ABSTRACT
The analysis of new media has become a central preoccupation within social theory. This has a number of reasons, not least because of the centrality of the metaphor of the network in seeking to characterize the modern post-industrial or knowledge society. If, as John Urry (2000: 33-7) has argued, networks are less vertical structures than they are different points of interconnection between people, objects and institutions, then such features would seem to have profound implications for how we understand society. Technological networks are best represented as flows across borders. In these terms, globalization is more about different levels of interconnection than a dominant world region seeking to impose its way of life upon others. The development of mobile phones, the Internet, multi-channel television and other features would seemingly weaken the power of vertical institutions to organize our identities. In a world of relatively fluid global networks, this potentially unfixes the task of making human identity from particular locations and places. Manuel Castells (2006: 14-17) argues that the network has helped to institute a new global social structure which he calls informationalism. Informationalism is a new form of capitalism where the main source of productivity is the application of knowledge. If industrialism was geared towards economic growth, informationalism, it can be argued, relies on both technological development and the development of knowledge. Castells argues that, since the 1980s, capitalism has restructured itself via the Information Revolution to allow for the emergence of a genuinely interdependent economy. In this respect, the Internet is to the knowledge economy what the factory system was to the Industrial Revolution. If, since the 1980s, states all over the world have deregulated their economies and increasingly privatized the public realm, they have done so to aid the introduction of a technological economy that is capable of interconnecting different world regions simultaneously. The virtual economy has promoted intensified global levels of interconnection while, at the same time, enhancing patterns of global exclusion. The new knowledge economy is not based on the idea of a mass society or concerns about information shortage but, rather, operates in a new paradigm where media messages and products become increasingly customized for the intended consumers. The development of new markets in television, proliferation of interactive websites and other features does not, of course, imply a loss of control by media corporations. However, the rise of digital
interactive media has helped to promote more horizontal forms of communication linking the global to the local. The rapid development of blog sites, MySpace and, of course, mobile phones has had a dramatic effect on the construction of popular culture and experience (Castells 2007).
