LAIZER EDWIN N

BAPRM 42691

THE RISE OF THE NETWORK SOCIETY 

Every new social structure has its own genesis, dependent on spatio temporal contexts. Naturally there is a relationship between the historical process of production of a given social structure, and its characteristics. However it is analytically possible to analyse this social structure as a given without considering in detail the processes that led to its upbringing. In fact, this is the option taken in this chapter that is focused on the theory of the network society rather than on its history.

 Nonetheless, I will summarize some of the analysis of the genesis of the network society, presented in my earlier writings (Castells, 1996, 2000a, 2000b) with one specific purpose: to dispel the notion that either technology or social evolution led inevitably to the network society, as the later incarnation of modernity in the form of postmodernity or as information/knowledge society as the natural outcome of a long evolution of the human species. We have ample evidence that there is no predetermined sense of history, and that every time and every power, claims ethnocentrically and historicentrically its right to be the supreme stage of human evolution. What we observe throughout history is that different forms of society came and went by accident, internal self-destruction, serendipitous creation, or, more often, as the outcome of largely undetermined social struggles.

True there has been a long term trend towards technological development that has increased the mental power of humankind over its environment. But the jury is still out to judge the outcome of such process measured in terms of progress, unless we consider minor issues the highly rational process of mass murder that led to the holocaust The management of large scale incarceration that created gulag out of the hopes of workers liberation, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to finish off an already vanquished nation or the spread of AIDS in Africa while pharmaceutical corporate labs and their parent governments were discussing the payment of their intellectual property rights. And if we remain in the analytical ground nothing predetermined the trajectory taken by the information and communication technology revolution.

Personal computers were not in the mind of governments and corporations at the onset of the revolution: people did it. And the crucial technology of the network society, the Internet, would have never come to be a global network of free communication if ATT had accepted in 1970 the offer of the Defense Department to give it free to that corporation; or if Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn would have not diffused over the net the source code of the IP/TCP protocols on which the Internet is still based.  Historical evolution is an open ended, conflictive process, enacted by subjects and actors that try to make society according to their interests and values, or more often, produce social forms of organization by resisting the domination of those who identify social life with their personal appetites enforced through violence.