Summary: The Network Society

A. Society

Network: a structural condition whereby distinct points (nodes) are related to one another by connections (ties) that are typically multiple, intersecting and often redundant.  
 
A network exists when many nodes are linked to many other nodes, usually by many ties, which cross the ties connecting other nodes.
 
Discourses that try to describe our age:
 
1. Post-Industrialism

• spawned in the 18th century, matured in the 19th and culminated in the 20th.
• an attempt to express the transition of industrial economies and societies into an unknown future.
• Alain Tourain (1971) and Daniel Bell (1973) shift from material manufacturing to service provision as the primary economic activity and source of wealth. The new crucial economic resources are the exploitation of information and knowledge, instead of lab our and capital.  
• social and political hierarchy turned upside down.
• the ideas of the new age were proposed by Daniel Bell as optimistic:

 “Post-industrial society would bring with it a more educated, leisured and engaged    
citizenry, a levelling of economic inequality, a thriving global economy, scientific
advance immune to ideology, and rational management of public affairs.”

• others (Touraine, Marcuse, Ellul) opposed this ideological idea and saw the dangers, they  believed that this development would deepen the alienation of capitalism.  
• others thought there wasn’t a shift from industry to service, but rather simply a transition from ‘one kind of industrial society to another’ (Cohen and Zysman).

2. Information society

• a model for society and economy that revolves specifically around the increasingly flexible functionality of microcomputers.  
• by Japanese scholars, “joho shakai”
• this model represents an echo of the theory of post-industrialism, but one with a sharper articulation of the role of computing technology and knowledge in the abstract form of information.  
• at the core of the information society would be the computer, the fundamental economic function of which would be to augment and replace mental labor, yielding increased leisure and new information-based industries.  
• “Computopia”
• post-industrialism theorists, such as Bell, rearticulated their analyses in the languages of computerization and information.  

Ideas surrounding the ’information society’ quickly transcended their roots in utopian idealism and disinterested social science, and by the 1980’s took the form of a distinct revolutionary doctrine, which has seven elemental believes:

• The world is in a state of fundamental transition/upheaval, similar in kind and  intensity to that experienced in the shift from agrarian to industrial society in the 19th century.   
• The crucial resource of the new society is knowledge/information.
• The primary dynamic force in this revolution/society is technology development and diffusion.  
• The generation of wealth in the information economy has eclipsed that of the material/manufacturing economy.  
• The social transformation accompanying these technical and economic changes is essentially positive.
• The information revolution -technical, economic and social- is planetary in scale.  
• The information revolution is not only a new phase in human civilization but also an evolutionary step toward for life itself.
• The information revolution is irresistible and irreversible 

3. Post-Fordism

• roots lie in the Regulation School of Economy
• Michel Aglietta (1979) and Alain Lipietz (1987) conceives of capitalism as a succession of ‘regimes of accumulation’ comprised of complementary production, consumption and regulatory configurations:  a regime of accumulation (opeenstapeling) combines a particular way of producing goods, a particular construction of the consumer market for these goods and a particular role for state regulation of the market economy.  
• In the late 1960’s social movements rejected the spirits of mass society, Fordism. 

 
Role of the state: to provide conditions for flexibility, innovation and competitiveness.  
 
A retreat of the state in economic matters;

• rapid privatization of state-enterprises
• market deregulation
• decentralization of state authority
• lowering barriers to the mobility of capital and labor
• decreased taxation
• privatizing/devolution of social welfare and security delivery

On the other hand post-Fordist states;

• have played more activists roles in crafting anti-inflationary fiscal and monetary policy.
• subsidized research and development pursuant to innovation
• funded and constructed the technical infrastructure for enterprise
• creating the regulatory conditions for the flexible deployment of labor
• fabricating attractive investment environments to offset the flight of highly mobile capital.  

Post-Fordism regime of accumulation is said to have accomplished the following transitions: 

• from Taylorism and mass production to flexible specialization
• from the mass proletariat to a more flexible labor market.
• from mass, standardized consumption to pluralized customization.
• from the Keynesian welfare state to the neo-liberal competitive state.

The criticism on this model is that:

• they overemphasize discontinuities in capitalist development at the expense of continuities
• they uncritically accept the propaganda of the business elite regarding  enterprise restructuring as evidence of a fundamental shift in the organization of work.  
• they are technologically determinist
• they are more concerned with theorizing the continued stability of capitalism than its inherent  irrationality and injustice.  

4. Postmodernism

• not opposed to modernism, rather hyper modern
• Foucault, Derrida, Lyolard, Baudrillard, Deleuze
• at the core of modern political thoughts lies Thomas Hobbe’s assertions that truth and falsehood are a function of names rather than nature, and that power rather than justice is the central preoccupation of political life.  
• in the post-modern view, truth is neither metaphysical unity nor correspondence to the observed material world; it is instead simply the regularized and institutionalized product of human discourse, which is itself an outcome of the operation of power in human relationship.  
• truth is a reflection of power
• the closest connection between postmodernism and the network society thesis arises in the context of anti-essentialist conceptions of the human identity.

Human identity is thus contested, contextual, multiple, fragmentary and transient.  
 
5. Globalization
 
In the 1990’s  
 
Core; the claim that nation-states are being challenged in their capacity to organize and
contain core elements of modern economic, political and social life. The source of this
challenge lies in these three realms:

• economic activities once relatively contained within national borders are now prosecuted as if borders were non-existent.  
• Decline of national economies.  
• state political authority once limited only by national geographic boundaries now  finds itself also challenged and hedged by international and transactional regimes.  
• Decline of national political sovereignty.  
• social practices, identities and solidarities once defined by national purposes and parameters are decreasingly characterized or contained in this way.
• Decline of nationally defined social identity and culture.  
• crucial element is the rise of several international and supranational agreements, instruments and institutions charged with managing the mercurial flow of people, commodities and currencies across national borders.
• it is at least conceivable that the open-ended cultural cross-fertilization embodied in globalization is more natural, healthy and liberating than the somewhat artificial construct of insulated national culture could ever be.   

 6. Network society  
 
The discourse ‘network society’ has taken parts of the other discourses and put them together in this discourse.  
 
The phrase ‘network society’ applies to societies that exhibit 2 fundamental characteristics:

• the presence of sophisticated technologies of networked communication and information management/distribution, technologies that form the basic infrastructure mediating an increasing array of social, political and economic practices.  
• the reproduction and institutionalisation throughout and between those societies of networks as the basic form of human organization and relationship across a wide range of social, political and economic configurations.  

 Networks are comprised of 3 main elements:
 
1.  nodes, a distinct point connected to at least one other point, though it often simultaneously acts as a point of connection between 2 or more points.
2.  ties, connecting one node to another.  
3.  flows, are what passes between and through nodes along ties.  
 
