So far I have enjoyed Castells take on “Informationalism”, that technological paradigm shift from industrialism occurring over the last quarter of the twentieth century. Castell seems to address the question posed in some of our earlier reading regarding whether we are experiencing a technical revolution or evolution.

Castells declares that networks have always been with us but have become the most efficient organizational form as a result of three major features of networks that benefited from the new technological environment:
flexibility
scalability
survivability

Castells evaluates the proposition that even genetic engineering is an information and communication technology like digital electronics.

I really found the section on the Rise of the Network Society most interesting as he explored what he describes as the three processes leading up to this new social structure along with the cultural, political, and economic influences associated with the informationalism transformation.

Castells discussions on Space of Flows and Timeless Time left me scratching my head.

Alstyne and Bulkley present their hypothesis, in chapter 6, on informations influence on productivity and how it influences business at the micro level.

The Say and Castells essay on “The Internet and the Political Process” is as far as I have managed to get but it peaked my interest enough to get the most recent report by Pew Internet Media Sources. In their report published Jan. 2008 shows that the proportion of Americans who rely on traditional news sources for information about the
campaign has remained static or declined slightly since the last presidential campaign
while the proportion of Americans who say they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet has almost doubled since 2004 from 13% to 24%.

The quintessential example of a completely top-down mindset toward governing a country is soviet Russia. Whether or not a certain item was or wasn’t selling didn’t matter, the same quantity of the item would still be produced. The government supposed the experts would have to govern the stupid; people were atoms wandering around mindlessly and couldn’t possibly govern themselves. Thus, no feedback loop existed to track anything; instead, everything was calculated (for example, number of toothbrushes needed would be figured by total number of people and average life span of tooth brush, and so on).

The industrial era developed a mindset of hierarchy. With hierarchy comes the ‘knowledge equals power’. The Network Society uses the term informational to refer to the type of “society built around microelectronic-based information technologies.” Castells later says, strictly speaking, instead of informational we should label it “electronic informational-communicationalism.” Finally stating ‘oh forget informationalism, we should call it the network society’. He brings us here slowly as it is a huge change in mindset – bearing the connections between information as more important than the information itself (and he hits upon an incredible number of interesting points on the way, especially the redefinition of space and time).

Ant colonies are created by the local interactions of little dumb things. These interactions create one bit smart thing. The simplest of local rules can give birth to a complex global system. You can completely and utterly understand the individual parts of a system. Putting these parts together will create a system that behaves in a completely unexpected way. A hypothesis cannot be created to judge the outcome – you just have to watch the outcome occur as the little dumb things interact. The outcome is always an elegant display of self organization. Thus, I anticipate this society fully coming into fruition considerably.

(A jump to the politics). The most blatant example of an internet-organized stand against something was set up by “Anonymous,” protesting scientology. It was a worldwide affair. Ron Paul is an example of grassroots politics at its finest. He didn’t attempt to lead his internet campaign in this way Howard Dean did. A lot of it was brought about purely by fans, like the idea of money bombs. Fandom really got his internet presence rolling.

http://www.therule.net is an example of a website that displays information in a purely relative form to make a point – no point of reference or numbers or statistic. I believe this is an example of something created by a mindset of a Network Society citizen– completely ignoring any sort of statistic or base point of reference outside of an interrelated-web displayed.

When looking at Castells talk about networks and their structures, it was media that stook out in my mind on and it’s use within networks. I mean look at how media use to be distributed to both alert and educate society about the news in the world. We had and still do have newspapers, radio, film, television, art and last but not least, the Internet. Now where most of the others saw the rest of the list as viable tools that could and did affect such things, as politics, the Internet was not one of them. Now where that is a point that I think could be argued, Sey and Castells point out that it wasn’t really until Howard Dean that a politician used the internet as a network to help try to further his political work.

During the 2003 presidential campaigns, the Internet was not viewed as the same source of media as say a newspaper or television. This is based upon, from what I hope I’m understanding correctly from the chapter, is that through political process, that media was the tool in which to inform the masses, and that the internet was only viewed as tool for the individual. Politicians saw it as a place where one might voice a single opinion or look up a piece of information. This was far from the truth though, and Howard Dean was the first to try betting on it.

Dean used the Internet as whole new source of media. We have to remember that this is was right around the time that certain sites like Myspace and Facebook were just starting out and at least 2 years before Youtube. That didn’t make it any less of a network tool for Dean. He got to his audience. Thanks to the people, they used sites like Meetup.com and blogs to get Dean’s political agenda to out there to the masses, and in many ways it worked. Maybe it didn’t help him win, but at least it showed that Internet was definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Now 4 and ½ years later, the Internet has become a huge tool being used for politics and by politicians. People can now watch the debates through the access of the Internet instead of having to be at home. Politicians are now also connecting with others buy managing accounts on social networks like Myspace to try to get in-touch with the younger generations knowing that many of them don’t follow the older methods of medium. Why should they watch TV or read a Newspaper when they can get all of the same information from the Internet via their computer. Even new video sites like Youtube have become sources of interactivity between politicians and the people they are trying to reach.

The internet is especially helpful today given the fact that if anyone missed anything like a speech or debate by politicians, especially the current presidential candidates, people can just jump on-line and catch up with everything that they might have missed thus showing just how networked society has become thanks to the internet. With that in mind, I really wonder how Howard Dean’s campaign might have faired differently if he had the many different social networks and advances in technology that we now back in 2003.

