Notes from Van Dijk. 2012. The Network Society, 3rd edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Chapter 7 – Social Structure

Space and Time in the Network Society

• Giddens uses the term “time-space distantiation” to describe the tendency of human and social time and space to widen over the course of history.
• Some scholars note distance and time are losing their relevance due to global networks (Cairncross and Castells).
• A better explanation: space and time dimensions are actually getting more important in the network society rather than losing relevance.
• The importance of time can be seen in high-frequency stock trading.
• The importance of the space dimension can be seen as transnational corporations choose to headquarter themselves in global cities like New York and Tokyo rather than their less expensive suburbs.
• An expansion AND compression of space and time:
• The natural environment is replaced by, or interwoven with, social environments constructed by people.
• Natural time is outdone by a greater reliance of socially constructed clock time.
• Socialization and individualization of space and time – trend and countertrend:
• Socialization: the rising importance of the social and society:
• Social environment is upgraded – people acknowledge the shrinking relevance of their own environment in the world.
• Social environment is made more objective – social and economic crises begin to resemble natural disasters.
• Fragmentation of social environments.
• A generalization and a standardization of social environments (see also).
• Individualization: importance of the social environment is downgraded:
• The individual self takes on greater importance than the traditional prisms of family, neighborhood, and village.
• The social environment is made more (inter)subjective – mass media increasingly pays more attention to viewer opinions than facts.
• Unification of the particular world of the individual – using SNSs to construct and share “my world”.
• Particularity and cultural differentiation.

The Blurring Spheres of Living

• Multi-functional or connected spheres of living?
• Tele-activity is not nearly as ubiquitous as many think.
• Dissolving boundaries between personal spaces of home, work, and transit correlated with the linking of spaces that remain and used primarily for special purposes.
• Tele-activity increasing more in mobile environments than in home or work.
• Tele-commuting: Advantages and Disadvantages:
• Tele-commuter/worker: employees with a formal agreement with their employers that allows them to spend some part of the working week at some location other than their office using ICT.
• Advantages:
• Less travel time (saving energy and reducing traffic jams).
• Able to plan their own days.
• Can be combined with household work or looking after children.
• Disadvantages:
• Conditions of labor for tele-workers having functional tasks are poor.
• Impoverished communication with management and co-workers.
• Little support can be given by management.
• Social isolation of employees can reduce productivity.
• Hard to separate work from other domestic activities.
• Distance education: Advantages and Disadvantages:
• Advantages are similar to tele-work:
• Less travel time.
• Able to plan their own day.
• Possibility of multi-tasking.
• Teachers can often grade assignments sooner and faster.
• Disadvantages:
• Tele-students work more individually than traditional students.
• Interaction between teachers and students can be so low that the education depends almost entirely on the curriculum.
• Many students cannot handle the independence and self-discipline required.
• Distance education is a socially isolated activity.
• Separating study from other domestic activities can be very difficult.
• Distance Learning at UMSL (see also)
• Structural limitations of tele-activity:

• Original places remain appropriate.
• Dependence on a center far away.
• Inadequate communication with mangers and teachers.
• Social isolation.
• Difficulty of separation from other activities.

