Manuel Castells: Politics and Power in the Network Society

Manuel Castells: Politics and Power in the Network Society

LSE Miliband Public Lecture, London, 18 March 2004

Tom Ogg

For a seasoned sociologist, this was a treat. I sat next to a professor who had travelled from Nottingham University to hear the man speak. For those relatively new to sociology, as I was, there could be no better introduction. Castells has penned twenty books, and over a hundred academic articles, and he advises dozens of international organisations and national governments and universities worldwide.

He apologised for going over the basics, but I was understandably happy. A society, he said, is merely its values and institutions. Power is the structural capacity to impose one's will, and politics is the process of determining where power lies and governs its exercise. However, politics is culturally specific; it is affected by society, technology, the economy, traditions and conventions. Castells' thesis revolves around the effect of the 'rise of the network society' upon politics and power and the 'crisis of informational politics'.

The first of two trends important in understanding the Network Society is a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy, caused by a lack of trust in the political class. According to survey evidence, politicians are consistently seen as the least trusted professional class by the public. In Italy politicians have no prestige, as even the prostitutes and Mafiosi are trusted more! Californians have turned to the Terminator to destroy the political class, because 39% of the public view politicians as 'crooks'.

Voter turnout is declining worldwide. Only half of Americans eligible to vote can be bothered even in presidential elections. It takes a destructive geopolitical event like the Madrid bombing to get 79% of Spain to vote. When people do vote, their vote is negative; against the ruling party (or perhaps still against the Tories), rather for anyone offering something positive. Protest votes, most obviously with Le Pen of France, are appallingly widespread. Finally, parties are empty shells - professional elites with no significant membership or strong personal links to society. Overall, the general trend is that the younger the voter, the greater the dissatisfaction.

Even PY Gerbeau recognises the French regional election results as votes either against reforms altogether, or against the timidity of the reform process undertaken so far. Micheal Portillo recently analysed the problem of trust as one inherent in party politics. Individuals within political parties must compromise - agree to agree, and this leads to the intuition that all politicians are 'liars'. He regards ITV's new reality TV show with scorn (which aims to produce a 'politician idol' to run in the 2005 election) because for individuals it is undemanding, no difficult compromises are necessary.

The second significant trend (decribed by Robert Putnam) is individualisation, increasing social mobility and a decline in political involvement from general society. Traditional forms of socialisation and their relation to politics, most obviously in trade unions, have largely disappeared. The rise of NGOs, which Castells calls neo-governmental organisations due to significant funding by the state (if indirect), has also meant a transfer of moral authority. This amounts to a growing gap between citizens and the political process. This is not the end of ideology, he told us, it is rather the end of trust.


Castells identifies two spheres of explanations for these shifts - changes in the nation state (including relationships between nation states) and changes in the media. The first is what he calls the crisis of the nation state. Globalisation has meant that the only remaining sovereign state is the United States of America. Whilst it is true that neo-liberal/radical prophecies of the extensive erosion of the state seem so far to be wrong, there are many new constraints upon actions of the nation state. Financial flows, internet communications, oil dependency, transnational criminals and scientists of all varieties, interdependence and a global division of labour all lessen the power on individual nation states to act.
In reaction to this, we seem to have become more, albeit differently, nationalistic, appealing to our ethnic and regional identities as the meaning of being British, or French becomes increasingly contestable. He tells us surveys in Europe and America show when asked 38% identify with the nation state, whilst 48% cite their regional identity. The nation state nonetheless adapts. Decentralisation, regionalisation, and devolution (eg to Scotland and the Basque region of Spain) all aim to bring power closer to the people.

Conversely, supranational institutions like the EU, and international organisations like the UN and WTO aim to bring under control the negative effects of globalisation. This form of networking, its institutionalisation (hence continuation) has made networking more effective. The dialogue such networking entails, it would seem, held the world in relative peace after WW2 and oversaw the historic rapprochement of France and Germany. The problem, he says, is the difficulty of representation. The protesters in Atlanta yelled 'no globalisation without representation' - but as Manuel pointed out, there is representation; the problem is it very indirect, and individuals no longer feel in control.

