Time(s), space(s) and communication in Castells’s ‘Network Society’*

Abstract

In ‘The Rise of the Network Society’ (2010), Manuel Castells elaborates on what today is commonknowledge, namely the notion of a society that is characterised both by networks of electronicallymediated communication and by networks undergirding economic exchanges worldwide. Inthis article, I explore a dissonance issuing from a feature of the network society, namely whatCastells calls the ‘transformation of space and time in the human experience’. In this context,he distinguishes between ‘the space of places’ and ‘the space of flows’, with the former referringto the historically familiar sense of space as a material precondition of social interaction andof architectural modulation into ‘place’, and the latter to a novel form of spatiality, one that isrelated to social interaction that has been fundamentally modified by advanced communicationtechnologies and is characterised by simultaneity, regardless of physical distance. This, in turn,is related to what Castells labels ‘timeless time’, which is noticeable where customary timesequences are blurred in certain contemporary practices, such as virtually instantaneous financialtransactions, ‘instant wars’ and virtual communication. This contrasts with both ordinary, ‘human’time and also with evolutionary ‘glacial time’ – a notion operative in the ecological movementand one that increasingly clashes with the demands of ‘timeless time’ in the network society. Thearticle reconstructs Castells’s comprehensive vision and points to the relevance of the conflictbetween these respective notions of space and time for contemporary communication practices.It also engages critically with the social implications of the dominant modes of space and time.