Manuel Castells is Research Professor of Information Society at the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in Barcelona, as well as the Wallis Annenberg Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles. He is also Emeritus Professor of Sociology and of Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Professor at M.I.T. He is the author of twenty two books, including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture translated into twenty languages.Pekka Himanen works as a researcher in Europe and the United States. Following the completion of his Ph.D. eight years ago, he has also carried out field study in India, China, and Japan. He has been an adviser to the Finnish government on the information society, and to the Finnish Ministry of Eduacation and numerous universities on the virtual university. He works with some of the world's leading information technology companies on the human-oriented approaches to the information society.