ABSTRACT
The term Information Society is now used in the policy arena – for instance in European Commission documents – more as a mantra to justify whatever policy is proposed than as a substantive analysis. It is clear that human social development has been, from a very early stage, in part dependent upon the development of technologies and institutions of social communication which break out spatially and temporarily from face-to-face interpersonal communication based upon speech and gesture. The general structure of Manuel Castells argument is clear. It derives from the classic tradition of political economy and deploys both an expressive totality and base/ superstructure model to explain the relationship between changes in the mode of production and changes in society at large, particularly culture and politics. Finally, most ambitiously, but also most problematically, Manuel Castells proposes an alternative explanation of the effect of the informational mode of development on culture and politics that is both more systemic and more direct.
