ABSTRACT
Manuel Castells published a three-volume study, The Information Age, between 1996 and 1998, that has enormously influenced the thinking of contemporary social scientists. The culmination of twenty-five years of research, The Information Age is a magnum opus. Reprinted many times over, with revised editions quickly following the original, the trilogy has been translated into over twenty languages. Castells has become recognised as the leading living thinker on the character of contemporary society, appearing on television to outline his views and being profiled in newspapers. Castells’s trilogy, over one thousand pages long, stands as the most encyclopedic and developed analysis of the role of information in the present period. 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. There is no better place to begin that task than with the Information Age trilogy.