Variables that, taken together, condition the character of any given network:

• nodes can be powerful/powerless, active/dormant, stationary/mobile, permanent/temporarily, net sources/net recipients of various kinds of flows.
• ties can be weak/strong, private/public, singular/multiple, unique/redundant, sparse/dense, parallel/intersecting.
• flows can be copious/minimal, constant/intermittent, one-way/reciprocal, uni-/multi- directional, balanced/imbalanced, meaningful/meaningless.

Networks can be:

centralized,       decentralized, - distributed (center less)
 hierarchical,     horizontal,
 bounded           boundless
 finite                proliferating
 accessible        inaccessible  
 inclusive          exclusive  
 intensive          expansive
 interactive        non-interactive
The network society thesis suggests that an increasing number of contemporary social, political and economic practices, institutions and relationships are organized around the network form though the precise configuration and character of these networks vary depending on how they combine the variable qualities of these three essential elements (nodes, ties and flows).
 
In his path breaking formulation of this thesis, Castells (1998) isolates a number of attributes that together give shape to the network society:

• at the economic base of the network society is an ‘informational’ -as opposed to strictly industrial- capitalist economy.
• the economy of the network society is organized, globally, on the network model.   One result of this is a relative decline in the capacity of the nation-state to organize political, economic and social power in the network society.  
• in the network society, human experience of time and space is displaced to ‘timeless time’ and the ‘space of flows’.  
• in the network society, power and powerlessness are a function of access to networks and control over flows.
• the principal source of conflict and resistance in the network society is the contradiction between the placeless character of networks and the rooted ness of human meaning.  

B. Technology

The network society is a technological society.  
 
The word technology is made up out of the ancient Greek words techne and logos.  
Techne refers to the practical arts, those forms of applied knowledge to that, when executed skilfully, typically result in the fabrication of useful things.  Logos refers to ‘the word‘, or speech, and more broadly denotes a reasoned account of a thing, an account that collects particulars into a rational, coherent whole.  The word technology is thus loaded with at least two meanings.
 
Theories of technology and society:
 
Instrumentalism
Technological devices can be employed to achieve a variety of ends, and these ends can be adjudged as good or bad, worthwhile or worthless, but not the technologies itself. The only judgment that can be brought to bear against technological devices is a technical appraisal of their efficiency in meeting their appointed ends.  
 
Substantivism
Beneath the superficial variety of technological instruments and their applications, technology as such has a substantive essence that implicates it in the deepest meaning of human souls, and in the prevailing character of societies where its logic holds sway. Individual devices may be neutral to their instrumental ends, but technology in general embodies and enforces a particular way of being in the world, a
particular conception of human relations. Most Substantivism accounts identify technology with the empire of instrumental rationality, standardization and homogenisation, the celebration of mastery over human and non-human nature and the cult of accumulation and efficiency.  
 
Critic: substantivist analyses are open to the charge that they treat technology as a monochromatic, autonomous force that is external to, and imposed upon, human social relations.  
 
Social constructivism
Technological outcomes are undetermined by the essence of technology and are, instead, constructed via the interaction between the technology in question, and the social relations/ environment in which it is situated.  The destiny of new technology, such as the internet, is no destiny at all: the outcome of
this technology will emerge from ongoing contestation and negotiation.  Social constructivism purports to reintroduce history, culture, contingency, contestation and politics back into the study of technology, and recommends sociological and empirical over philosophical and theoretical approaches to that study.  
There is no such thing as the network society, but there are many network societies, perhaps continuously reinventing and reconfiguring themselves. (Castells, 2001)
 
A composite view
Constructivism is instructive, but not perfect. A viable critical theory of technology must affirm what constructivism has taught us: that crude technological determinism is untenable; that the possibility of contestation, contingency and heterogeneity is always present in technological encounters; and that we must pay strict attention to local differences in technological outcomes. Such a theory must also take into account the limitations of this approach and remain open to the insights to be gained from competing perspectives. It must also be sensitive to the role played in technological outcomes by that which unites one technology to another at a very basic level, and by the peculiarities of technical instruments.  
 
A good composite view should pay attention to the following four factors:
The essence or spirit of network technology
 
There are a few common ideas about the essence of technology:
 
1.  Technology is essentially artificial, whatever specific technologies accomplish or do, they always accomplish something through human ingenuity that nature does not or cannot accomplish or provide on its own, without the intervention of human artifice. The essence of technology is the exploitation, domination or mastery of nature, human nature included. The essence of echnology is to set upon human and non- human nature and demand that they serve as a ‘standing- reserve’ of resources to be exploited (Heidegger). 
2. The essence of technology is instrumental rationality, a type of reasoning in which calculations of the efficiency means eclipse judgement about the worthiness of ends and prescribe human behaviour with considerable insistence. Under the regime of instrumental rationality, what matters is that a given procedure or instrument is the most efficient means to its assigned end, and consideration of ends themselves according to other  criteria serves only to undermine efficiency and progress.
3. The essence of technology is its bias towards abstraction, universalism and standardisation. Technologies prescribe ways of doing things, ways of being in the world, ways of doing things that are abstracted from concrete situations in all their variety. Standardisation is the foundation of technology.  
Technical design
 
The design of technological instruments is never neutral. Technical things have political qualities, and not all of those can be attributed to the social and political conditions in which the technology is situated (Winner). Technical artifacts can be said to ‘have politics’ in two distinct sense:
 
1. In the first instance, ‘the invention, design or arrangement of a specific device or technical system becomes a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community’.
2. In the second sense, technological designs are sometimes understood as inherently political, insofar they ‘appear to require or to be strongly compatible with particular kinds of political relationships’ (Winner). Here, technical devices and systems are not as flexible or open to alternative social and political
consequences, but are needed for the political bonds with their voters (for example).  
 
Situation of network technology
 
This third element at play in the determination of technological outcome is situation, which is meant to gather the various social, political and economic aspects of the contexts in which technologies and their use are situated.  
 
Technologies do not develop, and are not used in a vacuum. Instead technological outcomes have a historical and sociological character. They are developed and used in the context of a pre-existing social, political and economic relationships, network of actors, and conditions that enforce various priorities and norms of the technology and its elaboration in practice.  
 
According to Castells, it is the complementarily of these technologies and these contextual factors that produces the outcome that is ‘a new social structure predominantly based on networks’.  
 
Under certain situational conditions, technological deployments lead to particular outcomes that might not arise under other situational conditions. Also, certain situational conditions can undermine the potential of alternative deployments and uses of the same technology.  
 
Situation factors into the determination of the design choices that determine the technical configuration of technological instruments.  
 
The context in which network technology is situated are multiple, diverse and complex.  
 
Uses of network technology
 
A substantial portion of the social effect of a given technology can be accounted for by the manner in which the technology is actually used by individuals and groups in concrete social situations. It can be argued to day that it is the character of a technology’s everyday and extraordinary uses that determines its ultimate, lasting character. 

