The Network Society E-Book

Darin Barney

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Key Concepts
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 327

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In The Network Society, Darin Barney provides a compelling examination of the social, political and economic implications of network technologies and their application across a wide range of practices and institutions.

Are we in the midst of a digital revolution? Have new information and communication technologies given birth to a new form of society, or do they reinforce and extend existing patterns and relationships? This book provides a clear and engaging discussion of these and other questions. Using a sophisticated model of the relationship between technology and society, Barney investigates both what has changed, and what has remained the same, in the age of the Internet.

Among the issues discussed are debates concerning the emergence of a 'knowledge economy'; digital restructuring of employment and work; globalization and the status of the nation-state; the prospects of digital democracy; the digital divide; new social movements; and culture, community and identity in the age of new media.

This book provides an accessible resource for a thoughtful engagement with life in the network society. It will be essential reading for students in sociology and media and communication studies. This will be a valuable textbook for undergraduate students of sociology and media and communication studies.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

KEY CONCEPTS

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1 Network Society

What is in a name?

The network society

Conclusion: The spirit of informationalism

2 Network Technology

Theories of technology and society

Technological outcomes

From network technology to network society

3 Network Economy

Networks and globalization

A new economy?

Network enterprise

Network work

Network property

4 Network Politics

Globalization: from nation-state to network

New media, new politics

Network technologies and democracy

5 Network Identity

Identity versus networks

Identity as network

Network community

Network culture

6 Conclusion

References

Index

KEY CONCEPTS

Published

Barbara Adam, Time

Alan Aldridge, Consumption

Colin Barnes and Geof Mercer, Disability

Darin Barney, The Network Society

Mildred Blaxter, Health

Steve Bruce, Fundamentalism

Anthony Elliott, Concepts of the Self

Steve Fenton, Ethnicity

Michael Freeman, Human Rights

Fred Inglis, Culture

Anne Mette Kjær, Governance

Michael Saward, Democracy

John Scott, Power

Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism

Copyright © Darin Barney 2004

The right of Darin Barney to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2004 by Polity Press Ltd.

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 0-7456-2668-8

ISBN: 0-7456-2669-6 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3710-5 (Single-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3709-9 (Multi-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to several colleagues and friends whose insightful conversation contributed to my understanding of the questions driving this volume. These include Mary Stone, Leslie Shade, Peter Hodgins and Tom Goud. I must also acknowledge the patience and good judgement of the editorial team at Polity Press, especially Andrea Drugan, Ann Bone and Claire Creffield, and the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, whose suggestions improved its quality immeasurably. Finally, I would like to thank the students who have graced my classrooms at the University of New Brunswick at Saint John, the University of Ottawa and Harvey Mudd College. Their appetite for clarity is responsible for whatever is intelligible in the pages that follow. This book is dedicated to them.

1

Network Society

Like moths to a flame, ambitious minds seek out the spirit of their age. A spirit is a vital or animating principle: in the enchanted vocabulary of the ancient faiths, spirit comports with the soul and is ageless; in the enlightened vocabulary of modern science, the term spirit names a motive force particular in time and place. Thus, the political economist Max Weber, searching in 1904 for the ‘spirit of capitalism’, employs distinctly modern language in describing spirit as ‘an historical individual, i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance’ (1958: 47). Weber understood both the religious and the secular dimensions of spirit but, as a social scientist, his aim was to gather the particularities of his historical situation and abstract from these a concept that would articulate the principle animating human practices and relationships in that moment. Weber’s great insight was his conceptualization of modernity as an ‘iron cage’ populated by ‘specialists without spirit; sensualists without heart’ (1958: 182). The spirit of industrial capitalism was, in Weber’s estimation, spiritlessness: modernity culminates when ascetic devotion to profit as an end in itself recedes into a rather vulgar and progressive technological materialism. The principle animating the modern world is revealed by an eclipse of faith in the possibility of a transcendent animating principle. Paradoxically, the spirit that breathes life into modern industrial society also drives the spirit out of the human soul.

Few moths have come as close to the flame, or captured the spirit of their age so precisely, as Weber did his. Nevertheless, there have been attempts. Presently, one of the more ambitious and intriguing efforts to conceptualize the spirit of the contemporary era is gathered under the phrase ‘the network society’. In simple terms, this thesis asserts that the spirit of our age is the spirit of the network: the constitutive principles of networks have become the animating force of individual, social, economic and political life, and this marks the distinction of our period in history. Manuel Castells, the Catalunyan sociologist whose three-volume study of the economy, society and culture of the information age was a singular moment in the articulation of this idea (1996; 1997; 1998), puts the matter as follows: ‘as a historical trend, dominant functions and processes are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power and culture’ (1996: 469).