Connection unbound by location

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Chris Chesher

| Print | E-mail

Download the complete article PDF

Chris Chesher's biography and other articles by this writer

 

One day I met someone I didn't know I already knew. At the end of the first day of a communication studies conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a few years ago, I joined a group of attendees to go for dinner. We crammed into the back of a red Mitsubishi Precis hatchback and headed downtown. I started talking with the guy next to me in the car, Gilbert Rodman, who was doing a research project on the posthumous career of Elvis. I told him about my project on network cultures. After we'd shared our research war stories, we both had an uncanny sense that we'd met before, and recently.

And in fact we had met before. Just a few weeks earlier, my avatar "cdotc" had met his avatar "Brinkley" in a virtual environment for media researchers called MediaMOO. We had had a conversation not unlike the one we were having in the car, only this conversation had been in text only and we had been typing it on computers at opposite ends of the earth.

Obviously, this strange coincidence would have been impossible without the internet. As a technical network, it was the platform that supported our first encounter: a prime example of network society in action. But the internet was not the only network that helped bring about this uncanny coincidence. Each meeting was as much a product of the professional networks that we operated within as the technological networks that we used. Both the conference and the chat room were nodes, or attractors, in a global network of people working in the area of media research. We identified ourselves as media researchers and this shared affiliation pulled us towards the same spaces, virtual and physical. Other networks brought us together for the second time: a highway system, an aviation infrastructure and a circle of friends. Each of these has its own speeds and modes of operation but all served to smooth the paths that led to the back of that car in Albuquerque.

Perhaps the strangest thing about this event was that it wasn't that strange at all. This kind of experience is becoming common in a world increasingly mediated by networks and correspondingly less by geographical location, hierarchies or longstanding contractual ties. The expansion of networks facilitates connections that are unbound by obligation, location or tradition. Network connections are not random in the sense of being based on chance. They promote random accessibility – links from any node to any other node. But this indeterminacy leaves networks open for flows and patterns to emerge based on common connections. Without our knowing it, such networks brought us together – twice.

 

THE GROWING POWER OF NETWORKS HAS BECOME, according to some, a defining characteristic of our time. We live in a network society and share a network culture. But networks are very difficult for any individual to perceive, since you only ever connect with a limited number of people (and things). You don't know all the people those people know or all the people that they know, and so on. You don't know all the vectors that brought breakfast cereal to your table, electricity to your toaster or email to your in-box. And yet your life is bound up in networks that trace invisible and complex connections for goods, ideas, energy, diseases and interpersonal connections.

So how are we to understand the nature and significance of networks? It seems a very abstract question. Even supported by many anecdotes and experiences like my own, the wider implications of these connections are elusive. Networks organise the world differently from the way hierarchies do: order emerges from multiple local negotiations rather than from designs imposed from above. Networks structure space in different ways from grids: connectivity is more important than proximity. The story of the network society involves both a new way of understanding the world and a way of ordering it.

The growth of information technologies is bound up in this story, but not in any simple way. In some ways, it is yet another instance where a new technology is adopted as a metaphor to explain everything. In the 17th century, the development of intricate clockwork technologies coincided with the Newtonian view that the universe worked with a similar regularity and order. Networks represent a very different image of a more complex and unpredictable universe. But computer networks are not just a metaphor. They facilitate, inform and accelerate other networks. Databases capture traces of networks in operation – in log files of transactions. Communication infrastructures allow real-time negotiations and ubiquitous connectivity. Computers embody techniques for analysing and visualising network patterns. These technological network infrastructures smooth and make visible the platforms on which other networks can operate. The reliability and speed of computer networks allow other actors to work with less centralised co-ordination and more responsiveness to changing conditions.

 

THE NETWORK THEORY THAT HAS EMERGED RECENTLY is itself a network of sorts, physically and theoretically distributed and diverse. The recent work that I survey in this article approaches networks from very different starting points: sociological, mathematical, historical and philosophical. Much of it is interdisciplinary – drawing from knowledge beyond its own immediate specialisation. And yet, in doing so, each piece betrays its own disciplinary history as it ventures, less convincingly, into more distant fields. Unlike social theory that splits into radical and conservative camps, left and right ideologies, and east and west territories, network theory exhibits a more complex politics in which agency is more dispersed and power, space and time are multiplied and made more complex. While each writer emphasises the growing influence of networks, each frames that change in a distinctive way: as historical global economic and social changes; as complex puzzles that can be explained mathematically; as cultural transformations in thought and material culture; and as increasingly complex relationships between human/technological hybrids. The combination of all these approaches does not give a single cohesive picture, but a series of often resonating, but untranslatable, impressions. Networks look different from every node.

