COMMUNICATION POWER This page intentionally left blank COMMUNICATION POWER MANUEL CASTELLS 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Manuel Castells 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Clays Ltd., St Ives Plc ISBN 978–0–19–956704–1 13579108642 To the memory of Nicos Poulantzas, my brother, theorist of power This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Figures xiii List of Tables xv Opening 1 1 Power in the Network Society 10 What is Power? 10 State and Power in the Global Age 17 Networks 19 The Global Network Society 24 The Network State 38 Power in the Networks 42 Power and Counterpower in the Network Society 47 Conclusion: Understanding Power Relationships in the Global Network Society 50 2 Communication in the Digital Age 54 A Communication Revolution? 54 Technological Convergence and the New Multimedia System: From Mass Communication to Mass Self-communication 58 The Organization and Management of Communication: Global Multimedia Business Networks 71 The Politics of Regulatory Policies 99 Cultural Change in a Globalized World 116 The Creative Audience 127 Communication in the Global Digital Age 135 3 Networks of Mind and Power 137 The Windmills of the Mind 137 Contents Emotion, Cognition, and Politics 146 Emotion and Cognition in Political Campaigns 150 The Politics of Beliefs 153 The Framing of the Mind 155 Conquering the Minds, Conquering Iraq, Conquering Washington: From Misinformation to Mystification 165 The Power of the Frame 189 4 Programming Communication Networks: Media Politics, Scandal Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy 193 Power-making by Image-making 193 The Killing (Semantic) Fields: Media Politics at Work 196 The Politics of Scandal 240 The State and Media Politics: Propaganda and Control 264 The Demise of Public Trust and the Crisis of Political Legitimacy 286 Crisis of Democracy? 295 5 Reprogramming Communication Networks: Social Movements, Insurgent Politics, and the New Public Space 299 Warming Up to Global Warming: The Environmental Movement and the New Culture of Nature 303 The Network is the Message: Global Movements against Corporate Globalization 339 Mobil-izing Resistance: Wireless Communication and Insurgent Communities of Practice 346 “Yes, We Can!” The 2008 Obama Presidential Primary Campaign 364 Reprogramming Networks, Rewiring Minds, Changing the World 412 Conclusion: Toward a Communication Theory of Power 416 Appendix 433 Bibliography 489 Index 543 viii Acknowledgments Books are usually a collective endeavor under the author’s sole responsi- bility. This one is no exception. It was born in my mind a long time ago, but it has evolved in interaction with colleagues and students from around the world, and has been shaped by the academic and social environments in which I have lived and worked since the beginning of this millennium. And so, to name the people and institutions who are the co-producers of this work is not a matter of courtesy, but of accuracy in signing the book. My first acknowledgment goes to Amelia Arsenault, my doctoral student, an outstanding research assistant, and the Wallis Annenberg Graduate Research Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. Simply put, without the intellectual quality and personal dedication of her work over the years, this book would not exist in its current form. She will go on in her academic career to become a great scholar with wonderful values as she engages in understanding the world to make it a better place. Additional support for the research on which this book is based came from the excellent research assistance of Lauren Movius, Sasha Costanza-Chock, and Sharon Fain, graduate students at the Annenberg School for Communication, and from Dr. Meritxell Roca, my collabora- tor at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona. Earlier versions of the analyses presented in this volume have been discussed and modified through interaction with my students at the Annenberg School for Communication. I wish to con- vey special thanks to the students of my research seminar Comm620: “Communication, Technology, and Power” in the spring of 2008. Specific acknowledgment of the work of several students in this and other seminars can be found in the book’s notes and references. My current research, in this book and in other works, has benefited considerably from the intellectual stimulation of my two academic homes: the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern Acknowledgments California (USC) in Los Angeles, and the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) in Barcelona. I feel deeply indebted to my colleagues in both institutions for the support and collegial- ity they have provided over the years. I particularly thank Dean Geoffrey Cowan, Dean Ernest Wilson, Director Larry Gross, and Director Patricia Riley at USC, and Rector Imma Tubella at UOC, for the wonderful personal and institutional support they have given my research since joining the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Internet Interdis- ciplinary Institute at UOC. These academic institutions are at the cutting edge of research and teaching on the global network society, and I feel proud to share their meaningful project of situating the university within the technological and intellectual conditions of the Information Age. I am also grateful to my colleagues and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT Science, Technology, and Society Program; Department of Urban Studies and Planning; and Media Lab) for their mean- ingful interaction during my regular teaching periods as a visiting professor in one of the leading scientific institutions of the world. My special thanks go to William Mitchell, Rosalind Williams, David Mindell, Larry Vale, and Malo Hutson. When I say that this book is a collective work, I mean it. It has received the most generous intellectual contribution from a number of colleagues who have read all or parts of various drafts of the manuscript, and com- mented extensively on it. I have gone through several rounds of revisions for each chapter, since each time I thought I had reached the point at which my research could be communicated, new comments and suggestions would come from colleagues willing to engage in a dialogue with me during the process of elaborating this book. I have modified my argument, updated my data, and tightened my writing as a result of these multiple interactions with colleagues from different academic institutions. I have not been able to integrate every comment, as many of them came from different perspec- tives, but I have seriously considered every single comment I received, and this has led to substantial changes in the theory and analyses presented in the book. Of course, misunderstandings and mistakes during this lengthy revision process are my exclusive responsibility. And so, I want to pub- licly express my deepest gratitude to Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Jerry Feldman, George Lakoff, Jonathan Aronson, Tom Hollihan, Peter Monge, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Ernest Wilson, Jeffrey Cole, Jonathan Taplin, Marty Kaplan, Elizabeth Garrett, Robert Entman, Lance Bennett, Frank Webster, Robin Mansell, William Dutton, Rosalind Williams, Imma Tubella, x Acknowledgments Michael Dear, Ingrid Volkmer, Geoffrey Bowker, John Thompson, Ronald Rice, James Katz, W. Russell Neuman, George Marcus, Giancarlo Bosetti, Svetlana Balmaeva, Eric Klinenberg, Emma Kiselyova, Howard Tumber, Yuezhi Zhao, René Weber, Jeffrey Juris, Jack Linchuan Qiu, Irene Castells, Robert McChesney, and Henry Jenkins. Their collegiality demonstrates that open-source co-production is actually a medieval invention that began in the university environment, and continues today as an essential practice in scientific inquiry. I am also grateful to the colleagues, students, and citizens at large who commented on my