The Rise of the Social Media

• Definition and kinds of social media:
  • Social media: internet applications that enable the sharing of things.
• Link individual and social worlds.
• Combination of interpersonal and mass communication.
• Media Richness:
• Low: text-based (Twitter, blogs, wikis).
• Medium: use text, audio, and video (Facebook, YouTube).
• High: multimedia, 3D worlds (Second Life, World of Warcraft).
• Individual or Collective Focus:
• Individual – no need for feedback from others (Twitter, SNS, Second Life).
• Collective – do not work without feedback (wikis, World of Warcraft).
• Social media as an expression of network individualization:
• Network individualization: the individual is becoming the most important node in the network society and not a particular place, group, or organization.
• Individuals use networks to create a mobile lifestyle of geographically dispersed relations.
• Individuals may spend more time alone accompanied by technology and online.
• Online may be fully social (SNS).
• Social media in between interpersonal and mass communication.
• Social media blurs the distinction between interpersonal and mass communication.
• Senders and receivers of information can be either public or private.
• Castells developed the concept of mass-self communication.
• Private sender and public receiver (personal websites, blogs, Twitter, YouTube, public SNS profiles).
• The delayed arrival of social media:
• 1980s: the social applications of the internet were dominant.
• Peer-to-peer networking and virtual communities.
• Early 1990s: Worldwide Web arrives.
• Becomes a channel of information retrieval and economic consumption.
• Early 2000s: social media sites appear.
• Return to a network of exchange and cooperation.
• Four explanations for the sudden arrival of social media.
• The new media had to be learned:
  • Bandura’s social learning theory.
  • Learn to use media exchange sites, trade goods on eBay, and exchange knowledge on Wikipedia.
  • Exchanging contacts and messages was the next logical step.
• Latent need for a social use of the new media.
  • Extrinsic gratifications: creation and maintenance of social contacts, ways to organize things and to share them.
  • Intrinsic gratification: using social media is fun.
• Diffusion of innovations theory.
  • Social media spreads into society because it offers advantages older technology did not.
  • Innovators prepare the innovation after creative insights.
    • Mark Zuckerberg elaborated on the popularity of face books of students for dating and created a more advanced SNS.
• Diffusion follows the law of network externality:
  • Two tipping points in the spread of a network medium.
    • Network reaches critical mass (about 25% access rate).
    • When about 2/3s are connected, the remaining part feels forced to participate (besides “laggards” who refuse to participate).
• Social effects of social media:
• Blurring traditional dividing lines in life and communication.
• People can express themselves and sound out feelings, opinions, and identities.
• Used for identity development by adolescents.
• Users can think they are engaged in personal conversations when they are actually public.
• The dilemma of privacy and the disclosure of identity.
• When users do not share personal information on SNS or online dating profiles, they are less effective.
• Personal information is used for targeted advertising.
• Higher connectivity and increase of sociability.
• Social media leads to some increase of new social contacts, but it is far more important in updating and maintaining existing relationships.
• Example of “the rich are getting richer” phenomenon.
• Popularization and inequality.
• Younger people were first adopters, but older adults are quickly catching up.
• Popularization does not mean everybody is able to use social media equally effectively.
• Institutions under pressure.
• Sharing among peers through SNS is a horizontal process.
• Traditional institutions communicate in a vertical, top-down direction.
• People start informing themselves using social contacts rather than official sources of information.
• Information and communication overload.
• Messages and information is increasing exponentially.
• Easy to speak on the internet, but difficult to be heard.
• Perhaps better to view social media as expression (with value to the sender first).
• Social pressure and addiction.
• Addiction is characterized by compulsory behavior, withdrawal symptoms, and harm to other vital life activities.
• Some of these symptoms may be becoming more common.
• Can we pathologize social media use?
• Unknown manners.
• Better netiquette is still needed.
• Unsolicited invitations of people one scarcely knows.
• Bringing personal news about others before the people concerned can do this or before they know about it.
• Publication of personal or intimate pictures, videos, and confidential information without other’s consent.

Unity and Fragmentation: A New Social Cohesion

• The duality of social and media structures:
• Duality of social structure: society simultaneously reveals aspects of growing homogeneity and heterogeneity, integration and differentiation, unity and fragmentation.
• The new media is not making society fall apart.
• Duality of media structure: media have their own characteristics, producing social contexts that foster certain forms of interactions and social identity.
• Oral media fostered homogenization (“us against them”).
• Early print media produced specialization of social groups and simultaneously unified nations by a single official language.
• At first, radio and TV unified national and local societies, but the multiplication of channels has fragmented audiences (with a few channels receiving higher viewership).
• The new media sees a huge plurality of potential applications, enabling both divisions and commonalities among users and audiences.
• The reconstruction of public space:
• The future of the internet as a public space.
• Three conditions of modern public spaces disappear in the new media environement:
  1. The alliance of public space with a particular place or territory.
  2. The presumed unitary character of public spaces.
  • No longer a fixed number of common situations, views, habits, and other social, cultural, and political characteristics.
  3. A relatively sharp public-private distinction.
• The conventional idea of a single, unified public space is obsolete.
• Public spaces are now more privatized, which can be attributed to individualizing participation.
• This trend started before the internet appeared.
• New public spaces are characterized by:
• A multitude of online and offline spaces.
• A mosaic of different, but overlapping public spaces.
• Public-private distinction blurred by individualization in public space.
• Public communication will be less tied to time, place, and territory than ever before.
• Propinquity and face-to-face communication are still relevant though.

