Abstract

This essay advances two sets of critical observations about Manuel Castells's suggestion and detailed elaboration of the idea that modern society from the 1980s onwards constitutes a network society and that the unity in the diversity of global restructuring has to be seen in the massive deployment of information and communication technologies in all spheres of modern social life. The criticism attends to the possibility that the emphasis on the social role of information technologies in advanced society amounts to a modern version of `technological determinism'. A discussion of the so-called productivity paradox shows that cultural and social processes rather than technological regimes continue to be more important for the evolution of society.