4: Culture and New Media Flashcards
What is the space of flows? And what do they create?
Space of flows - the arena in which cultural processes take place
Networked economies are concentrating command and control activities at certain key nodes - New York, London, and Tokyo
But there is a second tier of specialized or regional c&c nodes - Singapore, Cape Town, Chicago, Manila
For Castells, these are more processes than just places (hence, space of flows)
They create the possibility of flexible and temporary linkages with other nodes that enable the flows of capital, information, technology, symbols and so that drive the network economy
And their fluidity means that the hierarchy they embody is flexible over time
Which generates competition between cities.
What are the 3 layers to space of flows?
There are three layers to the space of flows:
Circuits of electronic exchange
Nodes and hubs
Spatial organization of the dominant managerial elites
Elaborate on the spatial organisation of dominant managerial elites.
These elites are the human agents that drive the networked economy
They need to be reasonably unified across the globe. Cosmopolitan culture that has no real basis in any particular place
But they also need to unify in local places. And for this they rely on cultural codes or locks that allow entry for themselves and exclude all others
Castells describes these elite codes as “personal micro-networks that project their interests in functional macro networks …”
What is the space of places? What does the divide in space of flows and space of places cause?
Most people do not live in the space of flows but in the space of places
Localized, geographically and historically specific and bounded spaces, that can be communities or not
Power is concentrated in the space of flows, people in the space of places
This creates “a structural schizophrenia” and increasing segregation
What are the various kinds ‘times’? What does Castells propose?
There are various kinds of time.
In the past we have cyclical time of agrarian societies
And clock time of the industrial revolution
Castells suggests that the network society or culture is producing timeless time
What is timeless time? e.g. of timeless time
A mixing of tenses to create a forever universe, not self-expanding, but self-maintaining, not cyclical, but random, not recursive but incursive
In other words, time that is so compressed that it ceases to exist
AND, a randomization of the traditional/normal/natural sequencing of events
Examples: The global casino Blurring of life cycle Instant wars But most people will not experience timeless time as it is part of the space of flows
Elaborate on Metro Manila. What enables the space of flows?
Metro Manila
A megacity consisting of 17 municipalities containing 12.88 million people living on 620 square km hectacres
One of the densely populated urban areas on the planet
For a minority of its inhabitants, Manila takes on features of a global city or space of flows:
- Gated communities
- Luxury malls and office towers
- Private automobiles and expressways
What enables Manila’s space of flows
It is less of a regional, than a national node bringing together a variety of commodities for use in the networked and more traditional economies
- Micro-chips, Call centre labour, Garments, Tropical agricultural products
Provider of skilled/unskilled labour willing to migrate to the far corners of the globe
But this space of flows depends on a space of place …
For majority of its inhabitants, how is Manila a space of places?
For the majority of its inhabitants, Manila is a space of places
Economically the majority survives on very small wages (the minimum wage is S$13.00 per day) and transportation is difficult
Life revolves around the local community and perhaps a commute to a more distant workplace
But without this plentiful and cheap labour force, global capital flows would likely bypass the Philippines
The space of flows depends on the subjugation of the space of place
How is Metro Manila organised?
The organization of the space of places
Relies not on bureaucratic infrastructure such as gridirons or address numbers or paved roads
Rather, it is organized based on the inter-personal relationships between the inhabitants.
To navigate these spaces requires local knowledge.
To the uninitiated the surface appearance is just chaos
These relations in turn create great attachment to place among its inhabitants
What is Aileen O’Carroll’s analogy on Emmental cheese and spaghetti?
Fuzzy holes and intangible time: time in a knowledge industry (Aileen O’Carroll)
From the Industrial Revolution, clock time to the workers can be perceived as a block of Emmental cheese
Holes in the middle (unofficial breaks) to handle the monotony of the assembly line
Compares time in the knowledge work place to a plate of spaghetti where it is difficult to know when one time ends and the other begins
Elaborates this point by developing two concepts:
Fuzzy hole time
Intangible time
What is fuzzy hole time?
Holes are opened up in the working day due to the need to wait for other project groups, decisions by management, state of the market.
Holes are closed by multi-tasking with short tasks, with email as the ultimate micro-task.
Email also transgresses the boundaries of work and home and within the workplace, work and break
This multi-tasking changes the nature of breaks as the employee isn’t really taking a break from working, but taking a break from a task
What is intangible time?
A segregation of work process into work proper and extraneous work
Often creative or networking activities are classified as extraneous as opposed to report writing which is seen as making up
Other kinds of invisible work:
Helping, checking, integrating, planning and socializing (Perrins 1997)
Preserving the life and the well-being of the project, empowering others, creating the team’s social entity (Fletcher 1994)
What does O’Carroll wish to achieve?
O’Carroll wants to see a new social agreement between capital and labour that would recognize:
- The differences between the time of capital and working time
- The invisible work of intangible time
How has the space of flows caused acclerated contagion and responses?
Accelerated contagion and response, Zhou and Coleman, 2016
The networked economy society and economy has increased the speed of circulation of pathogens
Here, the space of flows helps states and other global and local institutions “keep up”
Example: the containment of SARS
Elaborate on the containment of SARS.
The containment of SARS
Once SARS crossed its first international boundary in February 2003 it was contained in five months
Networked labour allowed for the outpacing of the biological time of the virus
British Columbia Cancer Agency in Canada isolated the virus on Apri 12, 2003 and released its “code” to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlantic on April 14, 2003.
CDC builds on the this work and releases data to World Health Organization (WHO) on April 16, 2003. WHO releases it to its own international network thereafter
Another network of 50 clinicians in 14 countries develops a definition of the disease and control guidelines
And a final network under the WHO consisting of 32 epidemilogists from 11 countries and involving public health institutions, Ministries of Health and WHO country offices defines appropriate public health measures to contain the virus
This was the first instance in human history were there was new data on a disease outbreak available 24 hours a day
