Network Society

The network society is an emerging societal structure where human relationships are increasingly organized around technologically assisted information “flows.” This spaceless and timeless world without boundaries has transformed elements of human identity, relationships, consumption, and work. It is also changing worldwide economies and state powers. It has created unprecedented opportunities while sharpening inequalities related to technological access. Consumer culture both modifies and is modified by the network society.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, e-mail and Internet chat rooms, and a host of other activities that mediate interpersonal communication by way of electronic technology are all part of the network society. In many ways, the network society is the consumer culture of many portions of the developed world. On a microlevel, routine solo shopping may turn into a technologically assisted long-distance interpersonal interaction. If an American shopper takes a cell phone picture of a computer that she wants to purchase, e-mails it to her friend in Denmark—whom she knows only through Facebook and who is also shopping for computers—and then calls, texts, or e-mails about the prospective purchase, these friends have joined technological interaction with consumption. Rather than meeting face-to-face, the shopper and her friend are connected through technology even as they go about their other consumption activities. Indeed, their consumption activities are likely to be modified by their communication. A network society has also changed the ways in which people meet each other. For example, in the United States, it is now estimated that about 30 million people meet romantically online through paid social networking sites (Madden 2006), and the number is expected to increase. As these examples demonstrate, the network society is embedded in various consumption activities, perhaps inseparably so.

The network society is also a change in which whole societies operate. For example, monetary systems are so tied into one another electronically that a problem that occurs in one industry in one country can and will have an impact on the global economy because of transaction speeds and electronic wealth that the network society promotes. Clear evidence of this has been seen recently in the United States with [Page 1037]the housing crisis that had a domino effect throughout the global economy, devaluing the U.S. dollar as it went.