Imagining networks: The sociology of connection in the digital age

Abstract

‘Networks’, argues Barabasi, ‘are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them’ (Barabasi, 2003: 7). But, like beauty, the nature of a network, and what constitutes it, is in the eye of the beholder. In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in understanding the properties and nature of networks. The authors Hardt and Negri in their analysis of the modern cultural condition have even argued that networks are a key isomorphism of the modern era. Just as, in Foucault’s terms, we can regard nineteenth-century social forms as organised around and dominated by the image of the prison, so the image of the network has come to be the key image of modern sociality. ‘Today’, they argue, ‘we see networks everywhere we look - military organizations, social movements, business formations, migration patterns, communications systems, physiological structures, linguistic relations, neural transmitters, and even personal relationships. It is not that networks were not around before or that the structure of the brain has changed. It is that the network has become a common form that tends to define our ways of understanding the world and acting in it’ (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 142).