The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy by Manuel Castells
The term Network Society was originally used in Norwegian by Stein Brater in 1981. It was used in Dutch by Jan Dijk in 1991 and popularised by Manuel Castells in the ‘Rise of the Network Society,’ in 1996, in the first part of his trilogy, ‘The Information Age’.
The relationship between society and technology is always reciprocal, with one nourishing or destroying the other. But of late, society or rather, social needs, values and interests, have been influencing technology on an unprecedented scale. Eg; the Increasing rate of crimes, particularly against women has been the driving force behind several of the newly developed personal safety apps available on mobile phones. This provokes and justifies the statement, that technology is society.
A new form of social organisation has come into existence, based on digital technological systems of communication networks which can be called the Network society. Many sociologists call, the 21st-century society, knowledge or information society, but such a description is inaccurate because human society has always grown around knowledge or information. A more appropriate label would be informational society, which means a social organisation in which information generation, processing and transmission become the fundamental source of productivity and power because of new, technological conditions that have emerged during this period.
Networks have been in existence, since humans pre-historical hunter-gatherer days, but they were space-bound; simple and largely confined to the personal life of individuals. Later in the sphere of public affairs, as in the state, church, army, corporation, they were nearly always vertically oriented and not very vast. But the micro-electronics based digital technology of the current era has proliferated and thickened the networks to such a degree and given new capabilities to the social organisations to such an extent as to truly make today’s society, a network society.
The spread and increased use of digital technology gave birth to binary views, initially in the 1980s. Importance was given to the Dystopian view, which lamented the loss of modern individuals privacy and jobs, drastic reduction in reading habits, overload of information, social exclusion, isolation, fast-paced life, environmental hazards, cyber crimes and violence. But in the later 1990s the Utopian vision, gained importance, which hailed increased security with biometrics, creation of new jobs, exposure to greater vistas of knowledge, the proliferation of social networking sites, greater empowerment of the individual and so on. In the 21st century, we have been able to develop a more balanced or Syntopian view, which accommodates both perspectives.
Networks at all Social Levels
There is a world system of societies. It can be divided into political, economic, cultural and social systems. These systems could be divided into societies, which consists of groups, communities, organisations etc. They can in turn be divided into individuals. Digital Technology has brought about radical decentralisation, within such networks, making individuals relatively autonomous and decision making a shared activity. This does not mean that the network society has spread evenly throughout the globe. All though digital communications, transcend national boundaries eg; financial transactions through e-banking; assimilation of culture, or dissemination of knowledge and information through social networking sites, transmission and sharing of audio and video clippings in real-time, through the internet etc and have the capacity to create a globally networked society, there are still many pockets in the world that remain outside digital technology. In that sense, network society excludes as much as it includes.
Traditionally, we have tended to consider, the growth of human society as an evolutionary phenomenon. Led by the power of reason and strengthened by the ideology of Marxism, human beings progressed from nomadic existence and survival to an agricultural society; thereafter to an industrial society and later to an informational society. While this has made life more dignified, human beings have also used the newly acquired powers for destructive purposes as well. The world wars, global warming, pandemics etc revealed this ugly truth. They also point out that in an increasingly networked society, no effect of action can be localised. Eg; the massive spread of the airline network that connects the entire planet has increased our mobility and efficiency, but at the same time caused the diffusion of deadly diseases like Ebola and Covid-19.
Cybercrimes like hacking can cause the crashing of large volumes of communication networks. Digitally aided crimes like international terrorism, affect innocent victims by the millions, cutting across all national boundaries. It is therefore essential to take a Syntopian view of the effects of global networking, taking into consideration, the positive as well as the negative repercussions of the phenomenon. We should also properly understand its capabilities and its real power to modify, create and destroy our lives and thereby master our own condition. Merely providing the physical infrastructure to people for digital networking, will not be of any consequence. Technological know-how has to be imparted, existing skills have to be constantly upgraded and most importantly, a conducive political climate has to be created and sustained, to keep the network operational and available to all. That is despotic regimes can cause shutdowns of these networks, thus denying, potential beneficiaries of the power that this technological development can confirm.
Findings of Scholarly Research
Network Economy or New Economy
The new economy has come into existence, due to the confluence of three factors:Generation and diffusion of new and innovative, microelectronic or digital technology of information and communication.
The growth of highly educated autonomous labour that adapts itself to suit the demands of the changing economy.
Spread of this new form of techno-economic organisation, as a result the rate of productivity in the network economy, in the US, in most European countries, Japan, China and India have increased substantially.
The vertical integration of the production of the industrial era has given way to:
Decentralisation of large corporations into networks of semi-autonomous units.
Formation of networks of small and medium firms that maintain autonomy and show flexibility to become providers and subcontractors to the large corporations.
The partnership between the large corporations and the small and medium firms to execute specific projects causes the continued convergence and dissolution of the networks.
The major part of labour in this economy is spent, in the development and design of products such as software and information files. Although the cost of developing them is high, creating many digital copies takes only a small effort. This is opposite to goods in the material economy, where high productivity require additional labour, capital, raw material and transport in the process of reproduction.
