The information society

The title of this book, “”The Internet Galaxy” connotes much of the Castells’ arguments. (Castells created the term “internet galaxy” by analogy to McLuhan’s term, “Getenberg galaxy”). At first glance, a galaxy appearing in the night sky does not seem to have unity. In fact, what we see seems like a jumble of random stars. However, while those stars may seem scattered separately, in fact, they form patterns and reveal some kind of organization around certain pivotal stars. The birth and extinction of those pivotal stars determine the fate of other ones, i.e., the planets which revolve around them. According to Castells, one of those pivotal stars in our days is the Internet . The Internet is “the fabric of our lives” (p.1).

In the analogy of galaxy, those pivotal stars are independent variables, and the planets revolving around them are dependent variables. However, in fact, the Internet in Castells’ arguments is both an independent and dependent variable. (In this sense, there is logical contradiction between his title - the galaxy analogy - and his arguments). The Internet as an independent variable, according to Castells, has caused tremendous changes in business. For example, networked business model (Cisco) became possible with the help of the Internet. In addition, the Internet has created a new form of “acting, informing, recruiting, organizing, dominating and counter-dominating” (p.137) processes in political realms. However, in his core arguments, the Internet is also a dependent variable. His perspective that views the Internet as a dependent variable can be observed in many parts of his book. Most importantly, he captures the advent of the Internet age in a way that it was an inevitable outcome of the macro-changes of society. He argues: “the Internet is effective in maintaining weak ties, which otherwise would be lost in the trade-off between the effort to engage I physical interaction” (p.129). In other words, it was the very tendency of “networked individualism” and the new form of sociability that necessitates the pervasiveness of the Internet, not vise versa. To be sure, he seems to pay great attention not to make any causal relation between the Internet and society. However, in the logical extension of his arguments, it seems that the Internet is a social outcome of the “privatization of sociability” (p.128).

The reason he understands the Internet as simultaneously independent and dependent variable lies in the fact that he emphasizes analysis over prediction. In most cases, the Internet is considered only as an independent variable in the arguments of scholars who try to ‘make prediction’ of the future effects of the Internet on society. At the same time, throughout the whole book, he maintains bifocal perspectives on the Internet and macro-changes in society. It leads to his awareness of the complex relationship between the Internet and society that defies any reductionistic unilaterality. In this awareness, it seems that he can escape from uni-demensional prospects that reduce the Internet simply to either an independent or dependent variable.