Networks and Social (In)Equality

• Uneven and combined global development.
• The quantity and quality of jobs in the global economy across countries and regions is becoming more unequal.
• The spatial distance between the poor and rich parts of the global network economy is decreasing.
• The class structure of the network society:
• The type of employment being created or disappearing is more important than the extent.
• Social class can be defined with the following dimensions
• Ownership of means of production:
• Internet offers relatively cheap means of production.
• Creative class.
• Small minority of independent companies in the ICT sector are successful.
• Many small companies and freelancers earn less than people with a steady job.
• Control of organization:
• Middle management is replaced by top executives and technical staff controlling the organization with information systems.
• Increases the nearly unbridgeable gap between groups of employees with different skills and qualifications.
• Getting promoted from an entry level job to middle management is nearly impossible.
• Ownership of skills and qualifications:
• Polarization of the consequences of ICTs.
• Limited access to ICTs on the job provides fewer opportunities for increasing the quality of labor for the employees.
• Greater access to ICTs has divergent consequences for a user’s labor position.
• Data entry provides fewer opportunities than more advanced work like designing programs and programming software.
• Fewer women in high-skills, high-quality positions:
• Often employed in administrative roles.
• Will see an increase in the future.
• Better communicative, didactic, and commercial skills according to current divisions of labor, gender roles, and gender identities.
• Future is less bright for migrants and ethnic minorities with low education.
• Many lack digital skills and do not speak the dominant language sufficiently.

The Digital Divide: the gap between those who do and do not have access to computers and the internet

• Causes of the digital divide:
• Unequal distribution of a large number of resources.
• Material, temporal, mental, social, and cultural resources.
• Personal inequalities include age, sex, ethnicity, intelligence, personality, and health/ability level.
• Positional inequalities include particular occupation, level of education, life in a poor or affluent country, and household role.
• Access to particular medium shaped by technological characteristics of the medium.
• The more people gain access to networks, the more valuable a connection becomes.
• Consequences of the digital divide:
• More or less participation in the most important fields of society.
• Those without access will be isolated to local opportunities for jobs and social relationships.
• Citizens with more access are more likely to participate in political and decision-making organizations.
• Four successive types of action necessary for access:
  1. Motivation for access.
     • Necessary condition for the next three types of access.
     • The decisions to purchase a computer and network connection, to learn the requisite skills, and to use applications.
     • Some have avoided use (“technophobia”).
     • Some have or had access to computers and the internet, but stopped using them.
     • Some lack the material means or mental and educational capacities.
     • Factors of lack of motivation include:
       • Lack of time, technical knowledge, money, social relations that help people appropriate new technologies, and cultural lifestyles that fit computer and internet use.
  2. Physical and material access.
     • Necessary condition for the next two types of access.
     • Physical access: the opportunity to use computers and the internet at a particular place.
     • Material access: physical access + access to particular channels, programs, or sources of information.
     • Physical access divide is decreasing in developed countries but is increasing in developing countries.
     • Factors of lack of physical and material access include:
       • Household income, sufficient time to work with computers, and a social network that helps people obtain access.
  3. Digital skills.
     • Necessary condition for the next type of access.
     • Two types of technical digital (or medium related) skills are needed.
       • Operational skills: successfully operating digital media (“button knowledge”).
       • Formal skills: mastering formal structures – file and menu structures, web-browsing, and navigating.
     • Four types of content related skills:
       • Information skills: valid search, selection, and evaluation of digital media content.
       • Communication skills: being effective in the exchange of meaning via digital media (email, chat, designing SNS profiles).
       • Content-creation skills: being able to contribute acceptable software, websites, blogs, Tweets, postings, profiles, etc.
       • Strategic skills: being able to use digital media as a means for a particular personal or professional goal.
     • Most inequality is in the four content related skills.
     • Social and cultural resources are important – people learn more from practice and their everyday social environment than formal education.
     • Factors related to unequal distribution of digital skills:
       • Positional: educational and employment opportunities.
       • Personal: age and gender.
  4. Usage.
     • Previous three conditions are necessary, but not sufficient for usage.
     • User may still have no need, occasion, obligation, or time or make no effort to use them.
     • U.S. – 87% of adults use the internet.
     • Existing socio-cultural differentiations in society are reflected in internet use.
       • Reinforced instead of reduced.
       • Low education: more chat, gaming, SNS, and online market places.
       • High education: more news, government, and travel services and tele-working.
     • Factors related to usage inequalities:
       • Temporal, social, and cultural resources.
       • Age, sex, race, intelligence, personality, and health/ability level.
     • The appearance of usage gaps.
       • People of better social positions and higher education use significantly more information and career-related internet applications that help them advance in their work, careers, and studies.
       • People with lesser positions and lower education use more entertainment applications.
       • Four clusters of internet applications:
         • Information and news.
           • Using search engines, using news services, and reading online newspapers or magazines.
         • Social communication and entertainment.
           • Chatting, using social networking sites, online games, and downloading or uploading music or video.
         • Education and careers.
           • Following online courses, independent learning, finding online courses and training, and searching for job vacancies.
         • Shopping and commerce.
           • Online shopping, searching products and comparing prices, and using online auction sites.
       • More than a knowledge gap.
         • Internet use includes active engagement with the medium, as well as interactions and transactions.
       • Usage gap supports the assumption that those who already have a large amount of resources benefit first and most from the capacities and opportunities of the new media.
         • Matthew effect.
• The tripartite network society:
• Not a two-tiered society of haves and have-nots.
• Tripartite model:
• The information elite:
• Inner ring, 15% of the population.
• High levels of education and income.
• Nearly 100% access to ICTs.
• Make all important decisions in society, live in dense social networks.
• Large number of strategically important weak ties.
• The participating majority:
• Second ring, 55-65% of the population.
• Middle and working class.
• Most have access to ICTs, but fewer digital skills than the elite (especially information, communication, and strategic skills).
• Applications used are less focused on career or study – more recreational and entertainment usage.
• Fewer weak ties.
• The disconnected and excluded:
• Outer ring, 20-30% of the population.
• No access to computers or internet (voluntary or involuntary).
• Lowest social classes, particularly ethnic minorities, a majority of new immigrants, and elderly people.
• Isolated socially without use of ICTs; reliance on social network links rather than media network links.
• Structural inequality appears when an “information elite” strengthens its position while groups already on the margins of society become excluded from communications in society because they are practiced in media they do not possess or control.
• Larger distributions of computers and networks among the population are likely to increase the usage gaps.
• Existing social and cultural diversities and inequalities are intensified.
• Increasingly, the old media and face-to-face communications will become inadequate means of full participation in society.
• These trends will result in structural inequality.
• People with no access to computers or internet have less chance on the labor market and less educational opportunities.
• Lack of internet access will also lead to shrinking social networks and cultural resources.
• Fewer chances to participate in politics and citizenship entitlements (public benefits and healthcare).

