When a highly reputable policy analyst collaborates with a leading sociologist to produce a book-length statement on contemporary social structures and dynamics, there is an expectation of significant insight. Networked is a book resulting from just such a pairing, but its outcome is less than satisfying.
The core argument that Barry Wellman (Director of NetLab as the S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto) and Lee Rainie (Director of Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center) make is that contemporary society is running on a new social operating system that has been enabled by what they call a triple revolution driven by social networks, the Internet and mobile devices.
On the matter of what "networked individualism" — the term used for the new social operating system — looks like, the authors are well equipped to tackle their ambitious, self-appointed task. The complex dynamics of our technology-saturated social life offer gargantuan opportunities for interpretation and reflection. Rather than focus on devices and technologies per se, Networked provides a guided tour of the social ecology that such developments have given rise to.
This book will be of use to people who have not taken any time to read the last decade worth of churn on how social technologies are changing everything. Yet it will be frustrating to those who have because there just isn't enough deep insight in the core of the book to add new substance to the conversation. For those who are just embarking on explorations of social computing and changing social network patterns, the synthesis Networked provides is helpful.
Part of the problem is that few would argue with the premise that these technologies have moved from the periphery of our common lives to the centre. Most agree that technology is pervasive, transformative, disruptive or magical depending on the vantage point. Digital devices are inarguably integral to our networks of friends, family, work and organizational lives. But it is far less clear just what these social technologies are doing to us. It isn't enough to assume that what we lose doesn't matter and what we gain is better. This is where Wellman and Rainie could have given us something new..
The idea that they introduce to the conversation is that social technologies have significantly intensified the practices of individualism in contemporary society. Wellman and Rainie believe that this fraying thread in our social fabric is a good thing with a few problems on the side that we might attend to, a process of evolution leading to a higher order, though what that greater good looks like is never convincingly laid out. While "networked individualism" has the potential to do harm or to become a means of controlling our actions and decreasing freedom, they consistently caricature other scholars and cultural commentators who decry the ills of the "new social operating system" as Chicken Little devotees. In their estimation, the sky is in great shape and we have new vistas of wonder to experience together. There is no reason for alarm.
The two core case studies were selected to highlight these benefits — a student who is "always on" through digital platforms and a couple who experience a terrible accident and fi nd aid through network-enabled communication. The premise these examples are intended to support is that being in groups is passé; we now live in and among networks that are more fluid, depend significantly on personal curation and are the means by which we get what we need for happy lives. Quoting the student, "I can decide who I talk to, when we interact, and how. I can decide to what extent these interactions affect or interrupt my day. There's an immense amount of freedom in this." The authors identify the student in question as "hyperconnected," meaning "someone who never walks — or sits — alone" because as long as you have a device, you are (presumably) never alone.
With only passing notice to possible problems — such as distraction, the permanence of online information such as photos or scandalous posts, and how the savvy digital pioneers will win over those who can't figure out the new rules — Wellman and Rainie fail to provide sufficient analysis and context for the serious matter of how hyper-individualism could create significant and systemic social problems. Is the student quoted above better or worse off because she is in a never-ending conversation that is mediated by devices that never sleep, never forget, can never care, and that orient and frame her life and the lives of her friends, family and co-workers? The vision in Networked suggests that a human in a group without a device is far more alone than one who is in an empty room with a smartphone. This idea would have been odd even to our most recent forebears.
Though published six years prior to Networked, the first two pages of Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, for example, provides a much more helpful framing of the wider social and institutional implications for a society driven by technology-enabled networks than Wellman and Rainie have mustered. As I puzzled out my feelings of discontent reading through the book, it gradually became clear that what is missing is a seasoned sense of perspective. It seemed throughout the book that they were waging a war of enthusiasm for the great good of networked individualism (with a few gentle hat tips to some possible problems) well after the fight was over. The millions of cell phones, computers and established expressions of networked lives is evidence enough that society has already fully bought the dream — the party is well under way en masse.
What is much less clear, even after reading the book, is what happens when a society or global community adopts these technologically mediated practices wholesale. Wellman and Rainie clearly have their fingers on the pulse of a critical change in contemporary life. There is undoubtedly some sort of new social operating system, but humans have always been social and therefore part of networks, even if describing them in that way is more recent. It may be argued that what is most insightful in their phrase "networked individualism" is not the network element but the valorizing of hyper-individualism as a fundamental good upon which a better society can be built. This is very much in question and cannot be assumed. The history of political thought and State practice over the last 150 years has reflected the struggle of emerging individualism. Scholars such as Robert Nisbet have argued (in his Quest for Community) that "only with an absolute sovereign could any effective environment of individualism be possible." This is but a passing nod to a much greater conversation, but the lack of a coherent and explicitly stated social philosophy of some kind by which we could better evaluate the new social operating system is a serious flaw.
What we are not equipped to answer after having read the book are questions regarding who the new vulnerable classes and groups of people are. Who is being exploited today as a direct result of the fragmentation of social structures that we have long lived with and toiled greatly to form as a means of protection against the excesses of individual interest? Does this new social operating system introduce vulnerabilities in law, justice, equity, human rights, international exchange, governance, ecological protection and any number of other key issues? Are we seeing the "absolute sovereign" taking shape in the form of powerful business entities that produce and manage the devices by which massive amounts of data are harvested from our social interactions and then used to develop new means of extracting resources from us or marketing new products we never knew we needed? Are massive data facilities that house the information of the new social operating system a good thing?
Wellman and Rainie are planting a flag in ground that has already been won — we know we live in a world that is highly mediated by social technologies and characterized by very fluid relational networks and identities. What we need today is a greater capacity to reflect on how the introduction of new opportunities is opening the door to new and serious hazards. The 20th century is often noted as a century of great gains across many perennial human difficulties but often in the same breath as a century of unprecedented violence, horror and suffering. The scale of contemporary human trafficking is disturbing by any measure. The violence experienced by the poor globally is impossible to fully appreciate. Networks of people committed to breaking the stability of societies and countries through random acts of violence and intimidation are prevalent. Pornography online represents a social reality that is far from benign but is scarcely noted as a feature of the new social operating system.
We need this deeper reflection and counsel from people like Wellman and Rainie. It may well be that they possess this insight, but in an ambitious undertaking such as describing a new social operating system in a book-length project, incisive insight about these dynamics can't be just in the authors' minds. It has to be on the page..
They provide a sound review of the dynamics of the "networked operating system," but the lack of a sophisticated balance of the range of hazards means that readers are left with an insufficient range of dynamics to consider. Networked individualism is like a dragon birthed among us and we don't yet know whether its coming of age will provide us an indispensable ally or an enemy beyond vanquishing.
