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

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William E. Connolly: Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002)

Why would a political theorist venture into the nexus between neuroscience and film? According to William Connolly — whose new book is itself an eloquent answer — the combination exposes the ubiquitous role that technique plays in thinking, ethics, and politics. By taking up recent research in neuroscience to explore the way brain activity is influenced by cultural conditions and stimuli such as film technique, Connolly is able to fashion a new perspective on our attempts to negotiate — and thrive — within a deeply pluralized society whose culture and economy continue to quicken.

In Neuropolitics Connolly draws upon recent brain/body research to explore the creative potential of thinking, the layered character of culture, the cultivation of ethical sensibilities, and the critical role of technique in all three. He then shows how a series of films — including Vertigo, Five Easy Pieces, and Citizen Kane — enhances our appreciation of technique and contests the linear image of time now prevalent in cultural theory.

Connolly deftly brings these themes together to support an ethos of deep pluralism within the democratic state and a politics of citizen activism across states. His book is an original and rigorous study that attends to the creative possibilities of thinking in identity, culture, and ethics.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2002
ISBN 081664022X, 9780816640225
218 pages

Keywords and phrases
virtual memory, apodictic, amygdala, nontheistic, Kantian, Lucretius, Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Citizen Kane, neo-Kantians, Epicurus, Antonio Damasio, cultural theory, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ilya Prigogine, Henri Bergson, Isabelle Stengers, existential, immanent, intersubjective

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The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (1987)

The impact of technology on society is clear and unmistakable. The influence of society on technology is more subtle. The 13 essays in this book draw on a wide array of case studies from cooking stoves to missile systems, from 15th­century Portugal to today’s AI labs – to outline an original research program based on a synthesis of ideas from the social studies of science and the history of technology. Together they affirm the need for a study of technology that gives equal weight to technical, social, economic, and political questions.

Edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hudges and Trevor J. Pinch
Publisher MIT Press, 1987
ISBN 0262022621, 9780262022620
419 pages

Key words and phrases: cognitivism, azo dyes, ultrasound, expert systems, Parkesine, Michel Callon, Trevor Pinch, sociology of science, gyroscope, social constructivist, consumption junction, Wiebe Bijker, Elmer Sperry, Congo red, nitrocellulose, Cape Bojador, accelerometer, turbojet, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Celluloid

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