In many cases, uses are prescribed, standardized and adopted by individuals who assume the posture of consumers in choosing either to use the technology in the manner prescribed, or not to use it at all. In other cases, users intervene and appropriate the technology for purposes other than those prescribed.  
 
From network technology to network society
Some ways in which technological qualities of digital information and communication networks have been linked with fundamentally new conditions for human sociability typically associated with ‘the network society’:
 
Time - space compression
physical distance and the passage of time seems shorter, at least insofar as activities involving communication are concerned.  
 
Deterritorialization
there has never been a mass communication that seems so little contained or constraint by territorial expanse.  
 
Decentralization and control
there is not one point where a message is send to a receiver.  Interactivity and customization.  

C. Economy

The network society is a species of capitalism, not a new economic system.  Castells: “the rise of the network society is linked to the expansion and rejuvenation of capitalism, as industrialism was linked to its constitution as a mode of production.”  The distinction here between change at the level of form and practice, and continuity at the level of substance is the key. These changes must be situated within an
appreciation of certain basic continuities in the substance of capitalism, to which these same technologies also make a significant contribution.  
 
Capitalism is the major element of the context in which the development of network technology, and the society it mediates, is situated. Network technology, and the network society, reflect and confirm the dynamics and parameters of life under a capitalist technology.  
 
Five aspects of the relationship between network technologies and late modern capitalism:

• Globalization;
• Network economy;
• Network enterprise;
• Network work;
• Network property.

Globalization
 
Economic globalization refers to the transactional organization of capitalist firms, production, finance, services, trade, investment and markets, made possible in part by a variety of international economic agreements in which constituent nation-states have agreed to relax nationally specific controls on a wide range of economic activities.  
 
According to Ronald Deibert, there is a definite historical ‘fitness’ between the ‘hypermedia environment’ and the shift from a modern, nationally organized political and economic order to a post-modern, globally organized one. This fitness manifests itself in a few ways:

• these technologies are instrumental to the operation of the global economy, providing for an infrastructure and control technology for the execution and coordination of economic activities that are territorially disaggregated and dynamic.
• these technologies are similarly indispensable to the operation of the global system of finance and capital circulation.  
• digital communication technologies are central to the production and circulation of the branded entertainment and information commodities that increasingly drive the consumer end of the global economy, and contribute to the maintenance of a global commercial culture that operates notwithstanding national particularities.
• the globalization of the capitalist economy on the model of market liberalism also sets the conditions under which network telecommunication technologies have been developed and deployed.  

Network technologies have been a crucial enabler of the globalization of the capitalist economy; they are also subject to, and situated within, the limitations and direction imposed by that economy.  
 
The regime of global neo-liberalism that has prevailed since the 1980’s, is characterized by four primary orientations:
 
1.  the privatization of public enterprises.
2.  the liberalization of markets.
3.  a reorientation of the goal of state regulation away from securing the public interest against market failure and towards creating a hospitable climate for investment and enterprise.  
4.  the commercialization / corporatisation of the public sector.  
 
New Economy
 
The basis of economic life has shifted dramatically, not from capitalism to some other system, but rather from an economy driven by the resource extraction and industrial manufacturing to one driven by the circulation and application of knowledge. Services take up a central role in the economy, and information and knowledge assume apparently new prominence as productive resources and commodities.  
 
These ‘new economies’ are characterized by a considerable variety of indicators, most of which are somehow related to the expansive economic role played by new information and communication technologies, these include:

• escalating productivity of technology sectors and technology-intensive industries;
• growing markets for commodified information/knowledge products and services;
• transactional organization of firms, markets and services;
• increased technological mediation of commercial and financial activity (ie ‘e- commerce’)
• elevated importance of skills education and training (ie ‘lifelong learning’)
• continued growth of service/information-processing employment;
• restructuring of work and employment in response to the imperatives/possibilities of information technology;
• innovation and research and development as drivers of economic growth and competitiveness;  
• proliferation of new models of ‘flexible’ production and management;  
• growing ‘digital divides’ between those who are positioned to take advantage of network technology and those who are not. This refers to that feature of the new economies whereby material and political polarization intensifies between those who are effectively integrated into technological an economic networks and those who are excluded from them. This polarization pertains internationally between individuals within economically advantaged countries, between regions within countries, and internationally between affluent and poor countries.  

Critics:  

• Many people contest the notion of a new, knowledge-based economy. Some think it trades on a dubious conception of knowledge (knowledge as information, skill/expertise, technology/technique).
• Others feel that the idea of a knowledge economy exaggerates the purported demise of capitalism’s industrial base, which remains central to most capitalist economies, even those where new technologies are widely present.  
• Others argue that every economy is a knowledge economy, to the extent thatno effective execution of human labour is possible without an organization of the knowledge entailed in that effort.  
• Finally, critics charge that the rhetoric of the ‘new economy’ obscures the basic continuities of the old capitalist economy that are present even in technologically saturated technologies.  

To serve a knowledge-driven economy, education must be more carefully articulated with the needs of enterprise and industry.  
 
Network Enterprise
 
The network is the enterprise.  
 
“The organizational from built around business projects resulting from the cooperation between different components of different firms, networking among themselves for the duration of a given business project, and reconfiguring their networks for the implementation of each project… Thus, the network enterprise is neither a network of enterprises nor an intra-firm networked organization. Rather it is a lean agency of economic activity, built around specific business projects, which are enacted by networks of various composition and origin… While the firm continues to be the unit of accumulation of capital, property rights and strategic management, business practice is performed by ac-hoc networks. These networks have the flexibility and adaptability required by a global economy subjected to relentless technological innovation and stimulated by rapidly changing demand. “ (Castells)
 
The network enterprise is a deterritorialized network of networks of economic nodes, a formation whose architecture resembles that of the advanced digital communication technologies that make it possible.   
 
These constellations are comprised of overlapping intra- and inter-firm production and distribution networks, temporary strategic and sectoral alliances between large (even competing) firms with common interests, and relatively immediate relationships between vendors and consumers.  
Flexible, just-in-time production and delivery systems, novel marketing strategies aimed at maximizing consumers’ perceptions of personalization and customization within the framework of a familiar brand, and horizontal management strategies aimed at melding limited autonomy for nodes (ie, workers, managers, partners, ‘teams’) with enhanced centralized control, these arrangements make for a mode of
organization agile enough to thrive under the conditions of post-Fordist, global capitalism.  
 