The Instability of the Network Society

• A network society under tension.
• Opposing tendencies:
• Space and time become less and more important.
• Global and local spaces and times merge and clash.
• Public and private spaces are both dissolving and reconstructed in new ways.
• Interpersonal and mass communication are blurred with social media.
• The laws of the Web articulate social structures and intensify or polarize them.
• Contagion and volatility across a variety of social institutions:
• Economy:
• Driven more by contagion and crowd behavior than by rational decision-making in buying and selling.
• Sharply rising and falling prices in stock and currency markets.
• Speculative bubbles.
• Stock market crashed and recessions.
• Politics:
• Voter drift: voters are less faithful to their favorite parties and political leaders.
• Media campaigns influencing voters.
• Rise in populist movements.
• Image of a politician can be broken in a few hours when accusations or slip-ups spread on TV and the internet.
• Rick Perry.
• Howard Dean.
• Social Relationships:
  • Increasing connectivity and density of social networking cause faster changes in the composition of contact lists.
  • Rediscovery of old friends and acquaintances.
  • “Defriending” existing contacts.
• Culture:
  • Tensions between subcultures and religions can explode when an accident or violent attack happens and is shared on TV and SNS.
    • Takes far less time than the months or years needed for reconciliation.
• Media:
  • Rumors, fads, fashions, hypes, and innovations are spreading faster than ever.
    • Their life cycles are also shorter than ever before.
• Ecosystems:
  • Human and animal diseases are spreading across the world in a few days via air networks.
    • Occurs even quicker with computer viruses and worms.
• Too much connectivity?
• Too few connections may result in insufficient change and adaptation in systems.
• Beyond a certain level, too much connectivity decreases adaptability.
• Twitter, Facebook, and online newspapers covering a news event tend to run around in circles, rarely coming to a clear-cut conclusion.
• Exchange of ideas may spread too fast because the social contagion of ideas spreads even faster than biological contagion of diseases.
• Growing divisions produce more social tensions.

Chapter 5: Networked Relationships

Back to The Networked Society Lecture Notes

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