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Connectedness, Global

Connectedness and globalization are closely linked, in the sense that a growth in international and transactional activities leads to greater connectedness across borders. This network phenomenon exists at the personal, organizational, and nation-state levels, and it implies ties to other people, groups, firms, and agencies abroad. Connectedness, greatly facilitated by the Internet, social networking sites, and mobile devices, involves not only the number of connections but also their reach and volume in terms of a multiplex transnational network. David Held differentiates among the following:

  • Extensity as a measure of the geographical stretching of activities, indicated by the number of “nodes” (organizations, networks, and people) that constitute the overall spread of connections. Extensity refers to the range of globalized social structures generated by such ties across the different continents, countries, and regions of the world.
  • Intensity or the overall density of the network among entities in terms of the number and types of connections involved among the various nodes they constitute. Intensity indicates how densely elements are connected among each other.
  • Velocity of the overall network as a measure of the frequency with which connections are made or used among network nodes. Velocity refers to the volume of interactions among actors and organizations. It is a flow measure.

Examples include trade networks, supply chains and distribution channels, epidemics, commercial flights, academic conference circuits, migration patterns, communication flows, and friendship and acquaintance networks. Transnational corporations, states, nongovernmental organizations, activist networks, and individuals—all participate and communicate in a plethora of international exchanges, conventions, meetings, organizations, coalitions, and above all networks of all kinds, serving as the infrastructure of global regimes and allowing for the travel of flows of a variety of types (e.g., money, goods and services, knowledge and information, people, and drugs).

Background

Connectedness is a central theme in the study of globalization. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislav use the metaphor of the “woven world” to express how transnational actors connect formerly disparate entities and issues, so that everything becomes relevant everywhere. James Roseneau describes global governance as a framework of horizontal relations between states and between nonstate actors. Held's notion of global governance denotes a complicated web of interrelated global issue networks. Ulrich Beck proposes to examine the scale, density, and stability of regional-global networks, the social spaces they create, and the cultural images they carry. In his view, the continued expansion and contraction along local-global axes creates patterns of varying density and centrality in these global networks. Most notably, Manuel Castells argues that networks increasingly form meta-networks at the transnational level and create a system of decentralized concentration, where a multiplicity of interconnected tasks takes place in different sites. Since the 1970s, Castells points out, enabling technologies such as telecommunication and the Internet brought about the ascendance of a network society, whose processes occur in a new type of space, which he labels the “space of flows.” This space, comprising a myriad of exchanges, came to dominate the “space of places” of territorially defined units of states, regions, and neighborhoods as a result of its greater flexibility and compatibility with the new logic of network society. Nodes and hubs in this space of flows construct the social organization of this network society. For Castells, this new space is at the core of the globalization process—and for understanding global civil society within the larger process of a shift from “place” to “flows,” networks are the central concept.

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