This volume explores the construction of collective identities as they relate to social movements and power struggles in the network society. It also deals with the transformation of the state, politics,
and democracy under the conditions of globalization and new communication technologies. The understanding of these processes aims to provide new perspectives for the study of social change in the Information Age. In this preface I use the vantage point offered by a new publication of this book in 2010 to assess social and political
developments in the early twenty-first century by using the analytical framework proposed in 1997 and updated in 2004 in the first and second editions of The Power of Identity. The most dramatic social conflicts we have witnessed since the publication of the first edition of this volume have been induced by
the confrontation between opposing identities. Having detected the construction and assertion of identity as being a fundamental lever of social change, regardless of the content of such change, the theoretical interpretation I proposed in my trilogy on The Information Age was anchored on the dynamic contradiction between the Net and the Self as an organizing principle of the new historical landscape. The rise of the network society and the growing power of identity are the intertwined
social processes that jointly define globalization, geopolitics, and social transformation in the early twenty-first century. In fact, I updated the 1997 analysis of identity in the 2004 edition of this |