How Computer Networks Became Social

Abstract

From the mid-2000s, social networking services (SNSs) exploded in popularity around the world. This growth can partly be attributed to the availability of the broadband internet (technical networks) and partly to a collective desire for connection in human relationships (social networks). But how did computer networks become social? Even before the growth of SNSs, networks were in the popular imagination and in the academic literature. This chapter looks at three ways that networks were conceptualized: social network analysis (SNA), network society (NS), and actor–network theory (ANT). SNS designers were influenced by previously marginal social science approaches that theorized relationships as social networks. In network conceptions of society, complexity and scale emerge from webs of connections. SNSs mediated and captured the wider transformative power of social and technical networks. The tradition of SNA maps associations between individuals and groups to reveal how networks help constitute the self and generate wider social patterns. The second approach, associated with Manuel Castells’ influential sociological reading of networks, is the theory of the network society, which identifies a global transition from hierarchies and territories to flows across economic and cultural networks. SNSs follow many trends Castells identified – timeless time and spaces of flows. A third influential network tradition that relates to the rise of SNSs is ANT, which emerged from social studies of technology in the 1980s. It critiques the conventional split in social criticism between the technological and the human, insisting that both human and nonhuman actors have agency and form networks of relations. SNSs can best be understood as mixing the agency of technical actors (computers, software, databases, and interfaces) and human actors (designers, users, and “friends”) into sociotechnical networks.