Abstract
Even if the Internet did not establish itself in everyday life and as a component of mass communication as quickly or as sustainably as it appeared to do at the end of the 1990s, the Internet nevertheless shows what could change with the networking and availability logic that is inherent in the Internet. Manuel Castells (2001) with his analysis of the "information age" and society organised as an instrumental network sketches the outlines of how our society is developing and with what dynamics. He speaks of an "informational mode of development" (ibid., p. 17) which, unlike the "agrarian" or the "industrial" mode, affects people's social relationship to nature ("production"), to themselves ("experience", "cultural identity") and to others ("power"). Castells describes one aspect of this "informational mode of development" by referring to "global networks of instrumentality" that produce an "incalculable number of virtual communities" (ibid., p. 23). In the process, a kind of subjectivity is also constituted that can be described at the moment as an "increasing distance between globalisation and identity, between the network and the self" (ibid., p. 24). In this tension, "multimedia" takes on the function of a "symbolic environment" (ibid., p. 415).