Politics is now 'defined within the media space - a new public space'. The reality is, as he put it, 'it's a binary model; you must be in the media to be in politics… you must influence it'. This creates problems, for whilst 'neither Berlusconi nor Murdoch dictates everything' they can influence minds and votes. People read the media headlines about a party programme, rather than the manifestos themselves (although Labour was not helped 2001 with the Prescott punch on the same day as their manifesto launch). Politicians now must ask themselves, 'What is a credible message to translate through the media?' Hence the media acts as a powerful filter to the public.

Today's media is couched in negative terms. The personalisation of politics and the shift towards credibility being founded in personality has made the politics of scandal more significant. It seems JS Mill's 'eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship' has had an effect. Negative advertising is apparently 5% more effective than other current forms of ads in the US. I felt there was a problem with this statistic. This statistic must surely have assumed that policies are equally valuable in order to extract this figure - surely the better the idea, the more effective the 'positive' ad?

The media is 'predicated on the destruction of everything', and 'yet they accuse each other of being negative'. Tragically, in my opinion, he diagnoses that 'ultimately, discourse based on principles becomes unreliable and is seen as absurd'. Democracy becomes a 'defensive principle' whereby all you demand from it is that if you hear a knock at 5am, you expect it to be the milkman! Peace and independence, are seen as satisfactory, and nothing more.

This is the situation we find ourselves in today, according to Castells. The Network Society, where we are heading, is where everything is organised by electronic networks. This has made society more binary, as is the nature of digital information; you are either in or you are out of a network, with very little scope for ambiguity. The nature of power is then redefined. The question becomes, who decides who is excluded? Is it easier or less easy to exclude people? Does this changing nature of communication and networking widen the potential numbers of an elite, or close it off to society more than before?

Castells left many of these questions unanswered in his lecture (it is work in progress), but already he provides a basic analysis leading to some interesting questions. Digital networks have the key asset of increasing the autonomy of communication. Hence the nature of power changes because the power of the network is important to politics.

There are two sources of power in the Network Society. The first is the ability to change the aims of the network. The question I think he was posing is, for instance, whether the Network Society is more efficient and achieving its goals, and so the power at the centre of the network is augmented (alternatively, due to easier networking does decision making become less centralised?). Broadly, he is asking how the digitalised society changes the powers of influencing decisions, and hence politics.

The kind of questions he was asking refers also to culture wars. Does the easier communication allowed by the internet change the influence it is possible to exert on politicians or other decisions makers? For instance, is it increased because more individuals are being able to contribute to a debate, or is the force of any argument put forward is devalued by the plurality of sources of arguments? openDemocracy.net, for instance, allows a greater pool of experts to contribute, giving some fascinating viewpoints, but also there are so many articles- to what extent do we need a filter (as of old imposed by technological constraints leading to oligopoly?).

The second source of power is the switchers, the links between the networks of people. Isolated networks are fragile, whereas being connected is a form of power. Again, I have tried to interpret the significance of this. Belonging to more than one network has clearly always been useful, but in the Network Society, due to the binary nature of exclusion, and the fact that it is easier to exclude, does inclusion gives more power than it did? Yet with electronic communication isn't it easier to join a network (group emails etc), so inclusion is in fact devalued?

I'm a member of almost all the political groups at university, without necessarily going to all of the meetings, and this is possible through electronic means. So do people have more opportunities to be switchers? Is that how we should interpret the power shift? So power lies with switchers, there is more scope for switchers, and hence power is less exclusive than before? Is this an example of the Network Society re-grassing rooting politics?

Castells certainly argues the digital revolution is grass rooting politics again. His clearest example was the protests after the Madrid bombings. Despite it being a 'day of reflection' (and so protests were banned), young people in particular used text messages and the internet to organise a demonstration numbering in the tens of thousands. SMS traffic was up some 20-40% over the protest and bombing period, and youth participation in the election was at record levels. This surely is an example of the Network Society making inclusion much easier, and showing that networks can be much wider.

Communication can only be a good thing, right? My concern is that so far, the network society has not seemed to solve many of the problems outlined above. Electronic communication seems to make politicians seem more remote- there is still no connection between politics where power is brokered, and the Network Society itself. We can be optimistic however, that perhaps the Network Society has the capacity to achieve this. Castells raises many interesting questions, some of which I have tried to highlight here, though I feel this is an idea that has many more features to be worked out.