End of the millennium

Author: Manuel Castells, translated by Xia Zhijiu et al.
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-09-01
Features: Regardless of how we measure time, this is indeed a transformative moment. During the last quarter of the 20th century, an information-centered technological revolution changed the way we think, produce, consume, trade, manage, communicate, live, die, wage war, and make love. A dynamic global economy has already been constructed across the planet, connecting people and activities of value worldwide, but those unrelated to dominant interests and their networks of power and wealth remain disconnected. A real virtual culture has been built around an increasingly interconnected audiovisual universe, permeating every spiritual representation and communication, integrating cultural richness through electronic hypertext. Space and time, as the material basis of human experience, have been transformed—mobile space has dominated place-based space, and timeless time has abolished clock time of the industrial era. Social expressions against the logic of informatization and globalization have been built around primal identities, forming defensive communities in the name of God, locality, race, or family. Meanwhile, attempts to establish powerful social systems like patriarchy and the nation-state will face questioning under the combined pressure of the globalization of information and wealth, and the localization of identity and legitimacy.
The first two volumes analyzed the processes of these structural changes and the fundamental transformations in macro political and social contexts they triggered, shaping and determining the global human experience and social action. This volume continues to explore this macro transformation, attempting to explain it as the result of the interaction of several processes characteristic of the information age: informatization, globalization, networking, the construction of identity, the crisis of patriarchy and the nation-state, and more. Although not all important dimensions of historical change are covered in this volume, the author believes that the trends listed and analyzed in the following chapters indeed construct a new historical landscape, whose dynamics are likely to have a lasting impact on our lives and those of future generations.
The choice to begin the analysis with the dissolution of the Soviet Union is not coincidental. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and the international communist movement it ignited were significant political and ideological phenomena of the 20th century. Communism and the Soviet Union, along with their antagonistic responses, touched the entire world and deeply influenced the century’s society and people. Yet, this vast empire and its powerful mythology collapsed within a few years, becoming an unexpected example of historical change. The author argues that the roots of this process reveal the end of an era, demonstrating the nation-state’s inability to manage the transition to the information age. The following chapter will attempt to provide the empirical basis for this assertion.