions all over the planet.
P436 Yet what is the most significant about mega-cities is that they are connected externally to global networks and to segments of their own countries, while internally disconnecting local populations that are wither functionally unnecessary or socially disruptive… It is this distinctive feature of being globally connected and locally disconnected, physically and socially, that makes mega-cities a new urban form. A form that is characterized by the functional linkages it establishes across vast expanses of territory, yet with a great deal of discontinuity in land-use patterns… Mega-cities are discontinuous constellations of spatial fragments, functional pieces, and social segments.
P441 Space is the expression of society… Space is not a reflection of society, it is its expression. Space is not a photocopy of society, it is society.
In social theory, space cannot be defined without reference to social practices.
From the point of view of social theory, space is the material support of time-sharing social practices. I immediately add that any material support bears always a symbolic meaning… we separate the basic concept of material support of simultaneous practices from the notion of contiguity, in order to account for the possible existence of material supports of simultaneity that do not rely on physical contiguity, since this is precisely the case of the dominant social practices of the Information Age.
P442 Flows are the expression of processes dominating our economic, political, and symbolic life. If such is the case, the material support of the dominant processes in our societies will be the ensemble of elements supporting such flows, and making materially possible their articulation in simultaneous time… The space of flow is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows. By flows I understand purposefully, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors in the economic, political and symbolic structures of society.
P442-447 The contents of the space of flows:
The first layer, the first material support of the space of flows, is actually constituted by a circuit of electronic exchange that, together, form the material basis for the processes we have observed as being strategically crucial in the network of society… Thus, the network of communication is the fundamental spatial configuration: places do not disappear, but their logic and their meaning become absorbed in the network. The technological infrastructure that builds up the network defines the new space.
The second layer of the space of flows is constituted by its nodes and hubs… The space of flows is based on an electronic network, but this network links up specific places, with well-defined social, cultural, physical, and functional characteristics. Some places are exchangers, communication hubs… Other places are the nodes of the network; that is, the location of strategically important functions that build a series of locality-based activities and organizations around a key function in the network. Both nodes and hubs are hierarchically organized according to their relative weight in the network. But this hierarchy may change depending upon the evolution of activities processed through the network… Each one of these nodes requires an adequate technological infrastructure, a system of ancillary firms providing the support services, a specialized labor market, and the system services required by the professional labor force. [In that case, different positions in the networks, or whether or not have a position in the network might have an influence on the daily life?]【可能对于生产来说是这样的，但是对于生活来说，我们可以看到不同地方发生的事情紧密的通过社交媒体、短视频平台、流媒体工具紧密的结合在了一起。但是这些结合很多时候我们关注的是城市/区域之间的，有没有可能在城市内部的网络化呢？】… The functions to be fulfilled by each network define the characteristics of places that become their privileged nodes.
The third important layer of the space of flows refers to the spatial organization of the dominant, managerial elites… The space of flow is enacted, indeed conceived, decided, and implemented by social actors. Thus, the technocratic-financial-managerial elite that occupies the leading positions in our societies will also have specific spatial requirements regarding the material/spatial support of their interests and practices… Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people’s life and experience is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history… The spatial manifestation of this logic of domination takes two main forms in the space of flows. One the one hand, the elites form their own society, define their community as a spatially bound, interpersonally networked subculture… A series of symbolic socio-spatial hierarchies is organized, so that lower levels of management can mirror the symbols of power and appropriate such symbols by constructing second-order spatial communities that will also tend to isolate themselves from the rest of society, in a succession of hierarchical segregation process that, together, are tantamount to socio-spatial fragmentation. A second major trend of cultural distinctiveness of the elites in the informational society is to create a lifestyle and to design spatial forms aimed at unifying the symbolic environment of the elite around the world, thus superseding the historical specific of each locale.
P448 The call for cultural connectedness of the space of flows between its different nodes is also reflected in the tendency toward the architectural uniformity of the new directional centers in various societies. 【所以我们说中国城市到处都一样，这也可能是中国城市化进程与信息化进程同步的结果。】
P449 My hypothesis is that the coming of the space of flows is blurring the meaningful relationship between architecture and society.
The liberation from cultural codes hides in fact the escape from historically rooted societies. In this perspective, post-modernism could be considered the architecture of the space of flow.
P453 The space of flows does not permeate down to the whole realm of human experience in the network society. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of people, in advanced and traditional societies alike, live in places, and so they perceive their space as place-based. A place is a locale whose form, function, and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity.
P458 So Irvine (the epitome of suburban southern California) is indeed a place, although a special kind of place, where the space of experience shrinks inward toward the home, as flows take over increasing shares of time and space.
Thus, people do still live in places. But because function and power in our societies are organized in the space of flows, the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places… There follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society. The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasing unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes.
