The Network Society a cross cultural perspective
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Reference
Castells M (2004) The Network Society: a cross-cultural perspective. Edward Elgar, MA
Chapter 1. Informationalism, networks, and the network society: a theoretical blueprint pp.3-45. Castells, M. Chapter link
Networks, Society, and Communication Technology
A network society is a society whose social structure is made of networks powered by microelectronics-based information and communication technologies.
By social structure, I understand the organizational arrangements of humans in relations of production, consumption, reproduction, experience and power expressed in meaningful communication coded by culture.
A network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point where the curve intersects itself. "Communication networks are patterns of contact that are created by flows of message among communicators through time and space" (Monge and Contractor, 2003). So, networks process flows. Flows are streams of information between node circulating through the channels of connection between nodes.
A network is defined by the program that assigns the network its goals and its rules of performance. This program is made up of codes that include valuation of performance and criteria for success or failure. To alter the outcomes of the network, a new program (a set of compatible codes) will have to be installed in the network - form outside the network.
Network cooperate or compete with each other. Networks work on a binary logic: inclusion/exclusion.
- Cooperation is based on the ability to communicate between networks. This ability depends on the existence of code of translation and inter-operability between networks (protocols of communication), and on access to connection points (switches).
- Competition depends on the ability to outperform other networks by superior efficiency in performance or in cooperation capacity. Competition may also take a destructive form by disrupting the switchers of competing networks and/or interfering with their communication protocols.
Hypothesis for this historical superiority of vertical- hierarchical organizations over networks is that the networked form of social organization had material limits to prevail, limits that were fundamentally linked to available technology. Indeed, networks have their strength in their flexibility, adaptability, and self-reconfigurating capacity.
Networks became the most efficient organizational forms as a result of three major features of networks that benefited from the new technological environment:
- Flexibility: they can reconfigurate according to changing environments, keeping their goals while changing their components. They go around blocking points of communication channels to find new connections.
- Scalability: they can expand or shrink in size with little disruption.
- Survivability: because they have no center, and can operate in a wide range of configurations, they can resist attacks to their nodes and codes, because the codes of the network are contained in multiple nodes, that can reproduce the instructions and find new ways to perform. So, only the material ability to destroy the connecting points can eliminate the network.
All known societies are based on information and knowledge as the source of power, wealth, and meaning (Mokyr, 1990; Mazlish, 1993). Our society is characterized by the power embedded in information technology, at the heart of an entirely new technological paradigm, that I called informationalism.
So, what is actually new, both technologically and socially, is a society built around microelectronics-based information technologies. To which I add biological technologies based on genetic engineering, as they also refer to the decoding and recoding of the information of the living matter.
Informationalism: The Technological Paradigm of the Network Society
Technology is usually defined as the use of scientific knowledge to set procedures for performance in a reproducible manner. It evolves in interaction with the other dimensions of society, but it has its own dynamics, linked to the conditions of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and application and diffusion in society at large.
Technological systems evolve incrementally, but this evolution is punctuated by major discontinuities. These discontinuities are marked by technological revolutions that usher in a new technological paradigm. The notion of paradigm was proposed by Thomas Kuhn (1962) to explain the transformation of knowledge by scientific revolutions, and imported into the social and economic formations of technology by Christopher Freeman (1988) and Carlota Perez (1983).
A paradigm is a conceptual pattern that sets the standards for performance. It integrates discoveries into a coherent system of relationships characterized by its synergy, that is by the added value of the system vis a vis its individual components. A technological paradigm organizes a series of technological discoveries around a nucleus, and a system of relationships that enhance the performance of each specific technology.
Informationalism is the technological paradigm that constitutes the material basis of early 21st century societies. Over the last quarter of the 20th century of the common era it replaced and subsumed industrialism as the dominant technological paradigm.
Industrialism, associated with the Industrial Revolution, is a paradigm characterized by the systemic organization of technologies based on the capacity to generate and distribute energy by human-made machines without depending on the natural environment - albeit they use natural resources as an input for the generation of energy.
Informationalism is a technological paradigm based on the augmentation of the human capacity of information processing and communication made possible by the revolutions in microelectronics, software, and genetic engineering.