This development while creating new jobs has virtually destroyed certain occupations ie; the traditional typist cum secretary; cost massive layoffs ie; with digital technology requiring fewer hands in the various phases of production and distribution and considerably weakened the concept of a stable and predictable professional career.
Workers now tend to get only temporary employment or part-time work; they are fired and hired according to the demands of the project. To survive in the labour market, workers have to constantly reskill themselves, upgrade their ability and prepare for mobility. The workers themselves have to become autonomous and form part of self-programmable labour. With acquired skills, they enjoy good bargaining power in the market.
Workers can be innovative and productive, only if they are assured of the stability of a job and the employer or management are prepared to give autonomy to workers so that they can be more productive. The feminisation of labour is also an important new component of the network economy.
Trade unions play a different role in the network society. They might become beacons of resistance to economic and technological change, or powerful actors of innovation on the new meaning of work and wealth creation in a production system based on flexibility, autonomy and creativity.
The network society is hypersocial and not a society of isolation. We know from studies in different societies, that in most instances, Internet users are more social, have more friends and contacts and are more social, have more friends and contacts and are more social, have more friends and contacts and are more socially and politically active than non-users. People by and large do not fake their identity on the Internet, except for some teenagers experimenting with their lives.
The emergence of networked individualism is another major change in sociability. The social structure and historical evolution induce the emergence of individualism as the dominant culture of our societies and the new communication technologies perfectly fit into the mode of building sociability along with self-selected communication networks, depending on the needs and moods of each individual. So, the network society is a society of networked individuals.
A central feature of the network society is the transformation of the realm of communication, including the media. While interpersonal communication is a private relationship, shaped by the actors of interaction, media communication systems set the relationship between the institutions and organisations of society and people at large, not as individuals, but as a collective receiver of information, even if ultimately information is processed by each individual according to her personal characteristics.
The new communication system is defined by three major trends:
Communication is both global and local, generic and customized, depending on markets and products. It is largely organized around media business conglomerates that are local and global at the same time and are in turn linked to media organisations around the world.
The communication system is increasingly digitized and gradually interactive. In other words, the new media allows much greater integration of all sources of communication into the same hypertext. So digital communication becomes less centrally organized but absorbs an increasing share of social communication into its logic.
It allows the emergence of self-directed mass communication. It is mass communication because it is diffused throughout the Internet, so it potentially reaches the whole planet. It is self-directed because it is often initiated by individuals or groups by themselves, bypassing the media system. The explosion of blogs, vlogs, podding, streaming, and other forms of an interactive, computer to computer communication sets up a new system of global, horizontal communication networks.
The political process is transformed under the conditions of the culture of real virtuality. Presence in the media is essential for building political hegemony or counter-hegemony and not only during electoral campaigns. But at the same time, media politics and image politics lead to scandal politics, the kind of politics at the forefront of the political process almost everywhere in the world.
The rise of a new form of state is another important factor in the network society. This is related to globalization, which is the formation of a network of global networks that link selectively across the planet all functional dimensions of societies. The most integrated and significant example is the European Union. In addition, nation-states have spurred several formal and informal international and supranational institutions that actually govern the world. Not only the UN and various military alliances but also the International Monetary Fund and its ancillary agency, the World Bank, the G-8 and several ad hoc groupings are included in this category.
Furthermore, to connect the global and the local, nation-states have asserted or fostered a process of decentralization that reaches out to regional and local governments, and even to NGOs often associated with political management. Governance is operated in a network of political institutions that shares sovereignty in various degrees.
Key Policy Issues in the Network Society
The public sector should play an important role as a decisive actor to develop and shape the network society. The reform of the public sector commands everything else in the process of productive shaping of the network society. This includes the diffusion of e-governance which includes citizen participation and political decision-making; e-health; e-learning; e-security; and a system of dynamic regulation of the communication industry; adapting it to the values and needs of society.The social change epitomises a new kind of worker, the self-programmable worker, who is flexible and rooted in values able to adapt to changing cultural models. There should be a total overhauling of the school system for this to happen in all its levels and domains. This refers to new forms of technology and pedagogy, but also to the content and organisation of the learning process.
The new informational model of development redefines the condition of shared growth in the world. In fact, hundreds of people have benefitted but at the same time, a large number is left behind. The correction of this massive exclusionary process requires concerted international public policy acting on the roots of the new model of development (technology, infrastructure, education, diffusion and management of knowledge) rather than just providing for the needs arising from social exclusion in the form of charity.
Creativity and innovation are the key factors of value creation and social change in our societies but it is stalled by the legislation of property rights inherited from the industrial era. International agreements on the redefining of intellectual property rights, starting with the well-rooted practice of open-source software, are a must for the preservation of innovation and fostering creativity.
Creativity Versus Rentier Capitalism
Existing social systems can stall the dynamics of creativity. This was the case of the statist system of the Soviet Union. Now rentier capitalism, that is the power to control in the hands of a few, appears to be blocking the development of a new frontier of expansion of innovation. The power of Microsoft in contrast to other capitalist business models like IBM is an example. Thus reform of capitalism is also possible in this domain, including new models of intellectual property rights and diffusion of technological development responsive to the human needs of the whole planet. But at the same time, the governments across the world praise these benefits and yet they fear to lose control of information and communication in which power has always been rooted.
