Good God, it's puff piece week in La Vanguardia for Manuel Castells. He must be their pet intellectual, since this talk he gave yesterday gets page 11 of their "Living" section. It's sponsored by the Pompeu Fabra University, the Godo Group (the people who own the Vangua), and the Count of Barcelona Foundation. supposedly the lecture was the first course of a Master (Spanish for worthless certificate of attendance at some seminars) in Direction of Communication and Multimedia Group Enterprises. Get this: Josep Maria Casasus, worthless and incompetent La Vanguardia ombudsman, is the director of the course, and there's a photo of Castells and Casasus along with the puff piece. The story includes a couple of paragraphs on what a genius Castells is. Here's his conclusion: "Today, of all the information available in the world, 97% is digitalized and 80% is on the Internet. Therefore, each one of us can construct his own hypertext. It is a total revolution, which changes concepts and directly affects the mass meada, constantly eroded over the last 20 years. We do not live in an era of virtual reality, an incorrect expression, but of real virtuality, understood so as the dominant culture is the one that is supported by electronic systems of communications". How much does this guy get paid for spewing this nonsense?