Communication technology is political

Technology is Political from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Manuel Castells new book is called Communication Power, [Amazon] he writes reflecting on his time as an 18 year old protesting against the Franquist regime

What I sensed then, and believe now, is that power is based on the control of comunications and information, be it the macro-power of the state and media corporations or the micro-power of organisations of all sorts. And so, my struggle for free comunication, my promitive purple-ink blog of the time, was indeed an act of defiance, and the fascists, from their perspective were right to try to catch us and shut us off, so closing the channels connecting individual minds to the public mind.

Indeed, if we reflect on the Iranian Government or the Chinese in recent time shutting down internet and mobile communications in an effort to control information leaking out to a wider world and also to limit local peoples ability to organise themselves – we can see what Cascio and Castells mean.

Communication power, says Castells is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. And, in the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomised  but connected “up” to Big Media but not across to each other. And now that authority is eroding, says Journalism Professor Jay Rosen

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Posted in: Convergence, Culture, Darwin, Distribution, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Organisations, Engagement Politics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Identity, Law, Media, Mobile, Participation, Social Networks, Society, Strategy, Trends, Web/Tech

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