ABSTRACT
Manuel Castells published a three-volume study, The Information Age, between 1996 and 1998 which has enormously influenced the thinking of contemporary social scientists. The culmination of twenty-five years of research, and written under conditions of life-threatening cancer, The Information Age is a magnum opus. As a result Castells became recognised as the leading living thinker on the character of contemporary society, appearing on television to outline his views and being profiled in newspapers as far apart as the Wall Street Journal, the New Statesman and the Guardian. Castells’s trilogy, some 1200 pages, stands as the most encyclopedic and developed analysis of the role of information in the present period. It is among the most important accounts of the character of contemporary civilisation to have emerged since at least Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), a study which Castells exceeds in scale and scope. Indeed, publication of The Information Age led some commentators to rank Castells alongside the likes of Karl Marx, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. I share this estimation, convinced that Castells’s work is the most illuminating, imaginative and intellectually rigorous account of the major features and dynamics of the world today. Anyone attempting to examine the role and character of information – this necessarily involves endeavouring to understand the mainsprings of social life – and how this is implicated with change and the acceleration of change itself, must come to terms with the work of Manuel Castells.
