I've just been to the Oxford Internet Institute to hear Manuel Castells speak about his upcoming book, Communication Power. If you are not familiar with Castells, he is one of the foremost and earliest social thinkers about the internet. His Information Age trilogy is required reading. Published in 1996, the first volume predicted things like the paradoxical rise of radical (even violent) local movements as a consequence of increased global interconnection. I won't attempt to summarise his talk, but here are a few things that caught my attention.
One of his key subjects is the role of media as the place where politics happens. If you are not in the media, you are not in public politics. The power of media owners comes not so much from being able to promote a message, but from controlling access to this space, and through it to the 'public mind'. And what is in the 'public mind' is predominantly people, not ideas; characters with character. Media politics is about building trust (whether justified or not) in one's character. Hence the importance of negative campaigning and political scandal.
Much of this is old, and can be traced to people like John Thompson – as Castells acknowledges. But then he brings in the internet. His claim is that its horizontal and autonomous nature can have – and has had – a positive role in changing this for the better. A classic example he gives is how the Socialists won the Spanish elections as a result of young people spontaneously using SMS to organise demonstrations in the wake of the 2004 Madrid bombings. But he is also deeply enthusiastic about how Barack Obama has used the internet to subvert the traditional rules by connecting local grassroots efforts to each other, and appealing straight to the public when his judgement was questioned in connection to the Jeremiah Wright affair, facing – and diffusing – political scandal and surviving an attempt at character assassination.
Castells is concerned that a wave of 'privatisation' will make the internet less of a commons , and sees internet regulation – net neutrality and content regulation – as key battlegrounds not only for profits, but also for the ability to frame public debate. And although the policy debates have been going on for years (Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain and others come to mind), Castells thinks that this time around important decisions will need to be made.
Communication Power promises to be an important book.
