On Thursday (9th July) I attended an LSE public lecture given by legendary sociologist Manuel Castells, and chaired by Robin Mansell, LSE chair of New Media and the internet. The lecture focused on Castells new book, titled “communication power”, which Castells has worked on for the last 8 years building on his earlier work on the network society, media and the internet, bringing in ideas of power relationships and extending them to networks.

Castells seems to dip a toe in just about everything nowadays, from his discussion of power relationships he talks of how power shapes societies through the dynamics of social change and resistance, in describing the politics of conflict and reconciliation he talks about the progression from place-power, through globalisation- and ICT- power to his current thesis on communication power. More esoterically perhaps he also brings in work on neuroscience and cognitive psychology in order to anchor the method by which emotion plays a key role in socio-political decision making.

In thinking about power Castells delineates two approaches to using power for social control: the capcity to use violence against the body, and the capacity to use violence against the mind. The second of these is, accoridng to Castells, the decisive form of power, and it is from this seed that the rest of his lecture derives. In thinking about this form of power, communication power, the power to affect peoples minds, Castells describes fours key stages in the transformation of communication in the digital age:

1) Organisational transformation: The transformation of media to the current multi-media business model represents the heart of the system. These mulit-nationals have an incredible level of resources, capital and power but are also decentralised to fit into the diverse world that they inform.

2) Technological transformation: The digitalisation of communication, through elements such as internet and wireless has led to the rise in mass-communication, including mass-self-communication moving the communication paradigm from one to many, to many to many. Technological transformations have led to the increasing abundance of horizontal networks of communication, which puts an interesting spin the relationship between 1 and 2.

3) Cultural Transformation: The audience has developed out of being a passive object, content to receive information, to intervening in the relationship with the media. Which leads to:

4) The New Creative Audience: An audience which creates and controls what it wants to see through interaction with the mass-media system.

Castells then goes on to develop a theory of how media constructs meaning in peoples minds, transforming ‘media politics’ to ‘communication politics’ which uses factors such as the personalisation of politics (character of leader, emotional aspects) to the emotional politics of trust and scandal  to fuel the societal perception of events through media. Castells suggests that this ‘crisis of legitimacy’ had previously damaged the reputation of politics, but that the reprogramming of media and introducing new-media, such as that seen the Obama election campaign, introduced new values to the media mix, and enhanced the uptake of the messages that entered the media network from that camp. Castells shows in his depiction of the production of new media, by the autonomy of mass-communiction how important it is for social movements, insurgent politics and spontaneous political communities of practice. In doing this, the power of trust reigns, small networks of messages mean that recipients alway know, and hence trust the person sending them information. Thus the Obama campaign took the premise of grassroots community building into the age of the internet.

In suggesting that all this supports a theory of power and counter-power in the network society. Communication networks are critical to Castells because they define the real-world networks of people through persuasion. Finally he identifies 4 forms of power:

1) Networking power: the power of inclusion and exclusion from a network.

2) Network power: Whoever sets the standards/rules has power over those usign the network.

3) Net-work power: Some actors (nodes) work harder than others and have more connections and more scope to impose their opinion, but under the constraints of network power).

4) Network-making power: People (although more usually networks of people) who can program the creation and joining of networks in order to augment information sharing.

For Castells network-making power is the key element, and focuses not only on ‘programming the network’ – making networks happen but also, fundamentally, on switching. Switchers are people who can switch between different networks, poltical networks, media networks, cultural and industrial networks etc, and in doing so hold huge amounts of power towards access. Thus, he says the old politics of centralised power are gone because even the most power people in a network need partnership with others in other networks to fully exploit their situation.

Castells ends by saying that communcations in general, particularly new-media and creative audiences have a huge, huge potential power to construct visions of life and society within the mind.

LSE expect to put a transcript and podcast of the lecture online here.