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Manuel Castells Oliván is a Spanish sociologist. He is well known for his authorship of a trilogy of works, entitled The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. He is a scholar of the information society, communication and globalization.
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Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Information economy is an economy with an increased emphasis on informational activities and information industry, where information is valued as a capital good. The term was coined by Marc Porat, a graduate student at Stanford University, who would later co-found General Magic.
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- Sub-populations socially excluded from global society, such as uncontacted peoples;
- Hunter-gatherer, nomadic, pastoral, and some subsistence farming peoples living beyond the modern industrial norm.
- Sub-populations existing in a First World country, but with the living standards of those of a Third World.
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The theory of the Information Age is deeply rooted in organization theory. This may come as a surprise since Manuel Castells is perhaps more readily associated with either the study of the Internet, cities and regions, or social movements. There are two points to be made about the parallels with organization theory. First, Castells sees himself as picking up Max Weber's mantle in both his use of historical sociology and in his style of theory. Second, the informational economy is not the direct result of the rise of new ICTs. Rather, it is the convergence of those technologies with an older and autonomous process of network forms of organizing with their focus on flexibility and adaptability as key modes of organizing. This is a shift that organization theorists have been discussing and documenting since the appearance of open systems perspectives in the 1960s.
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The Political Economy of Communications is a branch of communication studies or media studies which studies the power relations that shape the communication of information from the mass media to its public. PEC analyzes the power relations between the mass media system, information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the wider socioeconomic structure in which these operate, with a focus on understanding the historical and current state of technological developments. PEC has proliferated in the 2000s with the modernization of technology. The advancement of media has created conversation about the effects of colonialism and PEC.
References
- ↑ Castells, Manuel; Ince, Martin. Conversations with Manuel Castells. Oxford, Polity Press (2003), p. 20.
- ↑ Webster, Frank. 2002. Theories of the information society. Abingdon: Routledge. pp. 98–99
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Castells, M., 2010. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
- ↑ Webster, 2002. pp. 99–101
- ↑ Castells, M., 2010. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. p.162
- ↑ Castells, M., 2010. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. p.406.