Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

NETWORK SOCIETY
1
1
1
2
1
1
than with the specific ‘bits’ which are what constitutes the e-mail relations (the
Van Morrison bulletin board, a professional listing, a business communication, an
electronic purchase) that can be easily disposed of when interest wanes (Talbott,
1995). Indeed, there is something disturbing about online relationships with others
that can be exited by the flick of a switch. Such superficial, non-disturbing and
self-centred links do not merit the term ‘community’ that, if nothing else, involves
encountering others in real places and real times. Real community can of course
confirm one’s opinions and bolster prejudices, but it can also challenge conduct
and convictions without prospect of electronic evasion (Gray, 1997).
As I have said, Castells believes that inclusion on the network is a requisite
of full participation in today’s society. This is an argument for extending access
to ICTs, especially to the Internet, as a right of citizenship in the information age
(Brown, 2003). Despite his enthusiasm for connectivity, Castells is fearful that, if
it is entertainment-led, it will result in people being interacted on by centralised
forces rather than being truly interacting. More than this, however, Castells argues
that ‘the price to pay for inclusion in the system is to adapt to its logic, to its language,
to its points of entry, to its encoding and decoding’ (Castells, 1996, p. 374).
This insistence returns us to his McLuhanite inheritance, since Castells believes
that the cultural effects of ICTs are more radical than even the prospect of more
democratic communications. He writes of ‘real virtuality’ to capture the amalgamation
of text, audio and visual forms that multimedia entail and life in a ‘network
society’ means. He suggests that, strung out on the network, even where we are
interactive with others and thus in some forms of communication, the media are
all the reality we experience. Thus it is a system in which ‘reality itself . . . is
entirely captured, fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make
believe, in which appearances are not just on the screen through which experience
is communicated, but they become the experience’ (Castells, 1996, p. 373).
This is to plunge into the postmodern imagination in ways that I find overstretched
and examine at some length in Chapter 9. Castells illustrates this novel
cultural condition by describing an amalgam of television soap and political issues
with reference to a Dan Quayle experience. During the 1992 election campaign
the then US Vice-President used a character from a soap opera to illustrate his
argument for ‘family values’. After Quayle’s speech the soap retorted by including
an item about his intervention in the next episode. Fact and fiction seemingly
blur here, something that Castells suggests as an instance of the ‘real virtuality’
that is a product of new media. In my view this is an unconvincing case for
persuading us that a novel situation has come upon us. More than a century ago
Charles Dickens did much the same thing in serialised stories such as Oliver Twist
and the Pickwick Papers, and large parts of everyday experience involve drawing
on fictional characterisations to explore the real (‘he’s a bit of a Scrooge’, ‘no
Podsnappery here’, ‘he’s a real Uriah’). Fiction supplies us with a good deal of
ways of talking about social reality and thereby may blur apparently sharp distinctions
between fact and fable. It has done so for years, certainly long before the
spread of multimedia and even before television. These new forms of culture offer
similar representations that may or may not be adopted, but we may be confident
that most people will not have too much trouble distinguishing the literal
107