A Time(s), space(s) and communication in Castells’s ‘Network Society’*
- Manuel Castells,
- networks of electronically mediated communication,
- networks undergirding economic exchanges worldwide,
- space of places,
- the space of flows
- architectural,
- spatiality,
- social interaction,
- communication technologies,
- simultaneity, regardless of physical distance,
- timeless time,
- instantaneous financial,
- evolutionary ‘glacial time,
- network society ...More
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- Submited: October 15, 2022
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Published: October 17, 2022
Abstract
In ‘The Rise of the Network Society’ (2010), Manuel Castells elaborates on what today is common
knowledge, namely the notion of a society that is characterised both by networks of electronically
mediated communication and by networks undergirding economic exchanges worldwide. In
this article, I explore a dissonance issuing from a feature of the network society, namely what
Castells calls the ‘transformation of space and time in the human experience’. In this context,
he distinguishes between ‘the space of places’ and ‘the space of flows’, with the former referring
to the historically familiar sense of space as a material precondition of social interaction and
of architectural modulation into ‘place’, and the latter to a novel form of spatiality, one that is
related to social interaction that has been fundamentally modified by advanced communication
technologies and is characterised by simultaneity, regardless of physical distance. This, in turn,
is related to what Castells labels ‘timeless time’, which is noticeable where customary time
sequences are blurred in certain contemporary practices, such as virtually instantaneous financial
transactions, ‘instant wars’ and virtual communication. This contrasts with both ordinary, ‘human’
time and also with evolutionary ‘glacial time’ – a notion operative in the ecological movement
and one that increasingly clashes with the demands of ‘timeless time’ in the network society. The
article reconstructs Castells’s comprehensive vision and points to the relevance of the conflict
between these respective notions of space and time for contemporary communication practices.
It also engages critically with the social implications of the dominant modes of space and time.
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