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Communication Power
Castells's 2009 landmark integrating network theory with media analysis — the book that articulated networking power and network-making power as the decisive forms of authority in the information age.
Communication Power is Castells's most systematic analysis of how power operates in the network society. Published by Oxford University Press in 2009, it synthesizes two decades of work on networks, media, and governance into a unified theoretical framework. The book identifies four distinct forms of power in networked societies — networking power, network power, networked power, and network-making power — and argues that the last is decisive. Those who can program the network's goals and reprogram them when circumstances change exercise the form of authority that matters most in the information age. The framework has proven especially illuminating for the AI era, where foundation model companies exercise unprecedented network-making power over the networks their tools anchor. Communication Power provides the analytical vocabulary for seeing this power clearly — and for designing institutional responses adequate to it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Castells wrote Communication Power during a period of rapid transformation in digital media: the rise of social platforms, the consolidation of