Information technology is unleashing the most
radical force of our time, hyperconnectivity, which is reshaping all areas of
our technology, economy and social institutions according to a new set of
rules. The concept of a network society is used to describe this evolution in
the development of social organizations as we move into an information and
knowledge economy.
Within such a context many people believe that we
are on the cusp of a fundamental transformation in our political-economy, in
how we choose to organize society in respect to industry, organizations, and
communities. This new form of society that is believed to be emerging is
variously called the information or the network society.
Network society is the expression
coined in 1991 related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes
caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications
technologies. The intellectual origins of the idea can be traced back to the
work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who analyzed the effect of modernization and industrial
capitalism on complex patterns of affiliation, organization, production and
experience.
Networked society concept
is based on the idea that social evolution is not determined by technology, but
it is enabled by it. Technology sets the parameters for what is physically
possible. Because of technology, in 21st century, villages grew up to become
towns and cities, cities turned into city states and nation states.
Network Society are based
on the existence of communication, The following The Communication Age
According to McLuhan & Innis is:
·
The first era, that of the oral tradition, stretches from the
time humankind first acquired speech to the beginnings of literacy five
thousand years ago.
·
The second era, the age of literacy, includes the period from the
invention of writing to the discovery of electricity and its use in the
form of the telegraph. The age of writing is further subdivided into three
periods, the first beginning with the advent of written symbols, the
second with the invention of the phonetic alphabet, and the last with the
invention of the printing press.
·
The third communication era, that of the
electric flow of information, covers the period from the first use of the
telegraph in 1844 to the present. “We live today in the Age of Information and
Communication because electric media instantly and constantly create a
total field of interacting events in which all men participate” (McLuhan 1964, 248).
Innis also divided history into periods in which
different modes of communication dominated. He divided the age of
literacy, however, by the nature of the medium upon which texts were
written. “We
can conveniently divide the history of the West into the writing and
the printing periods. In the writing period we can note the importance
of various media such as the clay tablet of Mesopotamia, the papyrus roll
in the Egyptian and in the Graeco-Roman world, parchment codex in the
late Graeco-Roman world and the early Middle Ages, and paper after
its introduction in the Western world from China” (Innis 1972,
7).
During each of these three major communication
eras, socio-economic and cultural life were deeply affected by the
dominant medium of communication.
Now there is a modern communication revolution, where
technology is easily found. Technological developments can be felt with the
existence of interenets that are easily and cheaply available. With the
presence of digital communication, it can facilitate businesses like
e-commerce.
Communication paradigm is sometimes called Hyper
Communication, hyper connectivity is marked with a shift from a linear to a non
linear communication paradigm instead of information flowing in a well defined
direction between a limited number of points at particular times and places in
a networked society communication exchange become pervasive it comes to flow in
multiple directions between all points continously.
Castells, a professor of urban geography at Berkley said the
importance of information in contemporary society is not new. What is new, he
claims, is the informational shift to the manipulation of information itself:
the “action of knowledge upon knowledge itself” (Castells, 2000b, p. 17) is now
the basis to increased productivity. In Castells' analysis, labor is
fundamentally divided into networked labor, which serves the goals of the
network, and switched-off labor, which has nothing to offer the network and in
the context of the network economy is non-labor.
Reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUT4B3au5h4&t=6s