1.  internal decentralized networking of large firms;  
Flattened horizontal networks of interdependent, self-managing ‘teams‘. The traditionally,  hierarchical organized firms are not flexible enough to adapt quickly to changing demand cycles, markets and technological innovations. 
2.  multilocational, segmented production and distribution;  
The chain of production is multilocational, transactional networks, with various elements of a finished product produced and assembled in a multiplicity of locations. 
3. networks of small and medium-sized firms linked to larger networks;
the network model does not only apply to large firms, transactional firms, but also to small and medium-sized firms that specialize in certain niche areas and make their profits by connecting to larger networks that contract for their products and services, either as individual nodes or as part of small constellations of nodes with other small firms.
4. sectoral-level strategic alliances and project-driven, ad hoc ventures between firms;
When competitive firms have a common goal (ie reducing costs) they work together to achieve this goal, and then move on again. 
5.  networks of synchronous interactivity between consumers/customers and vendors/firms;  
the flow between the consumer nodes and the enterprise nodes are reciprocal; it is not just that consumers receive flows (products); they also contribute flows (information) that become crucial in the success of the entire enterprise, and are necessary for the mass personalization and short product cycles upon which  the entire model sits.  
 
Crucial to the success of this model has been the proliferation of digital information and communication technologies.  
 
The relationship between the new technologies and the reorganization of economic technologies is a reciprocal one, with the new organizational form demanding enhanced communicative capacities, and the technological innovations rising to meet these demands in turn spurring further refinement and entrenchment of network logic on an organizational level.  
 
These new information and communication technologies form the indispensable infrastructure of the network enterprise, whereby economic activity can be dispersed in decentralized, dynamic networks of operation that nevertheless remain firmly under centralized surveillance and control.  
Network work
 
The new technologies destroy jobs.
 
Because tasks that once required a direct application of human labour can now be accomplished entirely by a computerized device, by fewer employees because of the productive efficiencies afforded by computerization, or by management remotely using a computer.  
 
The new technologies, on the other hand, create jobs.
 
It is the characteristics, rather than the level, of employment in societies where network technology has proliferated that are significant. Several trends in trends in this regard:

• the phasing out of agricultural employment and a steady decline in manufacturing jobs;
• the rise and diversification of the service sector as the dominant source of employment;
• the simultaneous expansion of upper and lower levels in the occupational structure, yet the rate of the expansion in the upper registers of the occupational structure is outpacing growth at the lower registers, resulting in a “relative upgrading of the occupational structure over time” (Castells).

Digitalisation has affected the nature of work performed in the economy as much as the quantity of employment.  
Flexibility in human labor;
achieved through the reconstitution of work and workplaces according to the network model and the mediation of work by digital network technologies. The network society has succeeding in the defining flexibility as a condition of security, and anything that compromises flexibility as security’s enemy.  
 
All these different work types area best described as non-standard forms of employment:

• part-timework and temporary work
• self-employment and episodic contract work, consulting or ‘freelancing’  
• the temporal and spatial dislocation of work
• eclipse of lifetime career in a single occupational trajectory or firm
• increasing social emphasis on the value of so-called ‘lifelong learning’

The individualization of work has two faces:

• one face for those who either choose it freely or are positioned to capitalize on its potential for autonomy and satisfaction
• a second face that presents itself to those have no choice but to settle for non-standard work involuntary, and to those who lack the means to make this situation a healthy one. This stimulates also the polarization of the well-educated and the less skilled. 

Network property
 
Network technologies are said to have affected the status of information, knowledge and communication as property and commodities in two contradictory ways.  

• In the first place, these technologies and the markets in which they are situated,  have provided the means and incentive for a historically unprecedented expansion of the co modification of information and knowledge.  
• In the second place, the technical attributes of network technology are such that control over these commodities, which is crucial to their status as property exchangeable for money or other property, had purportedly been destabilized.

What we have witnessed in the information age is a remaking of information as property, despite its potential free availability. The network economy is therefore not exactly the same as the capitalisms that
have preceded it historically.  

D. Politics

Three paths:

• an examination of the purported demise of the nation-state as the primary container of political power, organization and practice in the present era;
• an account of the ‘new politics’ presented as definitive of the political condition of the network society;
• assessment of the democratic prospects of political life in the network society.

Sovereignty; refers to the holding and exercise of supreme political power, the power to make judgements that are binding on others and the power to act to enforce compliance with compliance with those judgements. Sovereignty denotes the power to rule.  
 
The normative principles upon which the modern system of stated would be based:

• territorial sovereignty,
• the formal equality of states,  
• non-intervention in the internal affairs of other recognized states,
• state consent as the foundation stone of international legal agreement.

The state is the entity that has jurisdiction over activity within a given territory, including the exclusive right to act coercively, if alternative means of socialization, persuasion or inducement fail, to enforce that jurisdiction.  
 
That a state enjoys a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory is crucial, because it is this combination of monopoly and a fixed boundary that generates the exclusivities that define the sovereign authority of the state. The state is sovereign when it enjoys exclusive, ultimate authority over matters within its borders.  
 
‘A modern nation-state displays a correspondence between sovereignty, territory and legitimacy‘ (Held & McGrew).
 
Within a nation-state, sovereignty can be organized in a number of ways, and vested in a variety of institutions:
 
initially sovereignty was vested in the persons of absolute monarchs.  
 
since liberal revolutions the power of national monarchies has diminished, and sovereignty has been reconstituted in the depersonalised institutions we have come to associate most closely  with the modern nation-state:

• written constitutions and statutes;
• the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government;
• the police and military;
• bureaucratic state agencies. 

Politics refers to the competition to control the institutionalised, sovereign power of the nation state, and the governments that carry that power.  
 
Modern communication technologies have been instrumental to the organization of social and economic activity, and certainly to the exertion and maintenance of sovereign political authority, on a national scale. These modern technologies made possible:

• the more or less simultaneous, standardized communication of political authority from a centralized state apparatus to a national public dispersed across a national territory;
• for those centralized authorities to receive information about compliance or threats (both internal as external), to which they could then more or less rapidly respond.  
• the formation, maintenance and shape out of national public spheres, the political arenas of civil society in which liberal democratic citizenship is enacted, public opinion is formed, and the legitimacy  of sovereign state authority is tested.  

Globalization, the capacity of states to exercise exclusively the ultimate power of judgment and action within their territories has been decisively diminished; sovereignty has become unbundled, as states no longer enjoy the exclusive power to prescribe and proscribe activity within their national jurisdictions. This power is now shared amongst a constellation of domestic and international public and private actors and institutions, ranging from private, transactional corporations to an increasing array of international
policy-making venues (WTO, G8, EU etc).  
 
The roots of globalization lie in the dynamics of deterritorialization. The dynamic of globalization is most evident in the deterritorialization and transnationalisation of economic activity from 1980s onwards.  
 
A number of factors stimulated this process of economic deterritorialization;  

• increased international migration;
• significant advances in transportation and communication technology;

the more or less voluntary decision by prosperous states to ease limits the exercise of their independent sovereign authority might otherwise place on economic enterprise and accumulation within the free market. States have pledged to liberate the flow of economic activity by restricting their own ability to regulate those flows independently in response to domestic pressures or priorities that might not be encompassed by the desire for economic growth.  
The globalization of world economics has purportedly stimulated a deterritorialization of politics. This is manifested in:

• the growth of international institutions which enjoy power and jurisdiction without territory;
• the disarticulation of territory and identity evident in the rise  of international migration and diasporic communities;
• the heightened awareness and salience of territorially indefinite issues such as human rights and the environment;
• the beginnings of a global civil society and possibly even a transactional/deterritorialized public sphere.  

