Network Society in The Communication Theory

People are living now in a world that is almost fully driven by the information revolution products which has started from the last century. This spread of the use of technology and the richness of the information has definitely changed the internals of overall societies in one side, and the individual relationships from other side. Despite that there is no academically accepted definition yet to describe this era of information, still there are several terms that are used to indicate to the information age such as network society, global village, digital society and so on.

To go more deeply to the explanation of the network society, then we need to take a look to Manuel Castells perspective of the age of technology as he is considered as one of most famous theorists in this subject. He said that the network society is a social structure which is characterized by the information technology. That description is exactly what the international society is look like these days as information has become one of the most valuable products in the world.

Within Castells explanation of this concept, he has described two major characteristics of the network society, timeless time and space of flow.

In the timeless time we see that technology has break down the time barrier in communication as a regular information transmition without technology might take hours, days or months to be done it shortened to just couple of seconds.

On the other hand, space of flow concept tells that information can be transmitted from one point to another easily, no matter how much space between them. In addition, the individual himself also can navigate from a website that is located in x part of the world to another website that is hosted in the part y of the world within just one click.

With this reduction of the importance of time and space, it is now more crucial to be careful to the individual's identity sins that there is no doubt that those factors can lead to the domination of the rich culture over the technologically Deficient one.

 

 

Reflected article link:

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Communication_Theory/Network_Society