IPE: may98 : Giddens on Castells

> In the 1990s, Silicon Valley is a microcosm of the
> generalisation it helped promote. A dazzling variety of
> non-American companies have an active presence. Like other
> nodes of the network society, its regionality is now
> symbolic rather than real: it supplies one cluster of
> connections in a global system of parallel developments.
> The clusters of scientific and technical institutions found
> in areas such as Paris-Sud, the M4 corridor, Hsinchu-Taiwan
> and many others become tied into the global network. They
> are, Castells says, the blast furnaces of the information
> age.