NETWORK SOCIETY

THE NETWORK SOCIETY BEYOND MYTH

FINDINGS OF SCHOLARY RESEARCH

BY SHILLA FLORA .M. BAPRM 42669 (24^th May)

In the early years of the 21st century, the network society is not the emerging social structure of the Information Age: it already configures the nucleus of our societies. Indeed, we have a considerable body of knowledge gathered in the last decade by academic researchers around the world on the fundamental dimensions of the network society, including studies that show the commonality of this nucleus across cultures, as well as the cultural and institutional differences of the network society in various contexts. It is unfortunate that the media, politicians, social actors, business leaders, and decision makers continue to talk about the information society or the network society or whatever they want to call it, in terms that are those of futurology and uninformed journalism, as if the transformations were still in the future, and as if technology was an independent force that has either to be denounced or worshipped. Traditional intellectuals, increasingly unable to understand the world we live in, and thus undermined in their public role, are particularly critical of the advent of a new technological environment without actually knowing much about the processes on which they elaborate their discourses. In these views, new technologies destroy jobs, Internet isolates, we suffer from an overload of information, the digital divide increases social exclusion, Big Brother extends its surveillance thanks to more powerful digital technologies, technological development is controlled by the military, and the tempo of our lives is relentlessly accelerated by technology, biotechnology leads to human cloning and to major environmental hazards, Third World countries do not need technology but the satisfaction of their human needs, children are increasingly ignorant because they are messaging and chatting instead of reading books, nobody knows who is whom in the Internetwork efficiency is hampered by technology that does not rely on human experience, crime and violence, and even terrorism use the internet as a privileged medium, and we are rapidly losing the magic of the human touch. We are alienated by technology. Or else, you can reverse everything I just wrote in the opposite sense, and we will enter the paradise of human fulfillment and creativity induced by technological wonders, in the mirror version of the same mythology, this time propagated by consultants and futurologists, often on the payroll of technology companies and yet we know reasonably well the contours of the network society. There is in fact a big gap between knowledge and public consciousness, mediated by the communication system and the processing of information within our mental frames. The network society, in the simplest terms, is a social structure based on networks operated by information and communication technologies based in microelectronics and digital computer networks that generate, process, and distribute information on the basis of the knowledge accumulated in the nodes of the networks. A network is a formal structure (see Monge and Contractor, 2004). It is a system of interconnected nodes. Nodes are, formally speaking, the points where the curve intersects itself. Networks are open structures that evolve by adding or removing nodes according to the changing requirements of the programs that assign performance goals to the networks. Naturally, these programs are decided socially from outside the network. But once they are in scripted in the logic of the network, the network will follow efficiently these instructions, adding, deleting, and reconfiguration, until a new program replaces or modifies the codes that command its operational system