Manuel Castells: End of Millennium, 2nd ed. (1998/2010)

This final volume in Manuel Castells’ trilogy, with a substantial new preface, is devoted to processes of global social change induced by the transition from the old industrial society to the emerging global network society.

* Explains why China, rather than Japan, is the economic and political actor that is revolutionizing the global system
* Reflects on the contradictions of European unification, proposing the concept of the network state
* Substantial new preface assesses the validity of the theoretical construction presented in the conclusion of the trilogy, proposing some conceptual modifications in light of the observed experience

With a New Preface
Publisher Wiley-Blackwell, 2000
Volume 3 of The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture
ISBN 1405196882, 9781405196888
488 pages

publisher
google books

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Manuel Castells: Communication Power (2009)

We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.

Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment. His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China. In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging–“mass self-communication”–politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world.

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2009
ISBN 0199567042, 9780199567041
Length 571 pages

publisher
google books

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Sarai Readers 01-07 (2001-2007)

Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers, 2007

Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversations, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half forgotten agendas. we hope our text this year sets the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the boundaries, parameters and verges of our times.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, 2006

Sarai Reader 06 uses ‘Turbulence’ as a conceptual vantage point from which to interrogate all that is in the throes of terminal crisis, and to invoke all that is as yet unborn. It seek to examine ‘turbulence’ as a global phenomenon, unbounded by the arbitrary lines that denote national and state boundaries in a ‘political’ map of the world. It wants to see areas of low and high pressure in politics, economy and culture that transcend borders, to investigate the flow of information and processes between downstream and upstream sites in societies and cultures globally.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan + Geert Lovink
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 2005

‘Bare Acts’ looks at ‘Acts’- at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of doing things in society and culture. The Reader foregrounds explorations of borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the legal regulation of sexuality and trespasses of various kinds.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi + Geert Lovink
Guest Editor: Lawrence Liang
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 04: Crisis / Media, 2004

The 2004 Reader produced by Sarai, is devoted to the dual themes of crisis reporting in the media, and the crisis within the media when it comes to the reportage of violence. Crisis pervades the times we live, and becomes palpable entity in itself. To acknowledge the pervasiveness of the crisis in our times, is also to engage with the media through which crisis, and the representation of crisis, become the ‘substance of our morning’s meditations’.

Editorial collective: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi & Awadhendra Sharan [Sarai] + Geert Lovink

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Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, 2003

“Shaping Technologies ” sets out to ratchet our engagement with the contemporary moment a notch higher, in directions that are sober, exhilarating and discomfiting, all at once. The book brings to the fore a series of situations and predicaments that mark the encounter between people and machines, between nature and culture, and between knowledge and power.

Editorial collective: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai], Geert Lovink, Marleen Stikker [Waag]

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Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, 2002

This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world.

Editors: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta

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Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, 2001

Sarai Reader 01, (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a sovereign entity that comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope of the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor.

Editors: Raqs Media Collective (Sarai) + Geert Lovink (Waag)

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Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi