Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist especially associated with research on the information society, communication and globalization. In January 2020, he was appointed Minister of Universities in the Sánchez II Government of Spain.
Creative destruction, sometimes known as Schumpeter's gale, is a concept in economics which since the 1950s has become most readily identified with the Austrian born economist Joseph Schumpeter who derived it from the work of Karl Marx and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and the business cycle.
An information society is a society where the usage, creation, distribution, manipulation and integration of information is a significant activity. Its main drivers are information and communication technologies, which have resulted in rapid information growth in variety and is somehow changing all aspects of social organization, including education, economy,, health, government, warfare, and levels of democracy. The people who are able to partake in this form of society are sometimes called either computer users or even digital citizens, defined by K. Mossberger as “Those who use the Internet regularly and effectively”. This is one of many dozen internet terms that have been identified to suggest that humans are entering a new and different phase of society.
Network society is the expression coined in 1991 related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies. The intellectual origins of the idea can be traced back to the work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who analyzed the effect of modernization and industrial capitalism on complex patterns of affiliation, organization, production and experience.
Theoretical computer science (TCS) is a subset of general computer science and mathematics that focuses on more mathematical topics of computing and includes the theory of computation.
Urbanism is the study of how inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. It is a direct component of disciplines such as urban planning, which is the profession focusing on the physical design and management of urban structures and urban sociology which is the academic field the study of urban life and culture.
Internet studies is an interdisciplinary field studying the social, psychological, pedagogical, political, technical, cultural, artistic, and other dimensions of the Internet and associated information and communication technologies. While studies of the Internet are now widespread across academic disciplines, there is a growing collaboration among these investigations. In recent years, Internet studies have become institutionalized as courses of study at several institutions of higher learning. Cognates are found in departments of a number of other names, including departments of "Internet and Society", "virtual society", "digital culture", "new media" or "convergent media", various "iSchools", or programs like "Media in Transition" at MIT. On the research side, Internet studies intersects with studies of cyberculture, human–computer interaction, and science and technology studies. Internet and society is a research field that addresses the interrelationship of Internet and society, i.e. how society has changed the Internet and how the Internet has changed society.
In political and sociological theory, the elite are a small group of powerful people who hold a disproportionate amount of wealth, privilege, political power, or skill in a society. Defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, the "elite" are "those people or organizations that are considered the best or most powerful compared to others of a similar type."
The space of flows is a high-level cultural abstraction of space and time, and their dynamic interactions with digital age society. The concept was created by the sociologist and cybernetic culture theoretician Manuel Castells to "reconceptualize new forms of spatial arrangements under the new technological paradigm"; a new type of space that allows distant synchronous, real-time interaction. The space of flows first was mentioned in The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process (1989).
A network-centric organization is a network governance pattern emerging in many progressive 21st century enterprises. This implies new ways of working, with consequences for the enterprise’s infrastructure, processes, people and culture.
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006.
The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society is a book by Manuel Castells, Professor of Sociology and Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. The title is a reference to The Gutenberg Galaxy, a 1962 book by Marshall McLuhan. It is regarded as a good introduction to Social informatics.
Contemporary society, according to social and political scientists, is characterised by at least three fundamental directions:
The Autonomic Network Architecture (ANA) project aims at exploring novel ways of organizing and using networks beyond legacy Internet technology. The ultimate goal is to design and develop a novel autonomic networking architecture that enables flexible, dynamic, and fully autonomous formation of network nodes as well as whole networks. Universities and research institutes from Europe and Northern America are participating in this project.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to formal science:
Networked advocacy or net-centric advocacy refers to a specific type of advocacy. While networked advocacy has existed for centuries, it has become significantly more efficacious in recent years due in large part to the widespread availability of the internet, mobile telephones, and related communications technologies that enable users to overcome the transaction costs of collective action. The study of networked advocacy draws on interdisciplinary sources, including communication theory, political science, and sociology. Theories of networked advocacy have been heavily influenced by social movement literature, and refer to the preexisting networks used to create and support collective actions and advocacy as well as the networks that such actions and advocacy create.
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture is a trilogy of books by sociologist Manuel Castells: The Rise of the Network Society (1996), The Power of Identity (1997), and End of Millennium (1998). The second edition was heavily revised; volume one is 40 per cent different from the first edition.
The Invisible Class Empire is a term introduced by Robert Perrucci and Earl Wysong in their book titled, The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? The term refers to members of the superclass that are involved in shaping both political and corporate policies. This class of people may be thought of as an empire because members maintain an influence on society through access to a surplus of financial, cultural, human and social capital. These various forms of capital translate into the political force needed to preserve classwide vested interests. Unlike conspiracy theories of power and control, the superclass' political influence is evidenced in the reality of economic and political inequalities that maintain class hierarchies. The term, therefore, refers to "the hidden structures and processes through which superclass leaders, along with their credentialed-class allies, penetrate and dominate the American political system." The empire is "invisible" because many of the individuals involved receive very little or no public attention.
The Hidden Connections is a 2002 book by Fritjof Capra, in which the author proposes a holistic alternative to linear and reductionist world views. He aims to extend system dynamics and complexity theory to the social domain and presents "a conceptual framework that integrates life's biological, cognitive and social dimensions".
The concept of networked swarming warfare was first proposed by HUO Dajun in 2003. The key feature of the information age is the networking of organizational structure. The rising networked organization will overcome the limitation of traditional geography and link the operational resources distributed widely to form a military action network which combine strike range, speed and lethality, three elements of originally different developing, fundamentally transforming our idea of battle space. With the trend of decentralization of forces, we need to develop more small units with independent combat functions; meanwhile we can join these small units into a whole network as the technology's development. The warfare based on this network is called networked swarming warfare.
