Untitled - socium.ge

6 Manuel Castells• Flexibility: networks can reconfigure according to changing environments,keeping their goals while changing their components. They goaround blocking points in communication channels to find new connections.• Scalability: they can expand or shrink in size with little disruption.• Survivability: because they have no center, and can operate in a widerange of configurations, networks can resist attacks on their nodes andcodes because the codes of the network are contained in multiple nodesthat can reproduce the instructions and find new ways to perform. So,only the physical ability to destroy the connecting points can eliminatethe network.At the core of the technological change that unleashed the power of networkswas the transformation of information and communication technologies, basedon the microelectronics revolution that took place in the 1940s and 1950s. Itconstituted the foundation of a new technological paradigm, consolidated in the1970s, mainly in the United States, and rapidly diffused throughout the world,ushering in what I have characterized, descriptively, as the information age.William Mitchell, in an important and well-documented book (Mitchell,2003), has retraced the evolving logic of information and communicationtechnology throughout history as a process of expansion and augmentation ofthe human body and the human mind; a process that, in the early twenty-firstcentury, is characterized by the explosion of portable machines that provideubiquitous wireless communication and computing capacity. This enablessocial units (individuals or organizations) to interact anywhere, anytime, whilerelying on a support infrastructure that manages material resources in a distributedinformation power grid. With the advent of nanotechnology and theconvergence between microelectronics and biological processes and materials,the boundaries between human life and machine life are blurred, so thatnetworks extend their interaction from our inner self to the whole realm ofhuman activity, transcending barriers of time and space. Neither Mitchell norI indulge in science fiction scenarios as a substitute for analysis of the technosocialtransformation process. But it is essential, precisely for the sake ofanalysis, to emphasize the role of technology in the process of social transformation,particularly when we consider the central technology of our time,communication technology, which relates to the heart of the specificity of thehuman species: conscious, meaningful communication (Capra, 1996, 2002).It is because of available electronic information and communication technologiesthat the network society can deploy itself fully, transcending thehistorical limits of networks as forms of social organization and interaction.This approach is different from the conceptual framework that defines oursocieties as information or knowledge societies. To be blunt, I believe that this