Network Society

The term network society appeared with the 1991 publication in Dutch of Jan Van Dijk's book De Netwerkmaatschappij that was subsequently translated into English as The Network Society in 1999. When it was first published, Van Dijk's book reflected the growing ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) across increasing realms of economy, culture, and society. From stand-alone desktop computers that were a prominent feature of ICT development in the 1980s, the interlinking or internetworking of computers (desktops and larger mainframe systems) through the telephone system was the basis of both the Internet and the network society more generally. This growth of computing and information sharing and the rapid shift towards the networking of their diverse applications were part of a larger economic transformation that had begun in the 1970s. At this time, economies based upon planned and managed Fordist, or assembly-line production, began to introduce more market-oriented production based upon free market competition.

A key thinker in the initial conceptual formulation of the network society is Manuel Castells and his three-volume work The Information Age. Central to this transformation was the salience of digitally encoded information as the primary driver for economic, cultural, and social change. This occurred because within an increasingly competitive global system, knowledge began to replace labor as the most valuable component, and consequently, the production of services, as opposed to manufacturing, became centrally important. For Castells, the nature of this change constituted a technological revolution, a paradigm shift of the kind articulated by Thomas Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Castells termed this the information technology paradigm and in his The Rise of the Network Society, extended the idea that saw the cheap economic input of information as the most significant feature of change.

Castells identifies five primary features of the information technology paradigm: (1) information is the raw material of new forms of production and consumption, (2) digital information is all pervasive, (3) the logic of digital information affects society, (4) flexibility is a fundamental part of what information enables, and (5) networked information tends to converge into highly integrated systems. The network society is a product of these processes; networks provide the basis for organizing and expansion in the information age. The expansion of computing was due to the enabling effects of the networking process itself—the ability to link and spread and diffuse information flows on an unprecedented scale.

According to Dan Schiller, it was this logic that transformed capitalism, gave the momentum that popularized the Internet, and provided the ideological basis for a globalization based on neoliberalism, which he argues is oriented more towards profits than the needs of people. In other words, this information-networking logic has contributed to a digital divide in which the economic and social benefits of the network society have failed to reach large numbers of people in developed and developing economies. Notwithstanding the uneven development of the network society, multinational corporations were still effectively able to transcend space and time through the use of networkable technologies. According to Jeremy Rifkin, rapidly globalizing corporations such as Microsoft and Intel were able to develop and utilize networks not only to become more flexible in their production systems, but also to become increasingly free from the restrictions of place or territory and to become both global and virtual because their principal assets are information and knowledge.

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