Abstract
Sociologist Manuel Castells's sweeping 1,445-page, three-volume study, under the general title The Information Age, details the ways in which the rapid development and proliferation of information technology over the past two decades has created radically new social paradigms that call into question traditional societal structures and individuals’ relations to communal organizations as well as their personal perceptions of self. “Our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self,” Castells writes in his introduction to volume 1. “The Net,” a term covering the ever-expanding networked communication media, he defines as fluid and constantly changing, while the “Self” is in a constant search for some fixity or certainty, now that the primary markers of identity – sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial – are no longer clearly delineated or self-evident. This bipolarity between Net and Self has given rise to a condition Castells describes as “structural schizophrenia,” in which “patterns of social communication become increasingly under stress” (3).
Published Version
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