ABSTRACT
Theorising the Shift towards the Information Age receives its most sophisticated and highly developed articulation in the work of Manuel Castells, who has been writing on the issue for several decades. Fundamentally, Castells is interested in understanding the shift from one mode of capitalist production and development to another. In An Introduction to the Information Age, Castells offers an overview of the defining characteristics of the Information Age and the main lines of his argument. The reading is excerpted from a Castells speech first reproduced in the urban studies journal City. It is an economy in which sources of productivity and competitiveness for firms, regions, countries depend, more than ever, on knowledge, information, and the technology of their processing, including the technology of management, and the management of technology. This is not the same as a service economy. The global economy reaches out to the whole planet, but it is not planetary, it does not include the whole planet.
