Manuel Castells Quotes

the media are not the holders of power, but they constitute by and large the space where power is decided.

Yet, the main issue is not the shaping of the minds by explicit messages in the media, but the absence of a given content in the media.

Raum ist der Ausdruck der Gesellschaft.

Make-believe is belief in the making.

observation

Clinton brought in billions of dollars, twice the funds raised by Trump, and she also had twice as many campaign offices. But Trump led a movement. His relationship with the electorate was direct, at mass rallies with incendiary speeches.

In the United States, congressional and state elections typically attract little voter interest, and voters have scant knowledge about the names of their representatives or their challengers. A growing body of research suggests that, for these politicians, particularly during primaries, being implicated in a scandal may actually be beneficial (Burden, 2002). This benefit is particularly pronounced for office challengers. As Mann and Wolfinger (1980) first noted, people are better at recognizing a candidate’s name than spontaneously recalling it. This is important because voting only requires that voters recognize a name on a ballot. Thus, participation in scandal may be beneficial at these lower levels because it increases name recognition, which may translate into a higher percentage of the vote. However, for major political candidates, scandals are detrimental because voters already possess information about them and are more inclined to follow the details of the scandal.

As sociologist Manuel Castells, professor of communication technology and society at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, has noted: “In all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects”.52 Being overwhelmed due to ignorance is precisely what we should avoid, particularly when it comes to how the many diverse communities that comprise modern society form, develop and relate to one another.

things changed when the debate broadened out to include the general public at large, and not just the political classes.

The protecting state prioritized the protection of speculators and fraudsters over the needs of citizens who had been hit by the crisis and unemployment.

Traditional ideologies, whether the egalitarian ideas of the left, or those that serve the values of the conventional right, have lost their way, and the quest for personal success through politics is now tied to the personal accumulation of capital by profiting from the period that positions of power are held.

So, nationalism (Spanish nationalism as well as Catalan nationalism), both in Catalonia and in Spain, takes the forefront of the political landscape in line with a broader trend sweeping European democracies.

Not what it could have been: It is what it was. And what it was is dead. Octavio Paz, Lesson of Things, 1955

Según mi hipótesis, la superioridad histórica de las organizaciones verticales jerárquicas sobre las redes horizontales se debe a que las organizaciones sociales en red tenían límites materiales que vencer, fundamentalmente en relación con la tecnología disponible. La fuerza de las redes radica en su flexibilidad, adaptabilidad y capacidad de autorreconfiguración. Sin embargo, cuando superan cierto umbral de tamaño, complejidad y volumen de flujos, resultan menos eficientes que las estructuras verticales de mando y control, en las condiciones existentes con la tecnología preelectrónica de comunicación

Even in the rhetoric of the protests, the connection to the economic crisis was, at best, indirect. Manuel Castells had it right when he wrote that “the movement” was about “everything and nothing at the same time.”47 2011 never fixated on 2008: the impulse was to abolish history entirely, and open up a future purified of cause and effect.

Although Spanish politics is among the most corrupt in Europe, political corruption is in the basic DNA of almost any political system, the USA and EU included, and one of the factors that has had the biggest part to play in the crisis of legitimacy. If

how liberal democracy, already weakened at its own hand, is being undermined by the enforced negation of its principles by the onslaught of terrorism.

We find it in the improbable rise to power of a character as bizarre, narcissistic and vulgar as Trump to the imperial office of President of the United States.

It does, however, form part of a wider and more profound movement of mass rebellion against the established order.

The Democrats’ tactical mistake was to pitch another Clinton, closely linked to the political and financial establishment, against an anti-establishment candidate.

although racists voted for Trump, the majority of Trump voters are not racist. They are people who feel threatened by their country’s rapid economic, technological, ethnic and cultural change. This is why older white men supported Trump: they were trying to preserve their world, a world they saw disappearing day by day, where immigration was the most visible sign that their neighbours were no longer who they used to be.

The results of the general election in December 2015 established the emergence of a new, imperfect four-party system in Spain. The PP remained the

the Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all took a pro-remain stance, and yet 40 per cent of Labour voters and 60 per cent of Conservative voters went against the leaders of the three parties to vote for Brexit.

Enter José Antonio González: socialist mayor of the small Granadan city of Jun and part-time hacker, who had brought innovation to his town’s democracy by introducing direct public participation through social networks with help from MIT researchers and the support of Twitter’s very own CEO.

The most significant piece of information in this whole affair is the historic level of voter abstention in the June 2017 legislative elections: 51.2 per cent.

Trump did extremely well with voters that some analysts have called ‘white trash’, the pejorative epithet frequently used to describe poor white people throughout history. It was a cry for survival based on the only thing they had a handle on: being white

Despite the fact that the alt-right was not dominant in the broadest popular movement that formed around Trump, some of its leaders did play a decisive role in the ideology and politics of Trumpism, thanks to their direct influence on Trump himself.

Trump responded to all this with scorn, lies and personal attacks, establishing a whole new means of presidential communication: governance by Twitter.

UKIP largely sank without trace and not even Nigel Farage won a seat. This was a reflection of the fact that their vote was a purely anti-European protest vote which, after the success of Brexit, gravitated back towards its traditional home in the Conservative Party.

only 3 per cent believed that governments worked to improve their lives.

We talked and talked, strolling to the soundtrack of the waves breaking on the shore at Santa Monica beach, where I was living.

corruption became a systemic feature of Spanish politics, albeit to different degrees depending on the parties, times and areas involved.