These changes are seen by many as responsible for the democratic crisis that is said to characterize the politics of globalization. This crisis operates on two levels:
 
The level of the nation-state,  
membership in the global economic marketplace is contingent upon a range of commitments made by states to refrain from intervening prejudicially in the flow of a range of economic values. These economic commitments are also political commitments, as they limit states’ ability to secure non-market public goods, and to respond when the democratically expressed will of their citizens directs them to do so.
In many cases these commitments undermine the state’s capacity to deliver the benefits of social welfare and security that have been the cornerstone of the state’s legitimacy since WW2.  
 
The level of the international venues to which its power is apparently shifting,  
 decisions made by institutions (such as the WTO) have a decisive impact upon life in the countries that are subject to them. Most of these institutions lack the institutionalized mechanisms for participation, representation, scrutiny and accountability that are necessary for them to claim democratic legitimacy. 
Critics:  It is important to note that there are many who argue that reports of the demise of the nation-state and its sovereignty are greatly exaggerated. Their arguments:
 
1.  globalization is the continued progress of an old one, the growing economic and political interdependence of nation-states.  
2.  globalization is anything but global, because of the unevenness with which its fruits and burdens are distributed across the planet.
3.  ‘border effects’ continue to contain economies within national territorial, linguistic and cultural boundaries, affording states much more room for political autonomy in relation to economic matters than is supposed in most accounts of globalization. 
4.  regardless of multilateralism (van vele partijen uitgaand) and interdependence, there remain no organizations that rival the interdependent economic and military resources, and so the power, of modern nation-states. 
5. radical critics suggest that globalization is more of an ideological device than a material reality, a discourse generated to obscure the responsibility of states for their commitment to neo-liberal, market capitalism, their abandonment of the welfare state, and their power to reverse these commitments.  
 
Nevertheless, the modern state is increasingly embedded in webs of regional and global interconnectedness permeated by supranational, intergovernmental and transactional forces, unable to determine its own fate.  
 
The account given above of the decline of the nation-state under the pressure of globalization is central to the network society thesis. Castells advances the model of the network as both contributor to, and an outcome of, the state’s descent into powerlessness.  
 
While nation-states continue to exist, and they will continue to do so in a foreseeable future, they are and will increasingly be, nodes of a broader network of power.  
 
It’s from the wreckage caused by the democratic crisis of old politics that the new politics of the network society supposedly emerges. Castells calls this new politics “information politics” and connects it directly to network communication technologies.  
 
Media have become the privileged space of politics.  
 
The new politics is a politics of struggling over information management and control in the ‘space’ constructed by prevailing media of communication, as a necessary precondition of access to more material forms of power.  
 
A minimum condition of political action is access to and presence and/or representation within, the arenas in which these battles are engaged. Not everyone has this access. So the digital divide is at once a technological, economic and political divide. 

There is a struggle in the new politics about the meaning of globalization;  
Globalization as the extension of the rights and freedoms associated with liberal democracy, a sharing of the prosperity associated with market capitalism, rising standards of living, enhanced intercultural understanding and harmony, international peace and global democracy.  
 
This is the meaning preferred by the forces of transactional capital that stand to gain from globalization on the neo-liberal model.  
 
Globalization as the end of national self-determination and autonomy, the triumph of unaccountable transactional corporations and institutions over democratic governments, global dominance of American cultural commodities, a deepening of the dependency and exploitation of the developing world, environmental degradation and an assault on the working people.  
 
This meaning is preferred by the multifaceted transactional social movements that has risen in opposition to these forms.  
 
Network technologies provide resources to both sides in this contest. They provide the infrastructure for the various economic flows of transactional capitalism, and their deterritorializing effects undermine the ability of national governments, democratically accountable to the public interest, to impose limits on those powerful economic actors. Network technologies also provided an opportunity and means for transactional elites to consolidate their control over the global medias cape, through a dramatic
consideration of ownership, through horizontal and vertical integration, across media-platforms, and across the content/carriage divide.  
 
Many new social movements are nationally specific and these have made significant use of networked communication technologies to considerable impact within and beyond their respective borders.  
 
However, it is specifically transactional new social movements whose rise and activity are more strongly identified as definitive of the politics of the network society, largely because these movements are themselves structured as networks.  
 
Dynamic, deterritorialized coalitions of local, national and international groups, each of which represents a node in a complex network whose coordination relies heavily on the communication made possible by digital networks.  
 
There are a lot of opportunities to new social movements by digital information and communication networks. These instruments provide spatially dispersed activist coalitions with the means to accomplish a range of functions that are central to their operations and impact. These include the following 9:
 

• collection, production, archiving and global publication of information resources (especially political material that might not otherwise be disseminated so widely and inexpensively)
• a platform for event promotion, recruitment, fundraising and the solicitation of other forms of support;
• a delivery system for consciousness raising, political education and training
• a means of establishing and maintaining communication links with sympathetic and allied organizations, and the networks of which they are a part;
• a communication system for internal organization, administration, mobilization and coordination of activities;
• a communication system for democratic dialogue, debate and deliberation, contributing to the possibility of a global, democratic sphere;
• a medium for political communication otherwise prohibited by repressive states
• a distribution system for independent media, new reporting and alternative journalism that bypasses corporate-controlled mass media;
• an instrument for engagement in novel forms of direct political action.  

The limits and challenges that high-technology organization and activism present to new social movements;

• the technological, financial and time/labor resources required to mount and maintain an effective ‘digital’ movement,
• issues of privacy and surveillance,
• over-reliance on a technology to which access is far from equally distributed,
• vulnerability to technology failure,
• issues of censorship/freedom of expression.  

Digital networks have done more to help than to harm the proliferation and effectiveness of new social movements and the global civil society into which they coalesce (samenvoegen).  
 
New instruments do not necessarily make for new politics, but the claim that the politics of the network society is ‘new’ rests not only on an account of the character of instruments political actors use, but also on certain assumptions about the object of political action, and the organization of political power. To say that politics is primarily informational is a contestable claim.
Network technologies and democracy:
the arrival of new information and communication technologies was attended b an often euphoric discourse that these would be the instruments of a radical democratic renaissance, and this discourse has proved to be quite persistent.  
 
One of our deepest liberal democratic intuitions is that generalized advance in our ability to gather and share information, and to communicate with one another, stimulates democratic politics. So instruments that expand our access to information and communication, must contribute positively to democracy’s achievements and enhancements. Democracy is a deeply communicative brand of politics. It demands the
communication and exchange of information and views. It demands dialogue, and a public sphere, in which citizens can engage in the practices that define them as citizens and their society as democratic:

• the dissemination of information,
• the expression and consideration of contending viewpoints,  
• rational, critical debate on issues of common concern,
• scrutiny of public authority and policy,
• the presentation and contestation of reasons,
• the holding of officials to account.  

