Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)

What a better way to return to media studies after close enough to ten years than to read Manuel Castells' Communication Power (2009) in which he provides us with an overview of, what he has dubbed as, the Network Society. The Network Society is that of a techno-Marxist functioning principle, where the all-familiar divide between oppressors and the oppressed from the Marxist tradition exists in the form of inclusion/exclusion in the electric spider web that now surrounds us virtually at all corners of the world and to which we're connected through our mobile devices. As a curiosity to this, the World Bank declared on its website in 2012 that 75% of the earth inhabitants have access to a mobile phone.  What would be even more interesting to know or to calculate is the rate at which this coverage is growing on an annual basis.

Fortunately Castell's take on the labour market is more from today's world than the Marxist era's industrial time miseries. That take is more positive for those who participate in the production as self-programmable agents since they're the ones who effectively determine what is valuable, what is to be desired by us, to the rest of us. OK true, we live in a relative value economy, where commodities are exchanged for value and indeed those commodities need to be manufactured by some people. Those in generic labour do that, but they're reduced to hapless gaming chips to be spat on by global corporations whenever the advancements of digitalization has erased their work tasks excluding them from the System. Well, partially at least.

I guess you could say then that the new ruling class doesn't just own (in the sense of owning, say, a shoe factory in Britain in the Victorian times), it designs (and then it goes out to buy things and owns them). The designer of things create that relativism in the value and therefore express power over the rest of us. This power is in existence through, what Castells calls, the Network Enterprise which I see iconic companies of our times like Google and Facebook to be, as they actively direct our minds and construct the world to us.

Another bone that Castells' throws us relates to the issue of influence over audiences. According to Castells, audiences interactively partake in the production of meaning. Thus, in the digital age, the oppressor is schizophrenically also the oppressed, as we all are, first and foremost, the consumers of commodities regardless of our status in employment. The world view on offer here is nice, I like it. Simple enough to recognize and complicated enough to apply to our multi-layered realities of existence. And though we've not escaped the cruelties of the free market that Marx couldn't have even dreamt of, we can still have an impact to what meaning we give to things. Castells says that “meaning determines action so communicating meaning becomes the source of social power” and convinces me to believe there's room for improving the world through that.