4 - What is a network society?

To answer this question we must first ask:

4.1 - What is an Information Economy?

The information sector of an economy is that sector whose products consist principally of information goods.

Information goods are non-material goods. They are most easily distinguished by the fact that they can be stored in various media and when stored in electronic media, their cost of reproduction becomes negligibly low. Some examples of information goods include software, music, video, databases, books, machine designs, genetic information, and other copyrighted or patented goods.

When the information sector of an economy becomes more dominant than either its industrial or ecology sector, then that economy has become an information economy.

[Source: Roberto Verzola, Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the Information Sector Resources: http://www.tao.ca/earth/lk97/archive/0174.html ]

4.2 - When is it appropriate to speak of an Information Society?

A society in which Information and Communication Technology has become the dominant technology, and whose economy is primarily an information economy, can be called an information society. Another commonly used term for this kind of society is "Post-Industrial Society".

Commentary:

* The term 'Information Society', according to a recent report of the European Commission's Information Society Project Office (ISPO), reflects "European concerns with the broader social and organisational changes which will flow from the information and communications revolution", as opposed to the more limited, technology based, term 'information highways', which originates from the United States.

[Source: Information Society Project Office (ISPO), "Introduction to the information society the European way", 1995 This and other policy papers can be found at: http://www.ispo.cec.be/infosoc/back.html ]

4.3 - And what about the Network Society?

Sociologist Manuel Castells concludes in his book The Rise of the Network Society: "...as a historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the information age are increasingly organised around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organisation has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure."

[source: Manuel Castells, "The Rise of the Network Society - The Information Age Vol.1", Blackwell Publishers, Malden (Mass.), 1996, p. 469]

Commentary:

Castellls contrasts two spatial logics that emerge in the network society and that threaten to become increasingly unrelated to each other - the Space of Place and the Space of Flows. Castells: "...people still live in places. But because function and power in our society are organised in the space of flows, the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamic of places. Experience, by being related to places, becomes abstracted from power, and meaning is increasingly separated from knowledge. It follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society. The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes. Unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately built between those two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of a social hyperspace."

[source: Castells, 1996, p. 428 ]

Frequently Asked Questions about the Public Domain, Version 6.0 - February 2004, De Waag, http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=12829