Social Science Literature Best Translation Library: The End of a Millennium

Author: Manuel Castells
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 love. A dynamic global economy has already been constructed across the planet, connecting people and activities with value or price, 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 form of 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 dominates local space, and timeless time eliminates clock time of the industrial era. Social expressions against the logic of informatization and globalization, centered around primal identities, have formed defensive communities in the name of God, locality, race, or family. Meanwhile, attempts to establish powerful social systems like patriarchy and nation-states will face questioning under the pressure of the globalization of information and wealth, combined with 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 created, 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 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 start the analysis with the dissolution of the Soviet Union is not accidental. 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 profoundly influenced society and people throughout the century. Yet, this vast empire and its powerful myths collapsed in just 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. This chapter will attempt to provide the empirical basis for this assertion.