Timeless Time
From Internet: Knowledge and Community
HOYLE HODGES
INTERNET: Knowledge and Community
Response for 23 Oct 2010
Real Virtuality, Timeless Time, The Space of Flows and other “Theories written by a Marxist with a “We Are All Victims” agenda.
“Once in this underworld, processes of exclusion reinforce each other, requiring a heroic effort to pull out from what I call the black holes of informational capitalism. (Manual Castells, ‘An Introduction to the Information Age’ City, 2:7, pg 10) The author obviously has done extensive research on how the “Information Age” is affecting various aspects of Society, Global Economy, Network Enterprises, Work Transformation, Culture, Politics, Time, and Space. I found it especially interesting to read this text from the position of 14 years of hind sight and comparing how some of his theories actually stood the test of time and which didn’t. I found that Castells remarks on Social Polarization and Social Exclusion to be way off from what has actually happened in the context of the “Information Age” While it is interesting to read the observations of the author I found some of his findings almost amusing. He seems to think that the USA has somehow regressed to the 1920s as far as inequality is concerned. That there are “black holes of informational capitalism” that people somehow can only overcome with “heroic” effort. What about hard work, ambition, staying out of trouble, and daring to dream and make those dreams become a reality. I do not find that the Information Age has brought about stepped up inequality or social exclusion in and of itself. People make choices in life on how they are going to live; no Network Enterprise can truely control how you live your life unless you let it. I believe that the opposite of exclusion is happening right now in regards to living and working in the Information Age. Access to the digital world is available to more and more of the world’s population that the author felt was excluded back in 1996. This has resulted in exclusion only if individuals or societies like the Taliban purposely revert back to earlier centuries and refuse to accept the world as it is and make the most of, and use the “Network Enterprise” to their advantage.
