The Impact Of It Within Economy
A Throughout history the pursuit for control of various factors that determined our lives has lead to fundamental evolutions in society. Castells ‘Network Society’ has emerged out of this pursuit. Throughout this essay I will clearly define Castells Network Society in an attempt to show how Capitalism search for control has lead to the emergence and dominance of the Network Society.
Capitalism is based on ownership of factors of production by individuals. Ownership of these factors of production means possessing control of them. The various factors of the ‘Network Society’ facilitate this control. To understand the network society we have to critically examine the elements that it consists of and how it places power in the hand of the capitalist.
With the markets becoming more competitive and the consumer becomes the controller. This ambition to satisfy the consumer’s needs are dependent on knowledge about the consumer and the ability to process this information fast enough to gain competitive edge. Information since has been transformed into an essential factor of production. Castells, goes as far as to regard this as a whole new system whereby Information and not capital is the ultimate controlling factor. He calls it ‘Informationalism’ (Castells 1996: pp 18 – 19).
Like the human body’s blood being essential for survival so to is the ‘network society’ dependent on information. Castells argues that new communication technologies have resulted in information fundamental in the economy. It could however be argued that the demand for information has resulted in the development of new technologies to facilitate the demand.
Demand is the key feature of the information that fuels the network society. According to Shiv Sisvanathan (2001) Castells does not consider the politics of knowledge in his network society (Shiv Sisvanathan 2001: pp 5) Castells neglects the factor that knowledge goes beyond information...
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