Week12. Society of communicated networks

Having discussed about how the 'new' media in the times of rapid social change (e.g.urbanization and the mass society) have been viewed in the classical studies, this week we are dealing with our own time. And not surprisingly, it is a time of even more rapid social change, and our own 'new' media Internet is playing a big role in this.

"The Internet Galaxy" is a work that efficiently introduces us into the whole scope of the implications of Internet on our society. It is one of the rare works that is quite a few years old and still not outdated, on a subject of such rapid ongoing changes. It is because this work digs into the most fundamental features of the Internet as a media paradigm, from the very bottom. On the other hand, many Internet related studies never bother to ask how the Internet itself was born, how it is structured, and on which kinds of social/cultural contexts, focusing only on the surface of current events (Partly due to the fact that many social scientists are afraid of the 'technical aspects'). Castells takes a broad view on the history, geographic status quo, political economical aspects, community related notions and underlying issues such as digital divide. In short, he describes the Internet as a feature of the whole system of the society, just as McLuhan did with print and TV.

There are two major implications we could find from this book. One is Internet as a concrete medium, or rather a network that facilitates many forms of media and communication patterns. Internet, as it is the case with everything else, is the result of actors and events in a concrete Bourdieuan 'field'. While many researchers the current form and structure of the Internet as granted, we must consider that it has its own dynamics that come into play and that it necessarily has impacts on the use of it as well.

The other implication is the role of Internet in the social relationships. In doing this, Castells intensively refers to Wellman's concepts of networked individualism. The important notion Castell makes is, that it is not the Internet that gave birth to all that, but functioned as a instrumental tool that facilitates them. Both the 'real-world' social life with its geographic boundaries and the 'purely communicated' social life with its interest-bound bonds have existed, but with the Internet the latter has been able to gain firm ground. Well, at least as long as the human race sticks to its protein-based biological bodies.

Regarding those, my question is how the above mentioned two dimensions of social life can be integrated to form a single unit of 'life' in the individual. I think that for a coherent democratic society to function, the former should not be a substitute or escape from the latter (or the opposite). Communication media such as the Internet should be utilized in a way to bridge the gap between them, thus promoting the firm link of the communicative and the actual life.

PS. One thing I'd like to add from my personal experiences of being involved in the Internet governance process... technocrats (that is, engineers with political inclination) absolutely rule. All the major political requests that the commercial, government or civil sectors raise, can be very easily turned down with one sentence: "You don't seem to know, but that's technically not possible right now".

PS2. Though dealing with the history, even Castells did not dare into the concrete technical visions and aspects of the Internet. A very easy and short history of the Internet that includes the technical aspects as well, can be found in the book "Reinventing Comics" (McCloud, S. 2000, Harper Perenial).