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The Network Society
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Our world has been in a process of structural transformation for over two decades. This process is multidimensional, but it is associated with the emergence of a new technological paradigm, based in information and communication technologies, that took shape in the 1970s and diffused unevenly around the world. We know that technology does not determine society: it is society. Society shapes technology according to the needs, values, and interests of people who use the technology. Furthermore, information and communication technologies are particularly sensitive to the effects of social uses on technology itself. The history of the Internet provides ample evidence that the users, particularly the first thousands of users, were, to a large extent, the producers of the technology.
However, technology is a a necessary, albeit not sufficient condition for the emergence of a new form of social organization based on net- working, that is on the diffusion of networking in all realms of activity on the basis of digital communication networks. This process can be likened to the role of electricity and the electrical engine in diffusing the organizational forms of the industrial society (eg. the large manufacturing factory, and its correlate the labor movement) on the basis of new technologies of energy generation and distribution. It can be argued that nowadays wealth, power, and knowledge generation are largely dependent on the ability to organize society to reap the bene- fits of the new technological system, rooted in microelectronics, computing, and digital communication, with its growing connection to the biological revolution and its derivative, genetic engineering. I have conceptualized as the network society the social structure resulting from the interaction between the new technological paradigm and social organization at large.
Castells, Manuel and Cardoso, Gustavo - Personal Name
1st Edtion
NONE
The Network Society
Information Technology
English
Center for Transatlantic Relations
2005
USA
1-460
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