None of the other mass-media has achieved to gain citizen participation in politics, but expectations that the internet will be able to do so remain high. Because of its technical attributes (decentralized architecture and interactive applications) enable practices, that the old centralized, one-way media do not.  
 
Seven contributions the new network communication technologies might make to enhance democratic politics;
1.  More convenient, generalized access to a massive volume of politically relevant information, including information produced by and about government and its critics;
2.  A medium of publication, by a plurality of sources, of a broader diversity of public-interest information than is characteristic of highly centralized, corporate-controlled, commercial mass media;
3.   A powerful, relatively accessible tool of organization, mobilization and action for politically active individuals, groups and organizations;
4.  A means of enhanced, routine, vertical communication between citizens and legislators/officials, enabling improved representation, responsiveness and scrutiny, and heightened accountability; 
5.  A means of enhanced horizontal communication amongst citizens, including expanded opportunities for public dialogue and deliberation on issues of common concern;
6.  A mechanism to enable more direct forms of popular participation in democratic decision-making, such as online voting, and deliberative opinion polling;  
7.  An infrastructure for the erection and maintenance of a more inclusive, politicized public sphere than that mediated by existing, commercial mass media.  
 
There are also substantial reasons to believe that these potentials will not be realized, and that network technologies might just as well serve to reinforce the undemocratic tendencies to contemporary mainstream politics, and perhaps even to  undermine the possibility of their transformation in democratic decisions. For example the role they played in the expansion of globalization.
 
People use the internet sites of established mass information providers (CNN, BBC etc). This suggest that the potential for the internet to deliver plurality of alternative political information is unlikely to be realized.  
 
The governments have been rapid to adopt the network technology for the purposes of more efficient information access and service delivery, but relatively little serious effort at using these technologies to transform practices of decision- and policy-making.  
 
The network model has figured into the processes and practices of government in ways that do represent a potentially significant shift a the rise of so called ‘network governance’. This refers to the distribution of select government functions into multi-sectoral networks that cross the territorial, jurisdictional and sectoral boundaries that have traditionally served to organize these functions.
 
Networks enable governments to better manage the risks and take advantage of the opportunities that economic liberalization and technological change bring… They represent a promising medium through which stated and their international organizations can achieve their mission, maintain their competence in a changing global environment, and serve their citizens in a more effective and legitimate way
(Witte et al, 2002).
 
The network model certainly holds promise for a decentralization and democratisation of governance, but it would be an exaggeration to day that this model has replaced the hierarchical, bureaucratic organization of institutional political authority and power, or that it is necessarily democratic in either intention or outcome. It could be argued that, for example, networked governance represents;

• a significant incursion of private interests into public governance,
• the reorganization of public sector government along corporate lines,
• a strategy for co-opting civil society opposition without significant devolution of power,  
• a style of public management feed from traditional structures of democratic representation and accountability.  

The network model remains as open to undemocratic possibilities as it is to democratic ones. Political parties have embraced new information and communication technologies. In most cases, parties use these technologies in exactly the same way that new social movements do, e-mail and websites are deployed as instruments of publication, recruitment, fundraising, mobilization and organization. Parties also use digital technology to engage in sophisticated information-gathering practices that enable them
to craft highly customized appeals. Also, political party sites enable various forms of interactively. Critics say however, that this last feature is used not enough.  
 
It is far from clear that the use of new information and communication technologies by established mainstream political parties represents a qualitive improvement in the practices of electoral and representative democracy that have been the source of such widespread disaffection in Western liberal democracies.  
 
And even if governments and political parties chose to capitalize creatively on the interactive capacities of digital communication technology to provide for robust, democratic engagement. It is not to say that citizens would take the advantage of this opportunity.  
 
Some say that the internet holds out the promise to act as a radically democratised public sphere, capable even of overcoming the biases and exclusions that undermine existing liberal democratic politics.  
 
There are, however, many reasons to be skeptical of this view:
 
The most likely impact of network communication on the public sphere is that it will contribute to a condition of ‘accelerated pluralism’. Critics worry that the internet will exaggerate the negative aspects of pluralism, whereby the public sphere fragments into many small groups pursuing their private interests against, or in isolation, from others, without really engaging each with others concerning the common good.  
 
The internet can be inclusive in ways that other media are not, it is far from clear that participation in this medium meets the standards of equality necessary to declare it an adequately democratic public sphere. Serious material inequalities characterize access to and use of digital technologies;

• levels of access to the new technologies mirror existing unequal distributions of power and resources in society,
• even those who do have ‘access’ to these technologies are far from equal,
• most users simply do not employ digital technologies in order to engage in the kinds of political activities characteristic of a democratic public sphere. This is a cultural matter, not a technical one.

E. Identity

Identity is the word we use to denote our consciousness of who we are, our sense of our most significant or defining attributes. Identity is comprised of the ideas that others have about you, and the ideas that you have about yourself. Identity is a crucial component of human subjectivity, of the experience of being a conscious actor in the world.  
 
Identity as it is discussed in the discourse surrounding the network society: The logic of identity takes on a particular importance in the network society. The salience of identity is both accelerated by the prevailing conditions of the network society, and also as a crucial source of social and political resistance to these conditions.  
 
Identity is presented as an energetic dialectical force opposing the dislocating dynamics of the network society. This appears in both within and beyond the reach of global networks.  
 
Within this reach, identity emerges as an organizing force amongst those who experience the network society as one in which their autonomy is diminished, in which global forces threaten to reduce their particularity and distinction to homogeneity, and in which the power to define the conditions of their existence is decreasingly located in actors and institutions over which they might hope to have direct influence.  
 
Beyond this reach, identity also thrives in those areas of the world where existence remains intensely local  and membership n the cosmopolitan is not an option, by virtue of systematic exclusion from global technological, economic and political networks. 
The power of identity.  
 
There are two remarkable features regarding identity in network society:
 1. Identity persists as a social force despite the supposedly universalising spirit of global networks, technologies and markets. 
2. The nation-state is no longer the only one, or the most significant mobilizer of identity.
 
The primacy and power of identity in (and against) the network society is embodied and carried by a variety of social movements, some of which are organized nationally but many which are not, and whose bases of identification are many and varied.  
 
There are, according to Castells, three distinct categories of identity
 
Legitimizing identities;  
those induced by a society’s dominant institutions and ideology, in order to reflect, support and rationalize its structure of social roles and relationships. These identities establish the boundaries of civil society in a given context.  The rise of the network society is marked by a collapse of the legitimacy of this kind of identity, as a result of economic globalization, technological dynamism and the declining inclination and ability of nation-states and other traditional institutions to impart to their adherents a sense of autonomy and efficacy, or to deliver the social welfare necessary to secure their ongoing allegiance and consent.  
 
