Media Re:Public, part 1

Framing the discussion: Manuel Castells, USC Annenberg; Roberto Suro, USC Annenberg; David Weinberger, Berkman Center.

Castells: Democracy is a derivative of power relationships, which are the foundational elements of all societies. "Whoever prevails in the field of power relationships defines what society is." Power is related through coercion and/or the construction of meaning in mind.

If the construction of meaning is a key source of power, then communication is key as the source of meaning construction.

(I'm excited that I am hearing Castells in person for the first time and also that nothing he is saying is new to me).

"Social movements act on the mind more than on politics... They act on the way we think."

In emphasizing the construction of meaning, how much does Castells diminish coercion as a force of domination? There has to be a way to think about, and maybe measure, the distribution of vulnerability to power mechanisms, so that we can learn the degree to which power relationship vectors such as poverty/wealth, male/female/other, etc. change the ratio of vulnerability of any given individual. I would argue that if one is affluent, educated, and otherwise empowered, the coercive power of large institutions (state, military, policy, market, church) is diminished, while if one is poor and vulnerable, one's exposure to these coercive forces can make vulnerability to meaning construction besides the point, in proportional relation to one's disenfranchisement. The point, in other words, is to resist a determinist idealism in the intersection communications and political theories as expressed by thinkers like Castells, but I still love Castells.

"Politics is media politics... Media are the field of construction of power relationships. It is essential to transform everything in... the media, especially mass media."

"The infrastructure... is also owned by the corporate world." Thank, you Manuel Castells, for making my job later today much easier.

"The key thing... is you have to transform freedom into a commodity, and that's where the business... Hackers and entrepreneurs... create more and new communications networks."

'The key political function of this [model] is to distribute access to the network."

John Palfrey from Berkman just called Castell's talk "hypnotic" and called for an unpacking of the idea of the commodification of freedom.