The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society, by Manuel Castells Free

The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society, Manuel Castells (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, 292 pages, $14.95).

This is both an enlightening and a disturbing book. It is clearly written and impressive in the depth and breadth of its arguments. Manuel Castells is a professor of sociology with emphasis on city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Senior Professor at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute at the Open University of Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain. Originally from Spain, he has contacts that span the continents, providing an impressive range of interests and expertise, to include computer science, urban planning, and business management. Castells is clearly well-connected to key leaders and global movers-and-shakers, as his recounting of lectures given on multiple continents indicates. This book is an outgrowth of a series of lectures given in the year 2000 at Oxford University in England.

The Internet Galaxy is enlightening in its coverage of a remarkable development of our age, the growth of the Internet. The book’s title is a take-off on a previous book by Marshall McLuhan (1962)The Gutenberg Galaxy, which was then subtitled “The Making of Typographic Man.” This book, oriented to the citizen of the Internet, opens with the argument, drawn from McLuhan and Lapham (1964), that “The network is the message.” The major event in our world of the past decade, from the standpoint of technology and its impact on our society, has been the growth of the Internet, to include access to electronic mail and to the vast resources of the World Wide Web (WWW).

In the various chapters of the book, Castells examines a brief history of the Internet and lessons that can be drawn, the Internet culture, e-business and the new economy, the network society, political developments in terms of privacy and liberty, progress toward convergence of multimedia forms through hypertext, the geography of the Internet in terms of involvement of various countries and continents, and finally, an examination of the “digital divide,” both within societies and across the world.

It goes without saying that this is an ambitious undertaking for a book. What is highly commendable in the writing is Castells’ frequent use of recently published studies, sometimes done by his own research team. In addition, his arguments are tightly and convincingly drawn. The book has breadth, depth, and appeal. Also commendable is the openended conclusion to many of his arguments: in other words, we live in an age of participation, where citizen action can make impressive differences. Castells may show how some trend is moving in a disturbing fashion, but he will generally counter with the argument that human decisions took us in this particular direction, and human decisions can get us out of the problems caused. I appreciate this emphasis upon the openness of the future and the implicit call for action among citizens of the world. The conclusion includes a passage indicative of the book’s activist tone:

One can hear a trace of Paulo Freire (1973) in his viewpoint that the aims of our society are not always clear, and there are many ways that humans can be exploited and oppressed. To avoid such consequences, people must be both informed and active. To be complacent or uninformed is to invite the worst to happen.

I particularly enjoyed the description of the “culture of the Internet” as having four layers, each with its own set of assumptions and modes of operating. The “meritocratic layer” deals with academic rules and hierarchies, helping with the sources of funding and the established power structure. The hacker culture is made up of computer enthusiasts who specialize in making the Internet technology better (to be differentiated from the “cracker culture” of computer types who specialize in breaking and entering into secure locations and, at times, concocting computer viruses and other illegal activities). A third layer is the “cyberculture,” a projection of social reforms into the computer realm, in some cases after such social reforms have failed in real life. The final layer is “entrepreneurialism,” the barons of electronic business and the dot.coms, where money and luxury are the prizes, but obtained only after lengthy sacrifice of everything about life other mortals value. Here is a telling quotation:

Castells reports on this aspect of Internet culture in matter of fact tones, but it is clear that, as a sociologist, he sees this as a highly unusual cultural form (and probably disapproves of it about as much as I do).

I found it disturbing to learn that some of the trends I have been counting on for longterm solutions for humankind have little basis in fact. For one, the notion of telecommuting has made sense to me as a solution to urban problems. Castells finds this trend to be a minor force at best, with an estimated ten percent of the U.S. workforce as “homeworkers” in 1999, but that work at home was limited to 9 days a month on average (p. 232). To make matters worse, in terms of need for random route automobile transportation, the development of remote offices or “call centers” has made the automobile all the more of a necessity (p. 233).

Related to telecommuting, in my mind at least, was the prospect of rural areas making a resurgence in the new, Internet-based economy. On the basis of extensive geographic analysis of the location of businesses with a strong Internet presence, Castells finds that instead, urban areas continue to attract businesses and people, providing inherent advantages that a rural setting apparently cannot. Instead, Castells proposes that people will live in mostly urban-suburban settings like “Silicon Valley,” made up of cities but with considerable open space (woodlands, mountains, beaches) as well. He predicts rural to urban migration as a trend that will continue in the coming decades, encouraged by urban advantages like “bandwidth” and available services. My hope for a resurgence of rural areas as “lone eagle” entrepreneurs choose small towns in rural Wyoming or Montana seems increasingly like a pipe dream.

In a similar vein, Castells suggests that even though the Internet has encouraged ecological awareness through the linking of groups with environmental interest, on balance the capacity of man to exploit the environment more efficiently with Internet information and marketing capability seems to be winning out. The prospects for changing those trends appear daunting.

And finally, the challenge of bridging the gap between haves and have nots, seen at one time as a promise of the Internet, becomes more elusive with each permutation of technology. The latest wrinkle, at least at the time of Castells’ writing, was the problem of “bandwidth,” where speed of access to the Internet was severely limited by the infrastructure of the country. What Castells portrays convincingly is that countries and regions can be effectively marginalized from the world economy by failing to participate in a meaningful way in using the Internet and in the creation of value for the world markets. Here his arguments parallel those of Thomas Friedman (2001) in relating the dangers to the world if groups of people are marginalized. To Castells, the lack of any overarching Internet authority or inherent dynamic that would ensure that no groups go unnoticed or without opportunity is a sad but accurate view of today’s Internet dynamic. I disagreed with Castells’ generally negative assessment of education’s level of strength worldwide and his assessment of the commitment of educators. He sees schools, except in a few countries like the USA, northern European countries, and a few select parts of Asia (like Korea, Japan, or Singapore), as being woefully short of technology that would prepare students for life and work in an information society. What is even more disturbing, in his view, is the lack of preparation of the educators themselves to demonstrate computer technology or the information retrieval and usage skills so necessary in today’s world. My own view is that it is easy to take a “technological fix” approach to education, but that skilled teachers have been and will continue to work in a variety of media formats to inspire and prepare their students. I do believe that much of modern society, in nearly any country one could name, fails to provide adequate incentives for dedicated teachers to progress, technologically and intellectually, over the course of a career.

This is an important book and a good read. I am glad to have discovered Castells as a commentator on the multiple complexities of our social world in the age of the Internet. At times I found it difficult to stay with the book’s extensive arguments; although they are wellreasoned and convincing, they take considerable time to unfold.

That said, this is a book I would recommend to those interested in the international growth of instructional technology. Castells’ command of global situations is detailed and extensive. The forces he has identified are producing the trends that will shape our professional and social lives in the years to come.