Manuel Castells lecture, City University, London, 23rd October 2009

These are my notes from the lecture I attended yesterday. They certainly aren’t verbatim, but should give a sense of the argument.

This new book really focuses on the relationship between communication and power. This is a foundational issue. Power after all allows for individuals and groups to create the rules of the game. It is important to note (indeed, it is an absolute law in the social sciences) that there is no such thing as absolute power. As a result, relationships are always between power and counterpoints. Institutions are the result of struggle, conflict and negotiation, and they continue to remain unstable, even when established.

My previous work focused on the emergence of the global network society, a structure that was much more able to manage complexity. This is the most pervasive, most efficient form of social organisation. “Everything that counts is organised in global networks”. Power relationships are structured in the context of the global networked society. However, while it dealt with these matters, my previous work never really addressed the matter in full. I now want to test the hypothesis that power relationships in the network society are constructed in the communication realm.

This is the structure of my new book. Broadly, there are two sorts of power: violence and persuasion. The latter is better and more efficient. It can, for example, work through the meanings we attach to words.

It also works at the emotional level. We are told that there, essentially, six human emotions. Of these, fear is the strongest. If fear can be created, an individuals responses can be changed. Inducing emotions is a common political trick. Socialised communication has the potential to reach society at large. As a result, Republicans, for example, communicate in certain ways to maximise their advantage and create an emotional response. If you look at an issue like Iraq, there are huge misconceptions about it. We have to ask, why do people believe what they believe?

So how has this pattern been influenced by the rise of the networked society? We have entered an era of what I term “mass-self communication”. By this I mean that the internet allows individuals to publish but that what they say can reach millions of people.

Parties assume that they will win through their ideas. As Lenin said “if we have good ideas, people will follow us”. But this is not true, and scientists have proved it by using an MRI scan. People respond far more to emotion than to reason. Lakoff, for example, argues that we think metaphorically, interpreting information through our memories and life experiences. Notions of death, for example, creates a particular response, as a 2004 political experiment proved.

Therefore, you can programme communication networks, and also reprogramme them with such messages.

Journalists are part of this system. By definition, they must represent someone’s interests, as they have to sell advertising. There is the old joke about the two types of journalists: those who know they work in business, and those with with principles who are unemployed.

The media rarely talks about what matters. Instead, we are left with the personalization of politics. The simplest message you can have is a human face. People might vote for a politician because they trust them, or because they distrust their opponent. This latter motivation is more important. The most important thing to do in politics is to demonise the other. Thus the wrong-doing of an individual becomes central to a campaign.

As a result, scandal is increasingly the currency of politics. They have the power to change everything. However, the reality is more complex. They do not always hit their target:

1. People get bored with scandal.

2. Citizens start to believe the political class as a whole is bad.

This leads to the rise of anti-party politicians.

There are some special cases. Berlusconi has a huge amount of control over media and the government. Bizarrely, his popularity increases with each scandal he is involved in. However, he uses his television networks to construct an image of himself as being flawed, but not a politician. This works because newspaper readership in Italy is low and 70 per cent of the population get their news from his TV channels.

The internet does offer opportunities however. In particular, communications that start on the internet, if they get viewed enough, can appear on the mass media. There are two forms of response to this, which allow for the reprogramming of the communication network.

1. Social movements are collective actions to rewrite society’s norms and values. Classic examples would include the feminist and environmental movements. In the 80s, these movements were portrayed very badly and couldn’t gain traction. However, they then learned to communicate better, and used science and celebrities. Now all the major parties are “pale green”.

2. Insurgent collective action this takes two forms.

   1. Mobilisation. This is potent for organising, and allowing outraged people to become active. An example of this can be found in Spain in August 2004 on the days after the Madrid bombing and before the general election.

   2. Obama-style mobilisation. He was not an outsider, so it was a political project from within by a marginal figure. In particular, he gained the support of young people and fundraised online. His communication network meant you got emails from him and from your next door neighbour who supported him.

Power relationships are ultimately built in the minds of the people, and emotion is hugely important. But we now must remember that the “pipes” [the internet] are not necessarily free, and there is pressure on the net as we know it today. There are strong parallels with the early industrial period enclosure defined capitalists and workers as separate classes. Something similar could happen online, and that is why this is a critical moment.

The arguments made are interesting, but broadly, I had three problems with the position (although the caveat is that I haven’t read the book yet, which may go someway towards offsetting the issues I identity).

First, I don’t really like Castells’s terms the “mass-self media”. His argument, as I understood it, is that individuals can much more easily publish things, but the internet is potentially “mass” because millions can see the item. But this fundamentally downplays the nature of the traditional mass media – namely, that it was about shared experience and universality of content. Viral communication, no matter how successful can’t equate to this.

Second, I thought the institutional definition of the Obama campaign as an insurgency was a bit loose, given that Obama was already a fairly establishment figure when he threw his hat in the ring (Castells did partially acknowledge this by stating that it was insurgency from the inside). I think a better example of a genuine insurgency campaign would have been Dean in 2004.

Third, I would be interested to hear more about the process of reprogramming by social movements. The examples he cited were the environmental and feminist movement. Two things struck me about both these examples. While the ideas they advocated are now (more or less) acknowledged by political elites, I think it would be going to far to suggest they have been completely accepted by the public en masse. This leaves open a question about how effective communication power is at spreading through a society and also the power that forces of reaction have in the environment.

One thing I absolutely agreed with Castells with about was his last point on the nature of the internet, and in particular the idea that the relative freedom we enjoy on line now is not guaranteed.