Timeless time - time and space are related in society as is nature and their meanings and manifestations in social practice evolve throughout histories and across cultures. The space of flows is the material organisation of time-sharing social practices that work through flows. The space of places continues to be the predominant space of experience. Network society is structured in its dominant functions and processes around networks and current manifestation is capitalist and but very different from industrial capitalism. The dynamics of networks push society towards an endless escape from its own constraints and controls, towards an endless supersession and reconstruction of its values and institutions, towards a meta-social, constant rearrangement of human institutions and organisations.
Cosmopolitan democracy is needed to regulate the network society and the network state.
Networks and social actors increasingly require the shared cultural codes - values, categories, and meanings that networks can process effectively. This is what identity based social movements are seeking to do as sources of change in an information age, for example environmentalism. They affirm experience over instrumentality, meaning over function, the value of life over the values in the networks. Network Society opens up a new realm of contradictions and conflicts as people around the world refuse to become shadows of global flows and begin to project their dreams, and sometimes their nightmares into the light of new history making. An introduction to the information age, Manuel Castells, CITY 7, May 1997, pp.