Because information and communication are the most fundamental dimensions of human activity and organization, a revolutionary change in the material conditions of their performance affects the entire realm of human activity.
In essence, three major, distinctive features of the technologies that are at the heart of the system:
- Their self-expanding processing and communicating capacity in terms of volume, complexity, and speed.
- Their recombining ability on the basis of digitization and recurrent communication.
- Their distributing flexibility through interactive, digitized networking.
Thus, a formal version of the hypothesis presented above is the following: in the first three decades of the Information and Communication Technology revolution we have observed a self-generated, expansive capacity of new technologies to process information; current limits of integration, programming, and networking capacity are likely to be superseded by new waves of innovation in the making; and when and if the limits of processing power of these technologies will be reached, a new technological paradigm will emerge – under forms and with technologies that we cannot imagine today, except in science fiction scenarios, or in the innovation dreams of the usual suspects.
Secondly, digital technologies are also characterized by their ability to recombine information on the basis of recurrent, interactive communication. This is what I call the Hypertext, in the tradition of Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee. One of the key contributions of the Internet is its potential ability to link up everything digital from everywhere and to recombine it. Indeed, the original design of the world wide web by Berners-Lee had two functions, as a browser and as an editor (Berners-Lee, 1999). The commercial and bureaucratic practice of the world wide web has largely reduced its use, for most people, to be a browser and information provider, connected to an email system. Yet, from shared art creation to the political agora of the anti-globalization movement , and to joint engineering of networked corporate labs, the Internet is quickly becoming a medium of interactive communication beyond the cute, but scarcely relevant practice of chat rooms.
The third feature of new information and communication technologies is their flexibility, that allows the distribution of processing power in various contexts and applications, such as business firms, military units, the media, public services (such as health or distant education), political activity, and personal interaction.
The Rise of the Network Society
Every new social structure has its own genesis, dependent on spatio-temporal contexts. Naturally, there is a relationship between the historical process of production of a given social structure, and its characteristics.
So, how the network society came to be? At its source there was the accidental coincidence, in the 1970s, of three independent processes, whose interaction constituted a new technological paradigm, informationalism, and a new social structure, the network society, inseparably intertwined.
- First, the industrial model of development hit the wall of its limits to increase productivity growth as the organizations, values, and policies of the industrial society could not manage the transition to knowledge-based productivity growth by using the potential unleashed by information and communication technologies. However, a crisis of the mode of development is translated specifically in the crisis of the model of accumulation that is dominant in each time and space.
- There was a second social trend, quite independent from the crisis of industrialism, Keynesian capitalism, and Soviet statism: the alternatives projects and values emerging from the cultural social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. These movements (whose first symbolic manifestations can be traced back to the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in 1964 and to the May Movement in Paris in 1968), were, fundamentally, freedom-oriented. They were the affirmation of a culture of personal freedom and social autonomy, both vis a vis capitalism and statism, challenging the conservative establishment, as well as the traditional left. They were profoundly political in their implications, but they were not oriented towards the state or preoccupied with the seizing of state power. For the analytical purpose of this chapter, what must be retained is that these social movements were cultural, that is oriented towards a transformation of the values of society. And the key values that were put forwards, and ultimately created a new culture around the world, were three: the value of freedom and individual autonomy vis a vis the institutions of society and the power of corporations; the value of cultural diversity and the affirmation of the rights of minorities, ultimately expressed in terms of human rights; and the value of ecological solidarity, that is the reunification of the interest of the human species.
- There was a third component of the process of multidimensional transformation, engaged in the 1970s. This was the revolution in information and communication technologies that led to the constitution of informationalism as a new technological paradigm, as presented earlier in this chapter. I will add three remarks concerning the relationship between this technological revolution and the processes of capitalism restructuring and cultural social movements that, together, constitute the crucible from where originated the network society.
The Network Society: structure, dimensions, dynamics
A Global Society
Digital networks are global, as they know no boundaries in their capacity to reconfigurate themselves. So, a social structure whose infrastructure is based on digital networks is by definition global. Thus, the network society is a global society.