Resistance identities;
formed upon the basis of opposition to, exclusion from, or subordination under the legitimizing identities of a given societies and its institutions. These resistance identities typically congeal around the very bases of their exclusion or marginalized from mainstream civil society: their biology (race sex), their history (class, ethnic or religious minorities), their geography (regional minorities).  Identities of this sort challenge the structure of civil society to become less suppressive of difference, more accommodating and inclusive.
 
These resistance identities are ‘defensive reactions’ against the threats to traditional social organization. These threats motivate social movements built around resistance identities in a variety of forms. These include:

• religious fundamentalisms,  
• ethnic and minority nationalisms,
• territorial communes that cohere around the location of identity at the urban level.  

Project identities;
arise when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society, and by doing so, seek the transformation of the overall social structure. These identities also challenge the legitimacy of civil society as it is constructed by the dominant categories and institutions. They differ from resistance identities in two aspects:

• they do not congeal around categories that simply reflect the bases of exclusion/ subordination coded into the legitimizing identities of a given society, they establish entirely new identity categories.  
• they do not aim at inclusion or acceptance in mainstream civil society as it is constructed, they seek transformation of that society.  

Project identity emerges from the radicalization of resistance identity, when a group of people who are marginalized or subordinated (ondergeschikt gemaakt) in a civil society do not simply seek inclusion, but rather reject the society that rejects them, and seek to transform it. Such project identities are highly self-consciously politicized, and they represent a diversity of ideological positions.  
 
Both resistance and project identities have an ambivalent relationship with the opportunities of network communications:  

• On one hand, movements driven by identities developed in opposition to the ‘new global order’ are, in effect, opposed to the order built by network technology.  
• On the other hand, the relationship between new social movements and new information and communication could be described as umbilical. The powerful impact of these movements has come, to a large extent, from their media presence and from their effective use of information technology. New technologies are fundamental for these movements to exist.  

In Castells’ estimation, hope for social change in the information age lies in the conversion of progressive resistance identities into projects aimed at fundamental transformation.  
 
Identity as network:
Inhabitants of the late modern West have witnessed a gradual eclipse of many of their traditional sources of meaning and identification. The salience of traditional sources of meaning and identity have waned for many people in contemporary, late capitalist societies, leaving subjects with the task of reflexively building, rather than passively accepting, their identities. Post-modern identity is constructed as a complex pastiche of relationships, choices and acts, enacted in a variety of parallel and overlapping
contexts. It’s artificial, fluid, contingent, multifaceted and mutable. Post-modern identity is a lot like a network.  
 
Computers change our selves by providing us with a novel instrument for the self-directed social construction of our selves (Turkle).  Several of the technical affordances of the network media environment lend themselves to the postmodern identity as described by Turkle:

• The dislocated, deterritorialized character of network communications, which diminish geographic location as a decisive factor in the determination of identity.
• Network communication is disembodied, and does not require physical co-presence for routine interpersonal interaction.
• Networks are opaque (ondoorzichtige) media that cannot be seen through. This opacity effectively eliminates the impact of visual apprehension of physical appearance and behavior which have traditionally been strongly tied to identity.

Identity and community:
Identity and community are organically related, and communication technologies have long been identified as central to the constitution, maintenance and character of communities.  
 
As people less and less occupy a localized, common physical space, communication technologies (in a sense) become the space of community. On the other hand, it has been argued that the proliferation of communication technology is implicated in what is best understood as a long-term decline in the vitality of community in the modern West.
 
Communication technologies, notably television, have been identified by some as having a delocalising, atomizing, privatizing effect that, far from making meaningful community possible, fatally weakens it. Technologically mediated communities are not communities at all. They are rather at best ‘pseudo communities’, which have the appearance, but not the substance of genuine communities (Beniger).   
 
Communication networks provide venues for sociability and for developing and representing identity. Some common characteristics of online communities:

• communication is their core and definitive activity.
• membership is voluntary and easily revocable.
• basis of relationship is a shared personal interest, rather than some form of obligation.  

Digital networks strengthen communities:

• The advent and spread of network technology brings with it the promise of a rejuvenation of community engagement and solidarity.
• Virtual communities overcome the obstacles of scale, including time, distance and population size.
• More meaningful because they are volitional (vrijwillig), rather than based on the arbitrary foundations of geographic proximity, common ethnicity or shared ancestry.
• Less hierarchical and less discriminatory, more equalitarian and inclusive than traditional communities, where recourse to visual markers of identity often results in prejudicial exclusion, silencing and mistreatment.  
• It makes it far easier to enter and exit at will than is possible in offline communities.  
• Anonymity
• Integration

Digital networks weaken communities:

• Undermine rooted ness in place and body that is necessary for a robust experience of, and commitment to, community
• Further encourage withdrawal from civic engagement offline, and a deepening of social life
• Fragment general interest and shared experience
• People withdraw from ‘real’ relationships.  
• Anonymity of interaction erodes the foundation of responsibility, accountability and social trust upon which meaningful communities are built.  
• Dislocation

The most likely effect of network communication on community is that it will contribute to an ‘accelerated pluralism’, in which ‘thin’ communities (associations of individuals whose private interests are complementary) will proliferate but ‘thick’ community (wherein members collectively pursue goals beyond the sum of their mutual private interests) is unlikely to be enhanced.  
 
Castells: Digital networks facilitate networked individualism.
 
We might say that digital technology is the perfect instrument for networked individuals to imagine themselves as communities. It is perfect because social relationships based on the network model require communication that can be maintained in the context of individual mobility, and despite spatial and temporal dislocation of nodes.  
 
The defining practices and activities of life in the network society are decreasingly located in consistent, enduring proximity with others and, in societies where everything is on, open and for sale all the time, we also decreasingly share temporal rhythms with others. Digital technology contributes to this dislocation, but it also provides the means to connect or communicate with others, similarly dislocated, under these conditions.  
 
Identity and culture:
Our understanding of culture has become very expansive, encompassing cultivated behaviors enacted by an identifiable group of people; any set of shared, routinized social practices, whether institutionalized or not; any set of learned ideas, values, norms, beliefs, habits and traditions; any set of symbolic or communicative representations of the foregoing. Culture consists of patterns, behaviors, symbols and
artifacts.  
 
Cultural systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of human behavior and symbolic action, and on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further behavior and symbolic action as a way of life and as a system of meaning.  
 
The advent of digital network technology is widely believed to be involved in nothing less than a cultural transformation. It has transformed fundamental parts of life: how we work and play, how we communicate and consume, even how we understand politics and participate in public life.  
 
