power and empowerment in the network society

Empowerment, according to Castells, is strengthened by social media including networking (such as Facebook) and social movements connected via the internet. He sees social media as evidence of trends within globalization that promote cultural diversity, innovativeness and certain kinds of freedoms.

In a social structure characterized by exclusion from and inclusion in different kinds of social and communication networks, power is a crucial determinant of social change. Power can be defined as the capacity to impose one's will over another's will. In the concept of the network society, the chief form of power is control or influence over communication.

This is because connectivity and access to networks are essential to the power of some social groups to impose their values and goals on society-at-large and of others to resist their domination.

In the network society, one of the most important impacts of globalization is the way it enables us to create economic, social and political relationships that are less and less bounded by where we are located at any given time or in other words, by our spatial location. In traditional societies, different social relations, customs, and culture exist in separate spaces and individuals have to conform to most powerful expectations and rules, for example, in families, villages, towns, cities, and nation states. In the globalizing society, these spaces lose their power to constrain individuals: people can communicate without personal contact via the global net of mass media, phone, fax and computers and are less and less linked by a common history and shared face-to-face relationships.

How we interpret this change in the social significance of location depends on how we interpret 'communication'.

• If communication is seen as a 'one-way' street, rather like a vaccination of new information into passive recipients who absorb novel information and ideas uncritically, then individuals and local communities can be disempowered by the communication of external knowledge and culture.
• If communication is seen as a process in which new information is actively interpreted and used selectively by the recipients who take an active role in shaping the meaning of the information, then individuals and local communities can be empowered by the inflow of new ideas. The possibility of developing innovative forms of communication and knowledge sharing is empowering.

This distinction between passive versus empowering communication is a central one for understanding how ICTs are used for development. Many critics of globalization view it as an invasive force for cultural homogenization promoting an inflow of information and knowledge that is becoming more uniform and standardized, due to powerful technological, commercial and cultural influences originating from centers of power and influence defining what constitutes information and knowledge and how it is shared.

A contrary view of the effects of globalizing electronic communication is that although information and knowledge from major centers of power have an extraordinary level of predominance, communication is a two-way process: inflowing information is not just taken in uncritically; it is subject to local interpretation and innovative applications.

     By Segesela Blandina

        BAPRM 42663