The Innovation Reading Circle aims to help develop theory around innovation through rich, high-level and well-informed public discussion around key and related texts and discourses... [Read on in Objectives]

21: The Power of communication

InCommunication Power Manuel Castells. [Read on on the book page on the publisher’s site...]

In Communication Power Professor Manuel Castells argues that we live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave, and in which the media – including the Internet and mobile networks – has become the space in which power strategies are played out. He argues that a new communication system – mass self-communication – has emerged, and power relationships have been profoundly modified by its emergence. This ‘mass self-communication’ can be locally based but globally connected, building on messaging, social networking, and blogging, and is now used by millions of people. Drawing on a wide range of social and psychological theories, Castells presents original research on political processes and social movements, and proposes a new theory of power in the information age, based on the management of communication networks.

Manuel Castells is University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles and holds a number of other posts. He is also Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, where he was Professor of City and Regional Planning and Professor of Sociology. He was born in Spain in 1942 and grew up in Valencia and Barcelona. He studied law and economics at the Universities of Barcelona and Paris. He received a doctorate in sociology and a doctorate in human sciences from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He moved to the United States in 1979. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2004-2009, and is currently Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at Santa Clara University, and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Internet Studies at Oxford University. He is the author of 22 academic books and editor or co-author of 21 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy ‘The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture’ was published by Blackwell in 1996-98. His most recent books are The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press, 2001) and the co-authored The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model (Oxford University Press, 2002). He is a Fellow of the European Academy, a Fellow of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics and Finance, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He has served, or is serving, on the boards or advisory boards of 21 academic journals and is currently the co-editor (with Larry Gross) of the International Journal of Communication. He has served, or is serving, on the a number of boards and advisory councils. He has been a pro-bono advisor to the governments of Chile, Portugal, Spain, Mexico, Ecuador, Nicaragua, China, Brazil, Russia, Finland, and South Africa, as well as a consultant with US AID, the European Commission, the World Bank, United Nations Development Program, International Labor Office, and UNESCO. [Full biography on USC Annenberg site. Profile on Wikipedia.]

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