Education and the margins of the network society. Debates with Manuel Castells

This chapter is one of a series of debates with Manuel Castells, reading between the lines of his writing about the ‘network society’. In his trilogy, The Information Age, as well as in a series of reports and papers, Castells touches on the implications of the network society for higher education and for Africa. I start by outlining Castells’ concept of the nature of work in the new global economy, and in particular his distinction between ‘individualised work’ and ‘generic labour. This highlights the structural basis for social exclusion in the network society - a risk for geographical areas such as Africa, but also for the ghettos of the new metropoles. From this I move on to education and, specifically, the current claims for the potential of distance learning on the World Wide Web. Although Castells does not consider this field specifically in his work that is reviewed here, his models for the workings of networks allow us to understand some of the trends, and to infer their implications. The chapter includes Castells’ responses, and his views on the future possibilities for the network society in Africa.