Manuel Castells: Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009.

Abstract

Manuel Castells is known for his extensive work.He is among other things the author of The Internet Galaxy (2001) and The Rise of The Network Society (1996).With his new and latest Communication Power (2009), he focuses his attention on communication as power and guides us on a tour de force through landscapes of international politics, mass communication, media convergence, neural networks, war, rhetoric and social movements.Politics is a central theme through the whole book.With an enormous overview, he merges complex fields and creates new perspectives, and his dissertation builds on comprehensive material consisting of quantitative and qualitative research.He alternates between the individual and the social, the local and the global.He moves between grand theory and analyses of specific cases.Thus, the book is not a theoretical presentation for the sake of theory; the theories are primarily a way of qualifying the perspective in terms of reality.Castells shows us how communication in and between networks creates the possibilities of power: the possibilities for the states to execute the monopoly of violence, the possibilities for the organisations to promote economic and political interests, the possibilities for the citizens to challenge established structures.Relations of power fluctuate in different networks, but exclusion from the network is a fundamental mode of power that saturates them all.Persons, groups or nations can be excluded from some networks and included in others, but the central networks are global, and the tendency is that the valuable global is included and the invaluable local is excluded.Castells provides us with concepts that can help us understand how power in the network society is executed.Switchers are social