Professor Manuel Castells will be give an STS Colloquium at MIT today at 4:00 pm in the Bartos Theater (lower level of Building E15).  Before his talk, there will be a reception from 3:30-4:00 in the atrium area outside of Bartos.

ABOUT THE TALK      
Power has always been decided in the realm of communication. In our societies, politics is largely media politics. Communication evolves according to the evolution of communication technology. Internet-based communication and wireless networks have allowed the emergence of self mass communication, that is mass communication that is originated by social actors or individuals without mediation of governments or corporate media. Under these conditions social movements and insurgent politics enhance their capability to intervene in the new communication space. On the other hand, corporate media are also increasing their presence in the horizontal networks of communication.  As a result of these trends, mass media and horizontal networks of communication are converging. Thus, we are witnessing a historical shift of societys public sphere from the institutional realm to the communication space. This analysis is based on a number of case studies, data analysis and literature review, some of which are included in my recent book "Mobile Communication and Society," MIT Press 2006.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Manuel Castells is the Marvin C. (1951) and Joanne Grossman Distinguished Visiting Professor of Technology and Society at MIT, and Professor of Communication and the holder of the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is, as well, Research Professor at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, and Professor Emeritus of Sociology and of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He holds courtesy appointments as Professor of Sociology in the USC Sociology Department and as Professor of Planning in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development.

He is the author of 23 books and editor or co-author of 15 additional books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. His trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture was published by Blackwell in 1996-98 in the first edition and in 2000-2003 in its second edition. His most recent books are The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press, 2001), The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model (Oxford University Press, 2002, with Pekka Himanen), La societat xarxa a Catalunya (Mondadori, 2003, co-author), The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2004, editor and co-author), Globalizacion, Desarrollo y Democracia: Chile en el Contexto Mundial (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2005), and Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective (MIT Press, 2007, co-author).

More information about the talk can be found here.