The culture of the internet is shaped by the values of the technology’s producers and initial users. The culture of internet, according to Castells, is one of openness, freedom and voluntary cooperation, built upon four layers of definitive users:
 
1. Techno-elite culture, is one of openness, determined by a technomeritocratic (technologische prestatiemaatschappij) culture rooted in academia and science. This is a culture of belief in the inherent good of scientific and technological development as a key component of the progress of humankind.  
2. Hacker culture, the loose affiliation of programmers who creatively and collaboratively built on the academic and scientific roots of the internet to produce the various programming languages, protocol and applications that now form the infrastructure of the internet (email, web, browsers).  culture is freedom; to create, to appropriate whatever knowledge is available, to redistribute this knowledge under every form and channel chosen by the hacker. Other values are spontaneous voluntary cooperation, anti-commercialism, and hostility to property and propriety relations and institutional power.  
3. Virtual communitarian culture, arose from the online social formations established by early users of the internet, many of which were born of the counter cultural movements and alternative lifestyles of the late 1960s.  Two major, common, cultural features: 

• the value of horizontal free communication, global free speech that circumvents the communicative dominance (and censorship) of media conglomerates and government bureaucracies,
• the value of self-directed networking: the capacity for anyone to find his destination on the net and, if not found, to create and post his information, thus inducing a network.  

4. Entrepreneurial culture,  
the culture of business entrepreneurs and venture capitalists responsible for disseminating internet technology to society at large. Its cornerstone values are the high value placed on ideas, knowledge and innovation.  
 
These four cultures articulate to form internet culture (Castells):  
the culture of the Internet is a culture made up of a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology, enacted by communities of hackers thriving on free and open technological creativity, embedded in a virtual network aimed at reinventing society, and materialized by money-driven entrepreneurs into the workings of the new economy.  
 
Post-materialist values include meaningful work (over basic job security); environmental protection (over economic growth); sexual equality (over traditional family roles); cosmopolitanism (over national identity); tolerance of diversity; secularism and free expression (over religious authority); and participatory democracy (over deference and bureaucracy). Norris’s hypothesis is that, given the demographic profile of internet users (affluent, educated and young), the culture of internet users is
particularly post materialist in its value/ideological structure.  
 
Norris’ conclusions: “The cyber culture sympathizes with the values of openness, freedom and tolerance, on both the social and economic agenda, perhaps reflecting the broader ethos of individualism and alternative lifestyles that seems to flourish online.”
 
The American and European internet users have many similarities: they posit (veronderstellen) a certain kind of freedom as the core cultural value of internet users.
 
Network technology infringes on culture in a variety of ways, and there are numerous possible ways of interpreting the cultural condition of the network society:

• Digital technology is an instrument of the global homogenisation of culture, the erosion of national and local cultural distinctions, the extension of American mass entertainment and consumer culture into every corner of life in every corner of the world.  
• Some celebrate the digitally mediated globalization of culture as a universalization of the values of freedom and democracy.  

The internet contributes to a fragmentation of common culture into a patchwork of cultures. Most of what was/is culturally significant about communication media before internet is that they were mass media capable of constructing mass audiences and mass consciousnesses. It was the ability of these communication media to gather and construct mass audiences that made them:

• economically significant as industry (because mass attention could be sold to advertisers)
• politically significant as tools of administration and propaganda
• culturally significant as a source of widely shared systems of meaning, symbolic interaction and socialization.  

Digital media have technical characteristics that undermine the mass media model. The internet is a mass medium, in the sense that it reaches increasingly massive populations. But it does not construct its users as a mass audience that pays attention to the same things at the same time. The technical characteristics enable customization or personalization of cultural consumption. There are a few reasons for this:

• the decentralization of production/distribution to the networked desktop personal computer has produced an explosion of highly varied cultural material accessible from multiple decentralized sources
• digitisation of material makes for ease of copying, alteration, appropriation anddistribution in ways unintended by the originator of the material
• digital interfaces increase the role of individual preference signaling and choice making (and unpredictability) in the reception of cultural information
• the a-synchronic nature of the medium enables physically dispersed users to engage in cultural consumption at times of their own choosing
• digitisation has also enabled an overcoming of the ‘bandwidth’ limitations that previously kept the channels of cultural transmission to a relative minimum, and so increased individual choice.  

There are many possible interpretations of this dynamic of fragmentation:

• some people say that the claims of the demise of the mass audience under the auspices of the internet are greatly exaggerated. They argue that the internet will just be experienced as yet another medium of mass culture. At most, fragmentation means the reorganization of the mass audience into more precisely defined niche markets ripe for more customized marketing strategies. 
• some are pleased to witness the demise of mass culture: an artificial, industrial product that has robbed popular culture of its authentic, diversity and dignity, and turned it into a commodity, or a propaganda device that generates meaningless spectacle, soul-destroying entertainment, false consciousness and political disempowerment. The internet provides the means for an explosion of authentic,diverse, non-commodified cultural practices and forms. 
• many see in the technological fragmentation of culture the demise of the particular virtues of a common culture. The internet disinter mediates culture, allowing a degree of customization and personalization that radically curtails our exposure to diverse cultural practices and artifacts, and undermines the common cultural experiences that might cultivate attention to widely shared common goods. The internet is the perfect instrument for the extension of a culture of radical individualism, narcissism and idiocy. A culture that presumes that there is no such thing as culture, only self determined individual choices, freely undertaken.  

F. Conclusion

Names have a performative aspect: they are not just labels, they also make things happen.  
 
So we must not only consider whether ‘the network society’ is a name that accurately describes the characteristics of contemporary society, but also the performative operation of this name as an active part, rather than a neutral description, of the historical dynamics currently under way.  
 
It is too soon to evaluate how well the network model describes the society that we live in. the network society thesis is neither right nor wrong, it is simply premature, and it is history and not us that will decide whether it is a name that sticks.  
 
Castells’s theory of the network society identifies five attributes as definitive of the contemporary situation, each enabled by the proliferation of networked information and communication technologies:

• A shift in capitalist economies from industrial to an informational base
• The organization of capitalist economic activity globally, on the network model
• Reorientation of the temporal and spatial organization of human activity, in response to technologies that enable real-time communication across vast distances
• Distribution of power based on access to networks and control over flows
• Tension between localized human identity and placeless networks.  

Intellectuals, including Castells, have begun to refer to networks not simply as a sociological reality that we should recognize, but also as a ‘superior organizational form’ upon which an entire socials order can, and probably should, be built. In this respect, the discourse of the network society takes on ideological proportions.  
 
The network society is not just a descriptive name. It is also an elaborate discourse that, in purporting simply to describe a set of contemporary social dynamics, provides a script that sets out roles, norms expectations and the terms of dialogue. As an alleged fact, the network society becomes the standard for what is normal, desirable and for what we can reasonably expect.  
 
At its most advanced level of articulation, the discourse of the Network Society not only normalizes present conditions, but also justifies political, social and economic measures that might otherwise be negotiable. 

The network thesis as a tool of                 The rhetoric of the Network Society as an
investigation and interpretation.      Vs     ideological discourse that serves a
performative                                              prescriptive function.

Year of summary

• Deze samenvatting is geschreven in collegejaar 2012-2013.