Castells represented 500 page of network goodness, and I savored (quickly) every morsel. I struggled to limit what I planned to include in this week’s mindmap, settling on a tried and true method: I use the table of contents to organize my new nodes.

Mindmap #11: The Network Society. Adding in Castells’ The Network Society (Popplet).

I linked Castells to Foucault, Latour, and aspects of ecology.

I found Castells’ depiction of the network enterprise as a virtual culture similar to Foucault’s (2010/1972) desire to “restore to the statement the specificity of its occurrence… it emerges in its historical irruption” (p. 28). Castells (2010) writes about the network enterprise that it “learns to live within this virtual culture. Any attempt at crystallizing the position in the network as a cultural code in a particular time and space sentences the network to obscelesence, since it becomes too rigid for the variable geometry required by informationalism” (p. 215).

I found Castells’ description of mega-cities quite similar to Latour’s description of individuation through increasing nodal connections. Latour (2005) writes about the emergence of the actor-network, “it is by multiplying the connections with the outside that there is some chance to grasp how the ‘inside’ is being furnished. You need to subscribe to a lot of subjectifiers to become a subject ad you need to download a lot of individualizers to become an individual — just as you need to hook up a lot of localizers to have a local place and a lot of oligoptica for a context to ‘dominate’ over some other sites” (p. 215-6). Castell’s identifies three characteristics of mega-cities in the space of flows, the third being “connecting points to the global networks of every kind; the Internet cannot bypass mega-cities: it depends on the telecommunications and on the ‘telecommunicators’ located in those centers” (p. 440).

And I found Castells’ closing statements about social action similar to a couple of our definitions of ecology, especially to Spellman’s focus on the relationship of the organism to the environment. Spellman (2007) writes that “ecology is the study of the relation of an organism or a group of organisms to their environment. In a broader sense, ecology is the study of the relation of organisms or groups to their environments” (p. 4). Castells (2010) uses a very similar formulation for his definition of social action: “social action at the most fundamental level can be understood as the changing pattern of relationships between nature and culture” (p. 508). As ecology studies relationship patterns among groups and environments, social action studies relationship patterns among culture and nature. This similarity, like the others, suggests (along with the book’s extensive bibliography) that Castells has incorporated ideas from many different sources in articulating this theory of network society.

Once I made those connections, I suggested that Castells offers theoretical, but not an operationalized, theory of the network society; his study of society is used to produce his theory, but he pointedly avoids using the theory to operationalize or predict anything about the network society.

Finally, I decided that the IT revolution is the “event” that triggered the emergence of the network society; without the IT revolution, there is no network society. All of the aspects of the network society, depicted in the table of contents — the global informational economy, the network enterprise, the transformed labor force, real virtuality, the space of flows, and timeless time — all rely on the advances brought about by the IT revolution for their existence.

I found Castells delightfully cogent and engaging. This is surely because of my engagement in a profession that relies on the IT revolution for its existence, but I also found intriguing connections to our emerging understanding of networks as they relate to English studies and to my own nascent ideas about the role of boundaries in network formation and nodal connectivity.

References

Ahlefeldt-Laurvig, F. (2009, December 17). The global society [Creative Commons licensed illustration]. Retrieved from https://flic.kr/p/7oxX6G

Castells, M. (2010). The rise of the network society [2^nd edition with a new preface]. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Foucault, M. (2010). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language. (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published in 1972)

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies

Spellman, F. R. (2007). Introduction. In Ecology for Nonecologists [pp. 3-23]. Lanham, MD: Government Institutes