Network Society Manuel Castells

Network Society explores the patterns and dynamics of the network society in its policy dimension, ranging from the knowledge economic, based in technology and innovation, to the organizational reform and modernization in the public sector, focusing also the media and communication policies. The Network Society is our society, a society made of individuals, businesses and state operating from the local, national and into the international arena. Although our societies have many things in common they are also the product of different choices and historical identities. In this volume we chose to focus both what we have considered to be already network societies and also those who are going through a transition process. Accepting the invitation from President Jorge Sampaio to discuss the knowledge economy and the network society from a policy point a view was a challenge that we and the different authors that have contributed to this book believe was worth it.

Policy is usually a strategic choice in order to deal either with uncertainty or with the reality already faced by populations or countries, in our times policy making is becoming increasingly important and at the same time more difficult.

What defines the collective research effort presented in this book is the conviction that the difficulty is probably more a result of the change, and consequently the need to understand what that change is, rather than of an increasingly difficulty of issues and problems. This volume is a small contribution for a better understanding of our societies, both those in transition and those already on the doorsteps of a network society.

The perspective of this book is cross cultural. A perspective drawn, not just by the diversity of geographical origins of its participants, but due to the very own thematic and the geographical scope that we tried to achieve. This is a book that focus on the transition societies of Portugal, Spain—and its different autonomies, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. This is also a book where the comparison of those transition societies with societies, where the network relations that characterize informational societies, is present. So this book focuses on informational societies like the US, Finland, UK and several other members of the more developed countries in the European Union and how policy is being developed.

Our world has been in a process of structural transformation for over two decades. This process is multidimensional, but it is associated with the emergence of a new technological paradigm, based in information and communication technologies, that took shape in the 1970s and diffused unevenly around the world. We know that technology does not determine society: it is society. Society shapes technology according to the needs, values, and interests of people who use the technology. Furthermore, information and communication technologies are particularly sensitive to the effects of social uses on technology itself. The history of the Internet provides ample evidence that the users, particularly the first thousands of users, were, to a large extent, the producers of the technology.

Manuel Castells is the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also Research Professor of Information Society at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in Barcelona, professor Emeritus of Sociology and of Planning, at the University of California at Berkeley and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.