Reading Stalder's Castells

After gritting my teeth through the first five chapters of the book, it became clear that chapter six is the payoff chapter. Chapters one through five read like a gigantic catalog and present Castells's ideas in autonomous modules. After the short background section it seemed like Stalder just started naming off ideas that Castell's has thought up, and that he was leaving out the connecting themes.

In essence, he describes a compendium of 'nodes.' We start off reading about what Castell's believes is happening in distinct social spheres, move on to his ideas about social movements, and then later to his thoughts of space and time. In the way that the 'nodes' are presented, they come off as distinct identities that aren't described as interactive, and we are left with a handful of chess pieces with no rules or playing space.

So in retrospect, chapter six is the 'aha' chapter. Stalder finally tells us how to play the game with the pieces that he has given us, and presents Castells's major theory of networks. In a way, the arrangement of the text helps to understand Castells's network theory. Because the theory depends on modules that may drop in or out of the theory at any time, yet depends on each module for its overall presence at any moment in time, the presentation of the nodes before the connecting theme was a useful way to write the book.

At the same time, I feel like this is a weakness in the theory. Stalder also speaks about this in the book. If a phenomena cannot be adequately explained by Castell's Network Theory, it can too easily be explained away as another autonomous 'node.' Still, I have to throw out mad props to a guy (Castells) who essentially says (pg. 34-38) if my theory don't work for you, don't use it: It's only as good as the insight that it provides to the user.