Looking on the technological progress we have made and how much our societies changed because of it there is a real question As a result of this changes and how technology became to us necessary every single day do we live in a Network Society The expression itself has been coined in 1991 and was related to the social political economic and cultural changes caused by the global spread of digital information s and communication devices This idea goes back to the work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who was analysing the modernisation and industrial capitalism on complicated trends of affiliation organization production and experience But one of the people which provided a framework to understand the Network Society is Manuel Castells which I will talk about later in this essay
Globalization is one of the trendy political as well as academic debates since the 1970s everything often to everything from a new cutting edge communication technology to the increasing number of McDonalds Restaurants in China In general globalization is used as a short term to refer to social fact that people cultures communities and economies around the world became more interconnected than ever The reason why I mention globalization is because it's similar to the Network Society They are both rather vague terms even in social scientific discussions Some social theorists argue that the speed of social life over the past few decades has increased so much that social spaces has become Compressed and even annihilated Things such as internet allow us to communicate virtually with anybody in the world at any time w want
And cities such as New York Honk Kong and Singapore became Global Cities in which the commerce as well as culture from very different part of the words feel interconnected in one space Globalization is what challenges our most fundamental distinctions about politics and social life as well as distinction between local and global domestic and foreign national and international So many things fit in into globalization rubric that it's really difficult to understand what exactly it means Castells himself argued that that globalization is a network of production culture and power which is constantly shaped by the advances in the technology which includes communication devices as well as genetic engineering Castells YEAR He also argues that the Information Age the world became flat he argues that with that we are faces with new global form of exclusion and inclusion There is no doubt that the internet has changed the way how we live and how our societies function since the last century
However does that mean we now live in a network society because of all those changes In these day and age our societies are characterised by the new flows of ideologies labour capital cultures international production systems and communal movements which are coming from the current globalisation Because of that our world has seen incredible changes in many fields Technology lost it s old fashion image as being complex impersonal machines and instead they become devices interlinked with our day to day lives For example the internet is an endless source of fun as well as knowledge and information s We are at this point where technology and internet are working together to form new habits for a newer generations which have not been possible in the past Machado 2017 For instance a nationwide newspaper announced that they will be only publishing their content exclusively online Independent 2016 as they realised that the big majority of their readers were online so it was much cheaper for them to go digital Those sort of changes could be seen as turning our society into network society But is it really In the last two decades the phenomenon of online network and the effects it can have on societies has been studied and theorized for even longer One of the most important names in this field of sociology is Manuel Castells which is known for his Network Society theory
Before we examine this theory we must look at what Network itself is As described by David Beer and Nicolas Gane in their book New Media They Key Concepts When we hear the word network we associate it with the technology often an internet However network itself has a complex history throughout many different academic disciplines which include Anthropology economics and sociology Beer and Gane 2008 For the purpose of this essay I will look at migration of concepts metaphors and networks from the mid 1990 which were passed on from the computer engineering into the social and cultural science to find out whether we live in a network society A defining feature of the new media technologies is that they can interact with each other and because of that the function as in networks As William Mitchell in his book Placing Words notices how the digital technology rarely operate alone but are linked by one another by communication channels Mitchell 2015 16 So what is the New Media Network
A most basic explanation it is the infrastructure which connects the computer together and to other devices as well Which enables it s users to share the information and communicate with one another The Networks themselves come in many different shapes or forms For example we have a computer network which called LAN or Ethernet Meaning that this network covers small geographical area for example a single or a group of buildings but a the same time we have a wide are of network called WAN which which can cover areas as big as state or a country Shay 1999 8 So what do we mean by Network Society The concept of Network Society is closely associated with how we interpret social implications created by the globalisation and what role electronic communication technologies play in our society The plain definition of a network society is given
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