Adapting to the logic

what characterizes the new system of communication, based in the digitized, networked integration of multiple communication modes, is its inclusiveness and comprehensiveness of all cultural expressions. Because of its presence all kinds of message in the new type of society work in a binary mode: presence/absence in the multimedia communication system. Only presence in this integrated system permits communicability and socialization of the message. All other messages are reduced to individual imagination or increasingly marginalized face-to-face subcultures. From society’s perspective, electronically based communication (typographic, audiovisual, or computer-mediated) is communication. Yet it does not follow that there is homogenization of cultural expressions and full domination of codes by a few central senders. It is precisely because of the diversification, multimodality and, and versatility of the new communication system that it is able to embrace and integrate all forms of expression, as well as the diversity of interests, values and imaginations, including the expression of social conflicts

the price to pay for inclusion in the system its to adapt to its logic, to its language, to its point of entry, to its encoding and decoding’

Manuel Castells