The Public Square
It comes in three fat volumes published by Blackwell, The Rise of the Network Society. A thoughtful cardinal friend put me on to it while we were in Rome participating in the Synod for America. The author is sociologist Manuel Castells, a Spaniard now at Berkeley who has over the years taught at universities from Paris to Hong Kong to Hitotsubashi. Virtual reality, according to Castells, is old hat. The new and totally revolutionary thing is real virtuality. The new digitized world, says Castells, segments markets and breaks up the uniformity of a mass audience. “These processes induce the formation of what I call the culture of real virtuality. It is so, and not virtual reality, because when our symbolic environment is, by and large, structured in this inclusive, flexible, diversified hypertext, in which we navigate every day, the virtuality of this text is in fact our reality, the symbols from which we live and communicate.”