However, the network society diffuses selectively throughout the planet, working on the pre-existing sites, organizations, and institutions which still make most of the material environment of people´s lives. The social structure is global, but most of human experience is local, both in territorial and cultural terms.
Thus, in theoretical terms, the network society must be analyzed:
- first, as a global architecture of self-reconfigurating networks constantly programmed and reprogrammed by the powers that be in each dimension;
- second, as the result of the interaction between the various geometries and geographies of the networks that include the core activities, that is the activities shaping life and work in society;
- and third, as the result of a second order interaction between these dominant networks, and the geometry and geography of disconnection of social forms left outside the global networking logic.
Two theoretical remarks are necessary to complete this analysis.
- On the one hand, structures do not live by themselves, they always express, in a contradictory and conflictive pattern, the interests, values, and projects of the actors who produce the structure while being conditioned by it.
- On the other hand, the inclusion/exclusion in the network society cannot be assimilated to the so-called digital divide, as the use of the Internet, and the connection to telecommunication networks does not guaranty the actual incorporation into the dominant networks or counter-domination networks that shape the society.
What is value in the Network Society?
It is value what the dominant institutions of society decide that is value.
Thus, given the variety of the potential origins of network domination, the network society is a multidimensional social structure, in which networks of different kinds have different logics of value making. The definition of what constitutes value depends on the specificity of the network, and of its program.
Work, Labor, and Class: The Network Enterprise ant the New Social Division of Labor
The crucial matter has always been how this work is organized and compensated. The division of labor was, and still is, a measure of what is valued and what is not in labor contribution.
The most fundamental divide in the network society is what I have conceptualized, schematically, as:
- Self-programmable labor has the autonomous capacity to focus on the goal assigned to it in the process of production, find the relevant information, recombine it into knowledge, using the available knowledge stock, and apply it in the form of tasks oriented towards the goals of the process labor.
- On the other hand, tasks that are not valued are assigned to generic labor, eventually replaced by machines, or decentralized to low cost production sites, depending on a dynamic, cost-benefit analysis.
Autonomy and self-programmable capacity in labor would not yield their productivity pay off it they were not able to be combined with the networking of labor. Indeed, the fundamental reason for the structural need for flexibility and autonomy is the transformation of the organization of the production process. This transformation is represented by the rise of the network enterprise.
Financial valuation determines the dynamics of the economy in the short term. But in the long run, everything depends on productivity growth. This is why the source of productivity constitutes the corner stone of economic growth, and therefore of profits, wages, accumulation, and investment. And the key factor for productivity growth in this knowledge-intensive, networked economy is innovation (Lucas, 1999). That is in the capacity to recombine factors of production in a more efficient way, and/or produce higher value added in process or in product.
The new economy of our time is certainly capitalist, but of a new brand of capitalism. It depends on innovation as the source of productivity growth. On computer networked global financial markets, whose criteria for valuation are influenced by information turbulences. On the networking of production and management, internally and externally, locally and globally. And on labor that is flexible and adaptable in all cases. The creators of value have to be self-programmable, and able to autonomously process information into specific knowledge. Generic workers, reduced to their role as executants, must be ready to adapt to the needs of the firm, or else face displacement by machines or alternative labor forces.
In this system, rather than exploitation in the traditional sense, the key issue for labor is the differentiation between three categories: those who are the source of innovation and valuation; those who are mere executants of instructions; and whose who are structurally irrelevant, either as workers (not enough education, living in areas without the proper infrastructure and institutional environment for global production) and as consumers (too poor to be part of the market).
Communication, Media, and the Public Space
The media system is characterized by global business concentration, by diversification of the audience (including cultural diversification), by its technological versatility and channel multiplicity, and by the growing autonomy of an audience that is equipped with the Internet, and has learned the rules of the game – namely, everything that is a collective mental experience is virtual, but this virtuality is a fundamental dimension of everybody´s reality.
Power in the Networks
There can be bargaining, but in the last resort, there is power when regardless of the will of someone (a person, a social group, a category of people, an organization, a country, and the like) it must submit to the will of the power holders – or else, be exposed to violence, under different forms.
