Description
This book is an exploration of the new forms of social movements and protests that are erupting in the world today, from the Arab uprisings to the indignadas movement in Spain, and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US. While these and similar social movements differ in many important ways, there is one thing they share in common: they are all interwoven inextricably with the creation of autonomous communication networks supported by the Internet and wireless communication.In this timely and important book, Manuel Castells – the leading scholar of our contemporary networked society – examines the social, cultural and political roots of these new social movements, studies their innovative forms of self-organization, assesses the precise role of technology in the dynamics of the movements, suggests the reasons for the support they have found in large segments of society, and probes their capacity to induce political change by influencing people’s minds.Based on original fieldwork by the author and his collaborators as well as secondary sources, this book provides a path-breaking analysis of the new forms of social movements, and offers an analytical template for advancing the debates triggered by them concerning the new forms of social change and political democracy in the global network society.
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From the Arab Spring to anti-austerity protesters in Greece to Occupy Wall Street encampments in the US, recent social movements have been characterized by their ability to harness the organizational potential of the Internet and then connect that to mobilizations in the urban space. Castells (communication technology and society, U. of Southern California) explores some theoretical hypotheses on the nature of these networked social movements and to consider some of the practical and political implications of the hypotheses, which includes positing communication networks as decisive sources of power-making, as power is exercised primarily by influencing the human mind through mass communications and the most powerful people in a network society as the "programmers" with the capacity to program the main networks on which people's lives depend and the "switchers" that operate the connections between different networks(e.g., "media moguls introduced in the political class, financial elites bankrolling political elites, political eliets bailing out financial institutions," etc.). Thus counterpower is exercised by reprogramming networks around alternative interests and values and/or disrupting dominant switches while switching networks of resistance and social change. Distributed in the US by Wiley. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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