Don't mention the war!

Week 23 already, & here comes Castells! He dogs my academic journey. The early stages were documented in a post for a blog I used to write: Like a circle in a spiral.  That was in 2005, as I was just starting the MA(ODE). Then in 2008 I tried to lay the ghosts to rest by using his writing as the subject for a linguistics project towards my OU BSc. This was my reasoning:

This project is rooted in personal history. I first read Manuel Castells in French in 1973. As I translated his short urban sociology text (Castells, 1973) into English, the writing struck me as somewhat monotonous, but I attributed this impression to my own unfamiliarity with the discipline. Over thirty years later, I encountered Castells again, in an OU postgraduate course on e-learning, and was astonished to find his English writing about the Internet (Castells, 2001) had exactly the same effect, confirmed by a fellow student as we traded judgements such as "mechanical" and "anodyne" (Dixon & Gibson, 2006). When his work appeared for the third time, provoking a similar reaction, in my daughter's final year undergraduate module on the sociology of cyberspace, I had begun studying E303 and decided to apply the new linguistic skills and understanding gained on this course to an analysis of the lexicogrammatical characteristics of Castells' academic writing, in an attempt to uncover objective causes for these subjective impressions of his prose as unusually dry and unengaging.

My tutor was quite amused that I would choose to study someone because I found them boring! I compared his writing with that of Rheingold & Weinberger, concluding that:

I embarked on my study of Castells' prose with a suspicion that "ironically, this guru of the Internet revolution may be stranded in the paradigm of a less connected age" (Dixon, 2008). It is now apparent that whilst this is essentially true, it is not for the reasons I suspected. What remains uncertain is the extent to which Castells can continue to earn the respect his traditionally authoritative prose demands, in the face of newer more engaging "representations of the world" (Halliday, in Stubbs, 2004, p.251) offered by scholars who are prepared to use the new media and adopt a language to match.

& thought I had seen the last of him, but here he is to haunt me again.

[Not Manuel Castells http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/01/24/article-2267351-0001D6E600000258-755_634x525.jpg]