2005b) ‘The Message is the Medium An Interview with.pdfVIP

INTERVIEW The message is the medium An interview with Manuel Castells ■ Terhi Rantanen Editor, Global Media and Communication and London School of Economics and Political Science Manuel Castells Oliván is widely considered the leading analyst of the information age. He is thus in high demand by universities, international organizations, governments, colleagues, students, journalists, biographers, and, of course, by Global Media and Communication. Castells receives about 1000 invitations per year (Ince, 2003: 20), accepts in fact only about 20 of them, gives on average one media interview per month, usually online, and one keynote speech a month somewhere in the world (Annenberg Agenda, 2003: 12). He has given more than 300 papers in 43 countries (Webster and Dimitriou, 2004). When not globetrotting he now divides his time primarily between two cities in two continents. In Los Angeles he holds the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, and in Barcelona the Research Professorship at the Open University of Catalonia [/]. Castells is sole author of 23 books and editor or co-author of 15 more, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His magnum opus, the trilogy, The Information Age (1996–8), has been compared to the work of Karl Marx and Max Weber and took him 15 years to research, from 1983 to 1998, the last five years in a race against cancer. Castells is now recovered and the book is in its second edition and has been translated into 20 languages. His most recent books are The Internet Galaxy (Castells, 2001), which has now been translated into 15 languages; The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model (Castells and Himane