Mediating the risks of virtual environments
JOOST VAN LOON · 2013
In his widely acclaimed Rise of the Network Society, Castells (1996) describes the contours of an informational landscape, which is characterised by a series of relatively smooth, globally operational, flows (of data, people, money, goods, services, images). This landscape, or what he calls ‘space of flows’, is the field in which global capitalism, with its geopolitics of the new world order, is able to bolster new heights in the accumulation of wealth and power. The space of flows, however, is further marked by an increased separation from what he calls ‘the space of places’—the lived geographies of everyday life. It is the growing gap between these two landscapes, the space of flows and the space of places, that is the definitive condition of inequality in the informational society (Castells 1996:428).