Network society: Manuel Castells

The subject of this chapter is at once thrillingly bold and disturbingly vague. It is bold in that the prefix ‘post’ evokes the idea of a decisive break with the past and the arrival of a new age. This notion is both appealing and interesting, not least because announcements of postmodernity accord with the views of others who argue we are entering a novel Information Society. However, the subject is also disconcertingly woolly, postmodernity being hard to define with precision. The term can appear to be a series of impressionistic suggestions (with repeated pronouncements on ‘difference’, ‘discourses’, ‘irony’ and the like) and gnomic reflections of the zeitgeist . Furthermore, postmodernity seems at once to be everywhere (in architecture, in academic disciplines, in attitudes to the self) and, because the words are so imprecisely used, impossible to pin down.