prologuethenetandtheself.docVIP

Prologue: the Net and the Self by Manuel Castells Do you think me a learned, well-read man?“ ?Certainly,“ replied Zi-gong. Arent you? Not at all,“ said Confucius. I have simply grasped one thread which links up the rest. Sima Qian, Confucius Toward the end of the second millennium of the Christian era several events of historical significance transformed the social landscape of human life. A technological revolution, centered around information technologies, began to reshape, at accelerated pace, the material basis of society. Economies throughout the world have become globally interdependent, introducing a new form of relationship between economy, state, and society, in a system of variable geometry. The collapse of Soviet statism, and the subsequent demise of the international communist movement, has undermined for the time being the historical challenge to capitalism, rescued the political left (and Marxian theory) from the fatal attraction of Marxism-Leninism, brought the Cold War to an end, reduced the risk of nuclear holocaust, and fundamentally altered global geopolitics. Capitalism itself has undergone a process of profound restructuring, characterized by greater flexibility in management; decentralization and networking of firms both internally and in their relationships to other firms; considerable empowering of capital vis-à-vis labor, with the concomitant decline in influence of the labor movement; increasing individualization and diversification of 2 working relationships; massive incorporation of women into the paid labor force, usually under discriminatory conditions; intervention of the state to deregulate markets selectively, and to undo the welfare state, with different intensity and orientations depending upon the nature of political forces and institutions in each society; stepped-UP global economic competition in a context of increasing geographic and cultural differentiation of settings for capital accumulation and management. As