In a world of networks, the ability to exercise control over others depends on two basic mechanisms:
- the ability to program/reprogram the network (s) in terms of the goals assigned to the network (programmers)
- and the ability to connect different networks to ensure their cooperation by sharing common goals and increasing resources (switchers)
Power and Counter-power in the Network Society
Processes of power making must be seen from two perspectives:
- on the one hand, seizing and/ enforcing power;
- on the other hand, resisting to power, on behalf of interest, values, and projects that are excluded or underrepresented in the programs of the networks
They do however operate on the same logic. This means that resistance to power is effected through the same two mechanisms that constitute power in the network society: the programs of the networks, and the switches between networks.
Space of Flows and Timeless Time
As with all historical transformations, the emergence of a new social structure is linked to the redefinition of the material foundations of our existence, space and time. In social theory space can be defined as the material support of time sharing social practices.
- The space of flows refers to the technological and organizational possibility of practicing simultaneity (or chosen time in time sharing) without contiguity. Most dominant functions in the network society (financial markets, transnational production networks, media networks, networked forms of global governance, global social movements) are organized around the space of flows.
- Timeless Time. The relationship to time is defined by the use of information and communication technologies in a relentless effort to annihilate time by negating sequencing. On the one hand, by compressing time (as in the split second global financial transactions or in the effort to fight “instant wars”). On the other hand, by blurring the sequence of social practices, including past, present, and future in a random order, like in the electronic hypertext, or in the blurring of life cycle patterns, both in work and parenting.
Space and time are redefined at the same time by the emergence of a new social structure and by the struggles over the shape and programs of this social structure. In a sense, space and time express the culture(s) of the network society.
Culture in the Network Society
All societies are cultural constructs, understanding culture as the set of values and beliefs that inform and motivate people´s behavior. So, if there is a specific network society, it should be a culture of the network society that we could identify as its historical marker.
But in terms of the theory, this is my proposition: the culture of the global network society is a culture of protocols of communication enabling communication between different cultures on the basis, not necessarily of shared values but of the sharing the value of communication. This is: the new culture is not made of content but of process.
Conclusions: the practical consequences of theoretical mistakes
Knowledge and information have always been essential sources of productivity and power. So, what is different? It is the technology, of course. But it is also the networked social structure, and the specific set of relationships implied in the networking logic.
If, instead, we identify our society as a network society, in the precise sense defined and elaborated in this chapter, we must place at the center of the analysis the networking capacity of institutions, organizations, and social actors, both locally and globally. Connectivity and access to networks becomes essential. The proper combination between information and communication technology, development of human capacity to take advantage of the full potential of these technologies, and organizational restructuring based on networking, becomes the key to ensure productivity, competitiveness, innovation, creativity, and, ultimately, power and power sharing. If we conceive the global network society as something else than telecommunication networks, if we recall the interactive, multinodal logic of the Internet, then it is possible to design communication systems for inclusion and collaboration.
Chapter 13. e-health network and social transformation: expectation of centralization, experience of decentralization pp.293-318. Katz, J.E.; Rice, R.E.; Acord, S.K. Chapter link
The chapter is organized around four analytical themes:
- (1) There has been substantial resource commitment, resulting in the creation of many useful centralized services (some commercial, some governmental),
- (2) However, despite their utility, perceived and actual inadequacies of these services have stimulated disparate groups to organize their own compensatory, decentralized and local networks of health information resources.
In both centralized and decentralized Internet health resources, though, there are still many issues to be resolved, such as:
- (3) Reconfiguring physicians/patient relationships in the light of new technology
- (4) Creating socially sensitive e-health services that are also socially equitable in terms of accessibility.
To examine some of the ways in which people try to use the Internet to serve their own needs, and how, when doing so, they bump against the logic and vested interest of health institution and information systems. Inescapable questions underlie these themes:
- The inherent bureaucratic logic of one-way information flow
- To survive, organizations must attend to their vested interests.
The syntopian perspective rejects both dystopian and utopian perspective on the social use and consequences of information and communication technology. Rather, it emphasizes how people use and reinvent technologies to make meaning for themselves relative to others. Hence, while possibilities are limited by the nature of the given technological tools, systems and their use are (potentially) surprisingly flexible. Thus technology becomes altered by individuals needs and social contexts.