Castells’s collection of essays seems to imply that, while society gets a lot of satisfaction from being networked, the network society hasn’t quite come through on its potential.

Chapter one explains that “networks became the most efficient organizational form as a result of three major features of networks that benefited from the new technological environment: flexibility, scalability, and survivability.” Sounds great, sign us up to be networked.

Chapter 15 demonstrates that these networks create the three factors for global justice movements: global, informational and networked. But all this seems to accomplish is getting information out to people in order to streamline protests. Bring rocks or don’t bring rocks, wear white t-shirts and jeans, or set up your own protest in your area. The “glocal” aspect is new(ish) but nothing we didn’t have before the Internet (people showed up to rally behind or spit on GIs coming back from Vietnam without broadband connections.) So is this really changing anything?

According to chapter 16, the answer is no. A few politicians made their mark with online campaigns, but still ultimately failed. This year’s elections are all over the Internet, but it’s more a symptom of our evolution into an Internet dependent society than an act of any party jumping out on the electronic ledge. We aren’t using networks to vote, still have to run down to some horrible elementary school for that. Politicians aren’t throwing their records online for all to see, we depend on civilians, pundits and journalists for that. What has really changed?

I’m sure there is deeper meaning in this collection, but I failed to make any serious connections. It just came across to me that all this potential of networking societies and culture to make our planet more connected fell a little flat.

In “The Hacker Ethic as the Culture of the Information Age,” Himanen’s outline of the informational economy resonates clearly with my experience at a large consulting firm, where I have worked for over two years. The notions of project-based work, emphasis on innovation, fostering the creative impulse, shared ideas, importance of collaboration, openness, self-management, and flexible work schedules — these all ring true in my experience, even the noted difficulty in balancing work and family life. The firm has tailored programs, training classes, and/or policies developed around many of the concepts Himanen documented. As a result, I love working for the company because I have never felt like a worker bee, even when I started at an entry level position. A management philosophy that seems to value and validate the individualism of each and every employee simply makes employees WANT to put in more hours and more effort. From the employer’s point of view, this must be an added advantage of the hacker ethic. A happy employee means a happy client, and a happy client means increased revenue. As just another worker bee in the hive, how easy is it to slack off? (Reference: the movie Office Space.)

In today’s work culture, there is not a sense of duty that Himanen identifies with the Protestant ethic. The hacker ethic is defined by the qualities I have just listed, namely “innovation for the sake of innovation” (Castells 40) and the notion that playing is producing. “The new culture is not made of content but of process” (Castells 39).
I found it helpful to associate the two contrasting ethics with the Baby Boomer generation and the Millennial generation (a.k.a. Twixters, Gen Y). Many cultural critics and staff trainers have noted the stark generational differences in the work place specifically, noting that Millennials need creative breathing room, while Baby Boomers just want to know what to do and how to do it. There is an assumption that not all playing will be valuable — some of it might be a waste of time, but “oh well.” And this leads into one question I have: in this ideal culture, where nobody makes mistakes because even dead-end ideas are considered productive, there are no stupid questions, there are no wrong answers… I wonder if something is lost in never receiving honest, even brutal feedback? To safeguard against free-ranging ignorance, don’t we need a system of checks and balances that the network just doesn’t provide for? Truthfully, not everyone is capable of constructive innovation. (If I accept all innovation is productive, then I do not accept that all innovation is constructive.) Rheingold’s notion of Reputation is perhaps the answer to my question, but in a work culture, reputation is carefully woven into a web of office politics and the ultimate goal of impressing only the people who matter (those who make salary decisions). Himanen notes that “the informational age is at least as money-centered as the industrial age” (428), but continues on to warn “Money centered-ness leads to the closing off of information” and ultimately innovation (429). The tension implied here is very real, and as a knowledge worker in today’s corporate environment, I have felt it. A tenet of Jeffrey Juris is relevant: “networking logic is an ideal type” contextualized “in dynamic tension with competing logics … and a complex cultural politics of networking” (342).

Anyhow .. the long and (actually the very short) of what I wrote was:
a) there are those who are excluded from our network society. How do they get to create value in a material sense or debate about value using network technologies, which are increasingly THE way it seems to do both. Are they doomed to labour in an industrial model – while others (hackers) run ahead, innovate, create wealth and barter ideologies?

b) As we communicate and negotiate our beleifs and cultures .. are we crossing over from fragmentation to convergence or at least to peacful co-existance & mutual modifications?
Or is this the tower of Babel with the social structure of globalization in basic conflict with the local identities & value systems.

c)What change in the political process can we see afforded by these technologies since Howeard Dean first ventured to use the internet as something more than an electronic brochure? (I am quite curious to see how this election campaign is different in this regard)

d)Are global justice activists (whose goal is not recruitment but horizontal connectedness:communication and co-operation) creating a model of citizenship in the network society that goes beyond the paradigm of polarized power centers and communes of dissenters

“grassroots, networkbased movements can be viewed as democratic laboratories, generating the political norms and forms most appropriate for the information age” pg 357

f)Castells casting of the network society as one that values communication and negotiation and where unimpeded flow of information is paramount .. sounds like a compelling ideal .. but possibly also a little utopian in that while it motivates and shapes behavior, it might not be attainable.

But it is a theory that can truly ground all the varied uses and aspects of our networked society and therefore it could be quite useful as a way to study connections or traffic between different groups, activities and agendas