Posted inGeneralNews/Politics

The present ‘world dis-order’

Bernard Stiegler, referring to the battle for the attention of (particularly young) users of technical devices such as smartphones, writes about the ‘dis-attention’ that results from this. What he has in mind is the manner in which capitalism, not wasting any opportunity for marketing, uses these mnemo-technical devices to disrupt the flow of attention on […]

Posted inGeneralMediaTech

Technocratic culture: ‘Disconnect’

If you don’t like thinking for yourself, don’t read this post. If you prefer playing around on your mobile device or smartphone, don’t bother reading further. The phone is definitely smarter than you are if you have relinquished your own memory and thinking-ability to its functionality. But if you would like to know something more […]

Posted inMediaNews/Politics

Islamic fundamentalism in the information age

In the second volume of his monumental three-volume study on the information age titled The Power of Identity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Manuel Castells addresses (as the book’s title indicates) the different ways in which a sense of collective identity is configured at a time when the so-called “network society” has emerged, concomitantly with the global communication-technological […]

Posted inGeneral

The ‘space of flows’ and the social elites of today

In Manuel Castells’s influential book, The Rise of the Network Society (Second edition, 2010, Chapter 6), he devotes a very revealing discussion to what he describes as the dominant spatial form of the network society, namely the “space of flows”. In his theorisation of the novel, now dominant spatial mode – the “space of flows” […]

Posted inGeneral

Tracking the aftermath of the financial crisis

In Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (Oxford, 2012), Manuel Castells, Joôa CaraÇa, Gustavo Cardoso (editors) and a number of colleagues from the social sciences set out to provide some insight into the financial/economic crisis that flared up in 2008 (and has still not run its course). More than that, as the title of […]