Manuel Castells quotes - page 2

Manuel Castells is a Spanish sociologist, widely recognized for his research on the information society, communication, and globalization. His influential works, such as "The Rise of the Network Society," have shaped the study of how technology transforms economies and cultures. He remains a leading figure in contemporary social theory and urban sociology. Here are 58 of his quotes:

"The city" is not a framework but a social practice in constant flux the more it becomes an issue, the more it is a source of contradictions and the more its social manipulation is linked to the ensemble of social and political conflicts.

Manuel Castells

Cultures are not made from free-floating values. They are rooted in institutions and organizations.

Manuel Castells

The Internet is, above all else, a cultural creation.

Manuel Castells

The Internet Culture is the culture of the creators of the Internet.

Manuel Castells

We must conceive of opposition to decisions relating to urban planning as something more than "consumer-reaction" and, consequently, we must link it to the whole range of social contradictions and look into the conditions for the emergence and the determination of the objectives of social movements in the urban field."

Manuel Castells

The Internet is indeed a technology of freedom - but it can free the powerful to oppress the uninformed, it may lead to the exclusion of the devalued by the conquerors of value. In this general sense, society has not changed much.

Manuel Castells

There is a multilayering of global networks in the key strategic activities that structure and destructure the planet. When these multilayered networks overlap in some node, when there is a node that belongs to different networks, two major consequences follow. First, economies of synergy between these different networks take place in that node: between financial markets and media businesses; or between academic research and technology development and innovation; between politics and media.

Manuel Castells

Literally everything is based on the capacity to attract, retain, and efficiently use talented workers.

Manuel Castells

Societies change through conflict and are managed by politics.

Manuel Castells

By social movements we mean a certain type of organisation of social practices, the logic of whose development contradicts the institutionally dominant social logic.

Manuel Castells

Technological systems are socially produced. Social production is culturally informed. The Internet is no exception.

Manuel Castells

The origins of the Internet are to be found in ARPANET, a computer network set up by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in September 1969. ARPA was formed i 1958 by the Defense Department of the United States with the task of mobilizing research resources, particularly from the university world, toward building technological military superiority over the Soviet Union in the wake of the launching of the first Sputnik in 1957.

Manuel Castells

the Internet is the technological basis for the organizational form of the Information Age: the network.

Manuel Castells

Internet use enhanced sociability both at a distance and in the local community.

Manuel Castells

traditional media companies are not generating any profits from their Internet ventures.

Manuel Castells

The Internet is no longer a free realm, but neither has it fulfilled the Orwellian prophecy. It is a contested terrain, where the new, fundamental battle for freedom in the Information Age is being fought.

Manuel Castells

The way people think determines the fate of norms and values on which societies are constructed. While coercion and fear are critical sources for imposing the will of the dominants over the dominated, few institutional systems can last long if they are predominantly based on sheer repression.

Manuel Castells

Power is based on the control of communication and information, be it the macro-power of the state and media corporations or the micro-power of organizations of all sorts.

Manuel Castells

John Chambers, Cisco's CEO and innovator, was, primarily, a salesman, and it shows.

Manuel Castells

To consider the city as the projection of society on space is both an indispensible starting point and too elementary an approach. For, although one must go beyond the empiricism of geographical description, one runs the very great risk of imagining space as a white page on which the actions of groups and institutions are inscribed, without encountering any other obstacle than the trace of past generations. This is tantamount to conceiving of nature as entirely fashioned by culture, whereas the whole social problematic is born by the indissoluble union of these two terms, through the dialectical process by which a particular biological species (particularly because divided into classes) "man", transforms himself and transforms his struggle for life and for the appropriation of the product of his labour.

Manuel Castells

Realpolitik does not disappear in the Information Age. But it remains state-centric, in an era organized around networks, including networks of states.

Manuel Castells

Internet use is diffusing fast, but this diffusion follows a spatial pattern that fragments its geography according to wealth, technology, and power: it is the new geography of development.

Manuel Castells