Untitled - socium.ge

36 Manuel Castellsmovements struggling for a better world. All of them aim to reach theirconstituencies and target audiences through the decisive switch to the medianetworks. In the network society, power is redefined, but it does not vanish.Nor do social struggles. Domination and resistance to domination change incharacter according to the specific social structure from which they originateand which they modify by their action. Power rules, counter-powers fight.Networks process their contradictory programs while people try to make senseof the sources of their fears and hopes.Space of Flows and Timeless TimeAs with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structureis linked to the redefinition of the material foundations of our existence, spaceand time, as Giddens (1984), Thrift (1986), Adams (1990), Harvey (1990),Lash and Urry (1994), and Graham and Marvin (2000), among others, haveargued. Two emergent social forms of time and space characterize the networksociety, while coexisting with prior forms. They are the space of flows andtimeless time. Space and time are related, in nature as in society. In socialtheory, space can be defined as the material support of time-sharing socialpractices. The development of communication technologies can be understoodas the gradual decoupling of contiguity and time-sharing. The space of flowsrefers to the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity(or chosen time in time-sharing) without contiguity. Most dominantfunctions in the network society (financial markets, transnational productionnetworks, media networks, networked forms of global governance, globalsocial movements) are organized around the space of flows.However, the space of flows is not placeless. It is made of nodes andnetworks; that is, of places connected by electronically powered communicationnetworks through which flows of information circulate and interact, whichensure the time-sharing of practices processed in such a space. While in thespace of places, based on contiguity of practice, meaning, function, and localityare closely interrelated; in the space of flows, places receive their meaningand function from their nodal role in the specific networks to which theybelong. Thus, the space of flows is not the same for financial activities or forscience, for media networks or for political power networks. Space cannot beconceived as separate from social practices. Therefore, every dimension of thenetwork society that we have analyzed in this chapter has a spatial manifestation.Because practices are networked, so is their space. Since networked practicesare based on information flows processed between various sites bycommunication technologies, the space of the network society is made up of thearticulation between three elements: the places where activities (and peopleenacting them) are located, the material communication networks linking these