User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS5/NTS/RNS

• Reshaping of the material basis of society, through the rising of a technological revolution based on information technologies -> globalization (interdependency of economies, new relationship between economy, state and society)
• Restructuring capitalism: flexible managements, decentralization and networking inside and between firms, capital even more powerful in relation to labor, decline in influence of labor unions, individualization and new working relations, women joining the labor force (though under discriminatory conditions); state intervention in the regulation of markets, goodbye welfare state, enter entrepeneurship; more competitive markets, "in a context of increasing geographic and cultural differentiation of settings for capital accumulation and management."
• "As a consequence of this general overhauling of the capitalist system, still under way, we have witnessed the global integration of financial markets, the rise of the Asian Pacific as the new dominant, global manufacturing center, the arduous economic unification of Europe, the emergence of a North American regional economy, the diversification, then disintegration, of the former Third World, the gradual transformation of Russia and the ex-Soviet area of influence in market economies; the incorporation of valuable segments of economies throughout the world into an interdependent system working as a unit in real time. Because of these trends, there has also been an accentuation of uneven development, this time not only between North and South, but between the dynamic segments and territories of societies everywhere, and those others that risk becoming irrelevant from the perspective of the system's logic. Indeed we observe the parallel unleashing of formidable productive forces of the informational revolution, and the consolidation of black holes of human misery in the global economy."
• New communication system, universal digital language, reshaping culture and its distribution, customizable to the tastes of individuals.
• Computer networks both shape and are shaped by life.
• Besides technological and economic transformation, dramatic social changes (e.g. patriarchy under attack, in some societies gender relations become contested domain; environmental concerns winning political appeal but being the target of lobbyist manipulation; legitimacy crises of political power, corruption and scandals, isolation from citizens, social movements are ephemeral, fragmented, localistic, "either retrenched in their inner worlds, or flaring up for just a second around a media symbol"). Confusing change -> tendency to group around primary identities such as religion, nationality, ethnicity, etc.
• Search for identity, collective or individual, ascribed or constructed - key source of social meaning in the globalized digital age:

"Yet identity is becoming the main, and sometimes the only, source of meaning in an historical period characterised by widespread destructuring of organizations, delegitimation of institutions, fading away of major social movements and ephemeral cultural expressions."

• Individual meaning based not on what people do but on what people are, or think they are.
• At the same time, instrumentalist global networks "selectively switch on and off individuals, groups, regions or countries" based on their importance in fulfilling the network's goals -> Split! Abstract universal instrumentalism vs historically rooted identities.
• "Our societies are increasingly structured around a bipolar opposition between the Net and the Self."