Globally, time spent on social networking sites surpassed time spent on e-mail in November 2007, and the number of social networking users surpassed the number of e-mail users in July 2009. Today, social networking sites are the preferred platforms for all kinds of activities, both business and personal, and sociability has dramatically increased — but it is a different kind of sociability. Most Facebook users visit the site daily, and they connect on multiple dimensions, but only on the dimensions they choose. The virtual life is becoming more social than the physical life, but it is less a virtual reality than a real virtuality, facilitating real-life work and urban living.

Because people are increasingly at ease in the Web’s multidimensionality, marketers, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the networks people construct by themselves and for themselves. At root, social-networking entrepreneurs are really selling spaces in which people can freely and autonomously construct their lives. Sites that attempt to impede free communication are soon abandoned by many users in favor of friendlier and less restricted spaces.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the Internet’s transformation of sociopolitical practices. Messages no longer flow solely from the few to the many, with little interactivity. Now, messages also flow from the many to the many, multimodally and interactively. By disintermediating government and corporate control of communication, horizontal communication networks have created a new landscape of social and political change.

Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, notably in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships and the protests against the management of the financial crisis. Online and particularly wireless communication has helped social movements pose more of a challenge to state power.

The Internet and the Web constitute the technological infrastructure of the global network society, and the understanding of their logic is a key field of research. It is only scholarly research that will enable us to cut through the myths surrounding this digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

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Manuel Castells is the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC); director of the Network Society Chair at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris, and director of research in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is académico numerario of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics and Finance, fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, fellow of the British Academy, and fellow of the Academia Europea. He was also a founding board member of the European Research Council and of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology of the European Commission. He received the Erasmus Medal in 2011, and the 2012 Holberg Prize. He has published 25 books, including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Blackwell, 1996–2003), The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press, 2001), Communication Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Networks of Outrage and Hope (Polity Press, 2012).