Societies in Transition to the Network Society

Societies in Transition to the
Network Society

Several analysts have put forward the idea that societies are currently experiencing significant change characterized by two parallel trends that frame social behavior: individualism and communalism (Castells, 2003b).
Individualism, in this context, denotes the construction of meaning around the realization of individual projects. Communalism, in turn, can be defined as the construction of meaning around a set of values defined by a restricted collective group and internalized by the group’s members.
Various observers have looked at these two trends as potential sources of disintegration of current societies, as the institutions on which they are based lose their integrating capacity, i.e. they become increasingly incapable to giving meaning to the citizens: the patriarchal family model, the civic associations, companies and, above all, representative democracy and the nation state.

 These institutions have been, to some extent, fundamental pillars of the relationship between society and the citizens throughout the 20th century (Castells 2003; 2004, Giddens 2000). However, another hypothesis is possible. Perhaps what we are witnessing is not the disintegration and fractioning of society, but the reconstruction of the social institutions and, indeed, of the structure of society itself, proceeding from autonomous projects carried out by society members. This independence (i.e. independence from society’s institutions and organizations) can be regarded as individual or collective, in the latter case in relation to a specific social group defined by its autonomous culture.

In this perspective, the autonomization of individuals and groups is followed by the attempt to reconstruct meaning in a new social structure on the basis their self-defined projects. By supplying the technological resources for the socialization of the projects of each individual in a network of similar subjects, the Internet, together with the mass media, becomes a powerful social reconstruction tool and not a cause of disintegration. This social (re)construction, giving rise to the new structure, will not have to follow the same values logic of the late industrial society.

However, as the Internet is a technology, its appropriation and domestication (Silverstone 1994) may also take place in a conservative way and thus act merely to perpetuate social life as it had already existed.

The examples are manifold. If we wish to expand our field of vision we can look at the Internet as, for example, an instrument for the maintenance of a patriarchal society rooted in a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, when we see it being used for the recruitment of volunteers for al-Qaeda, or as an instrument for the perpetuation of old public administration models, when the websites of the ministries offer nothing more than the telephone numbers of the various services, in what amounts to the mere substitution of the yellow pages, in hardcopy form, by hypertext in a closed institutional circuit. Or when we limit ourselves to constructing a personal page in which we center content around our own personality and identity without any connection to any entities to which we belong or are affiliated, thus rejecting the logic of sharing in a network of interests.
By Msele Musa
BAPRM 42626