Chapter 7: The Edge of Forever: Timeless Time
P464 It is the mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding but self-maintaining, not cyclical but random, not recursive but incursive: timeless time, using technology to escape the contexts of its existence, and to appropriate selectively any value each context could offer to the ever-present… Compressing time to the limit is tantamount to make time sequence, and thus time, disappear… Capital’s freedom from time and culture’s escape from the clock are decisively facilitated by new information technologies, and embedded in the structure of the network society.
P467 Skilled labor is required to manage its own time in a flexible manner, sometimes adding more work time, at other times adjusting to flexible schedules, in some instances reducing working hours and thus pay. [In that case, space will also change to adjust to this life style.]
P468 In modern societies, paid working time structures social time. Working time and potential lifelong working hours per person in industrialized countries has experience a secular decline in the past 100 years.
P472 These tendencies may indicate the increasing differentiation of the duration of working hours between and within countries after a long period of standardization and harmonization of working hours.
The source of this diversity: 1) there are institutional differences in the regulation of labor markets; 2) within countries, longer working hours are concentrated in two groups: high-level professionals and unskilled service workers… As for shorter working time and atypical schedules, they are linked to part-time and temporary work, and concern mainly women and low-educated youth… A considerable full-time workers (probably a majority of the professional labor force) are heading toward flexible time schedules, generally increasing their workload.
P473 Therefore, the real issue in our societies is not so much that technology allows us to work less for the same unit of output: it does so, but the impact of this technological facto on actual working time and schedule is undermined. What is at stake, and what appears to be the prevailing trend in most advanced sectors of most advanced societies, is the general diversification of working time, depending on firms, networks, jobs, occupations, and characteristics of the workers… The heterogeneity of working schedules in a society with similar participation by both genders in the labor force, imposes a dramatic readjustment of household arrangements… Since the flextime and part-time have penetrated the contractual structures of working time on the basis of women’s work, largely to accommodate women’s needs to combine their child-rearing endeavors and their working lives, the extension of this logic to men and to other domains of social life could actually introduce a new articulation of life time and work time at different ages and under different conditions. Thus, under such new arrangements, working time may lose its traditional centrality through the life-cycle.
P476 I propose the hypothesis that the network society is characterized by the breaking down of the rhythms, either biological or social, associated with the notion of a life-cycle.
P479 Together with the transformation of the family and the increasing diversification of lifestyles, we observe a substantial modification of the time and forms for mothering and fathering in the life-cycle, where the new rule is, increasingly, that there are few rules.
All combinations are possible [technologically] and are socially decided.
P492 It is a culture at the same time of the eternal and of the ephemeral. It is eternal because it reaches back and forth to the whole sequence of cultural expressions. It is ephemeral because each arrangement, each specific sequencing, depends on the context and purpose under which any given cultural construct is solicited.
P494 I propose the idea that timeless time, occurs when the characteristics of a given context, namely, the informational paradigm and the network society, induce systemic perturbation in the sequential order of phenomena performed in the context. This perturbation may take the form of compressing the occurrence of phenomena, aiming at instantaneity, or else by introducing random discontinuity in the sequence. Elimination of sequence creates undifferentiated time, which is tantamount to eternity.
Conclusion: the Network Society
P501 The topology defined by networks determines that the distance (or intensity and frequency of interaction) between two points is shorter if both points are nodes in a network than if they do not belong to the same network… Thus, distance (physical, social, economic, political, cultural) for a given point or position varies between zero (for any node in the same network) and infinite (for any point external to the network). This inclusion/exclusion in networks, and the architecture of relationships between networks, enacted by light-speed-operating information technologies, configure dominant processes and functions in societies.
P502 The convergence of social evolution and information technologies has created a new material basis for the performance of activities throughout the social structure. This material basis, built in networks, earmarks dominant social processes, thus shaping social structure itself.
This evolution toward networking forms of management and production does not imply the demise of capitalism. The network society… is for the time being, a capitalist society… It has two fundamental features: it is global, and it is structured to a large extent around a network of financial flows.
P503 Yet whatever is extracted as profit is reverted to the meta-network of financial flows, where all capital is equalized in the commodified democracy of profit-making. In this electronically operated global casino…
P505 There is not, sociologically and economically, such a thing as a global capitalist class. But there is an integrated, global capital network, whose movements and variable logic ultimately determine economies and influence societies. Thus, above a diversity of human-flesh capitalists and capitalist groups there is a face-less collective capitalist, made up of financial flows operated by electronic networks.
P506 At its core, capital is global. As a rule, labor is local… Labor is disaggregated in its performance, fragmented in its organization, diversified in its existence, divided in its collective action… Labor loses its collective identity, becomes increasingly individualized in its capacities, in its working conditions, and in its interests and projects.
Capital and labor increasingly tend to exist in different spaces and times: the space of flows and the space of places, instant time of computerized networks versus clock time of everyday life. Thus, they live by each other, but they do not relate to each other.