network society

Network society is defined by Manuel Castells (Castells and Ebooks 2004) as “a society whose social structure is made of networks powered by the microelectronics-based information and communication technologies.” (Manuel Castells’s imagination knows no boundary, and it’s still inconceivable to combine the computer and the genetic engineering. This is much more like the science fiction style, because he can’t give convincing arguments and the readers can’t falsify his assertion for the limit of time.) In Manuel Castells’ idea, the network society is relevant to informationalism. Informationalism is a technological paradigm based on the augmentation of the human capacity of information processing and communication made possible by the revolutions in microelectronics, software, and genetic engineering. So what’s more important is the development of technology.
As a good construct, network society should be different from the other pre-existing constructs or concepts. There are some similar constructs, and one of them is “social network”. The differences are apparent, and the social network is much more general concept of the network relationships, network society is a phase of the development of society. So the network society can be analyzed by adopting social network analysis method (SNA). According to Manuel Castells, motivated by the microelectronics-based information and communication technologies, there are three characteristics of the network society: flexibility, scalability, and survivability.
     The characteristic of flexibility is related to the network structure of the social network of network society, and he asserts that the structure of the network society is dynamic. While, this is not convincing enough, his judgment is just verbal. Manuel Castells does not analyze the structure of the structure of network society in detail. However, we can understand this characteristic by adopting social network analysis framework: Every social network has its cluster coefficient, it measure the degree of density of the social network, when the cluster coefficient is big enough, the social network is called small world network (Watts and Strogatz 1998b), which is usually known as “six degrees of separation” (Watts and Strogatz 1998a).
     Another characteristic of the network society “scalability” is relevant to another pattern of the social network—“scale-free”. The scale logarithmically with the system size (Barabasi and Albert 1999). The scale-free property of the complex social network portraits the characteristics of the degree of irregularity, there are some nodes having a lot of links, but most of the nodes having only a few links. If the attacker chooses to attack one of the nodes randomly, the network can survive, but if the attacker attacks the central nodes of the network, the social network will also collapse, this is exactly the situation of the network worm and hacker on the Internet. This is also a supplement to the third character of the network society: survivability.
The rise of network society reconstructs the former social relationships of the industrial society. There are three influencing factors account for the rise of network society in the 1970: the development of industrialism, production, capitalism and statism; the cultural social movements of the late 1960s and the early 1970s; the revolution and communication technologies. The network society is relevant to the globalization, now the social network in the world can be viewed as global network society. And the advent of the global network society is constructed by many communication forms, new media and communication forms emerging from the Internet: IM, SNS, online video site, blog.
What’s more important is that the network society will change the social relationship accordingly. A global social capital transformation is carrying out now, the former forms of social capital are changed and new forms of social capital are being created by the new communication forms in network society. Especially the online social capital is becoming one of the important parts of individual’s social relationship and resources. The relationships above can be summarized as figure 1.
 
Figure 1 technology, media use, network society and social change

Quotation
“There is a theoretical convergence between the two technological fields (Barabasi and Albert 1999; Jeong, Neda, and Barabasi 2003) around the analytical paradigm based on networking, complexity, self organization, and emergent properties, as illustrated some time ago by the work of visionary teams of researchers at the Santa Fe Institute and as theorized by Fritjof Capra.” (Castells and Ebooks 2004)
The reason I want to highlight the words above is that, as an emergence, network society is composed of complex network distinguished by its small-world property and scale-free property, the reason for its emergence is relevant to the self organization process, we all know Barabasi’s famous paper on how complex network emerges from the isolated nodes by adopting the local rule of preferential attachment. (Barabasi and Albert 1999; Jeong, Neda, and Barabasi 2003), in addition to that, Santa Fe Institute is one of the important centers of science of complexity, it’s a pleasant to find that Castells knows something about that.

Barabasi, A. L., and R. Albert. 1999. Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286 (5439):509.
Castells, M., and Corporation Ebooks. 2004. The network society: A cross-cultural perspective: Edward Elgar.
Jeong, H., Z. Neda, and A. L. Barabasi. 2003. Measuring preferential attachment in evolving networks. EPL (Europhysics Letters) 61:567.
Watts, D. J., and S. H. Strogatz. 1998a. Collective dynamics of 'mall-world' networks. Nature 393 (6684):440-442.
Watts, D. J., and S. H. Strogatz. 1998b. Small world. Nature 393:440-442.