information society well explained

Today I want to recommend you a book which changed dramatically my comprehension of our society and its future. It’s the three-volume work by Manuel Castells called “The Information Age”.

I had just finished high school when I discover this book. My intellectual background was quite poor; I hadn’t read any serious academic book at the time. Nevertheless my curiosity about the topic was huge. The Internet had appeared a couple of years before and I wanted to know how it was shaping our society. The length and austerity of this trilogy seemed a bit discouraging at the beginning but I was going to discover soon that it was worth the effort. Until then my only approach to the matter had been the books of these futurist gurus like Negroponte and Toffler. At the beginning I found them rather inspiring, they make me dream about wonderful worlds to come in which technology would allow us to do, well, everything we wanted. After a while I realized that the statements this authors made about the evolution of society were closer to science fiction than to any serious research. Pure technophile speculative day-dreaming.

On the contrary the book I was about to read didn’t make any reckless predictions. Its approach was to find the insight about the future that the systematic analysis of what is new in our society can provide.

I was in Ireland, shut away in my room recovering from a flu, when I started the first of the three books which compounds the trilogy: “The Rise of the Network Society”. And from that moment on I harrypottered it, and the other two parts which followed: “The Power of Identity” and “End of Millenium”. I just couldn’t stop reading them.

It was an intellectual treasure for a virgin mind like mine. This book offered a powerful general structure about how our society works. It’s like a reference framework which since then has remained with me and where I often go back to hang in the new knowledge I acquire.

Book shops are full of good books about particular dimensions of our changing society. Take one of them about economic globalization. Another one about the changing geopolitical game (China, India, and all that stuff). Another about the new technological paradigms of Internet and the interconnected society. And still take another about the socio-political aspects of our time (rising of nationalism and religious fundamentalism, crisis of democracy, feminism, ecologism, gay issues, the media…). Then mix them all and the result that you obtain is this book. What’s more, Castells doesn’t deal with these issues separately but manages to connect all of them in a common theoretical framework.

Disclaimer: No, I’m not getting paid by the publishing house of Manuel Castells. Neither am I his nephew or boyfriend.