One of the more substantial contributions to an understanding of the network society is the trilogy of books published by sociologist Manuel Castells in the late 1990s: The Rise of the Network Society, The Power of Identity and End of Millennium. He has updated each of these volumes already. Castells' sociological approach spans large institutional changes on a global scale, with a large number of national and urban case studies.

Castells sees technology as quite literally revolutionary – manifesting in a global technical infrastructure the libertarian spirit associated with the milieus of California in the 1960s. While networks have been a longstanding structural feature of human societies, they have always lacked the co-ordination to achieve instrumental outcomes. Hierarchical command structures are more rigid but have been able to achieve goals more effectively. Once information networks are laid on top of other networks, it is possible to retain the flexibility and adaptability of networks, and also to achieve instrumental outcomes.

Network society is also partly a consequence of economic crises when the engine of growth for industrialism - improvements in production and distribution of energy – ran out of steam. The capitalist postwar boom went quiet and communist statism failed. Informationalism achieved growth by improving flows of information but also emerged with a dramatically changed global environment. Unlike the Cold War world, which was polarised between two geographically discrete ideological blocs, network society operates with infinitely complex structures and power relations. The war on terrorism is a struggle with the ambiguity of fighting across networks more than territories.

As well as presenting a large amount of empirical material, Castells develops theoretical concepts to make sense of the changes he describes. The examples he uses include global financial markets, the narcotics trade, technopoles (technological centres such as Silicon Valley) and megacities (headed by Tokyo, Sao Paulo and New York). Using such cases, he argues that the rise of networks is associated with a number of trends that transform collective experiences of time, space and power: "timeless time" and "the space of flows".

Time is less regulated by the consistent rhythms of the clock, or even the body. Knowledge workers can work more flexible hours. People's life cycles are more variable because they are living longer and managing fertility with birth control. Global corporations work across multiple time zones. Castells sees these as examples of the rise of timeless time. New technologies promote two distinctive senses of time: simultaneity and timelessness. Network connections link the globe to allow simultaneous connections across immense distances and time zones. At the same time, history loses its order, as hypertext and databases present texts from any point in time as a consistent multimedia universe, out of all sequence.

The concept of timeless time rings true to experience. Online environments such as MediaMOO facilitate conversations across time zones and also store biographical information about those with whom each user is interacting. But what was an academic experiment has since become popular culture. While MediaMOO has been practically abandoned, multiplayer PC games, such as EverQuest, internet real-time chat and networked games consoles have become very popular, creating a leisure culture of timeless time.

Another transformation Castells associates with the increasing significance of networks is that the "space of places" is subsumed by the "space of flows". While Australia is not among his case studies, the patterns he describes are familiar. Places become defined less by their intrinsic qualities, or by their relationships with immediately surrounding regions, and more according to how they operate as nodes in global flows of information, goods and people. The fate of cities relates increasingly to where they sit in relation to these global flows. Among the consequences of these forces is that some areas and people are systematically bypassed. Innovations tend to emerge from well-connected and prosperous nodes and hubs.

The second book in the series concentrates on the growth in the power of identity, which Castells reads as a cultural reaction to networks. With declines in traditional sources of meaning, asserting one's identity becomes a key way of making sense of the world. This change is apparent across the political spectrum, from feminist and anti-racism movements to religious fundamentalisms and nationalism.

Castells's description of a global transformation into the network society is well argued and substantiated by historical evidence. But it lacks attention to the processes by which networks form and change. What are the cultural dynamics specific to networks? This question is possibly better addressed from quite a different region in the network of network researchers: experimental mathematics.

 

IN THAT CAR IN ALBUQUERQUE, WHEN GIL AND I REALISED that we had in fact already met, we both exclaimed, "What a small world!", as is customary in such situations. We weren't aware at that time that there was a group of mathematicians who shared our surprise at such apparently random events, who were modelling this kind of event as a network phenomenon.

Among these mathematicians is Duncan Watts, whose recent book Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age tells the story of how this tradition of mathematical network theory emerged in the late 1990s. Unlike Castells, who begins with a detailed study of geopolitical changes associated with networks, Watts looks for network patterns he can describe mathematically. Where Castells starts by observing the world, Watts starts by imagining possible worlds and creating models of them. Information technologies are significant for both: for Castells they are a historical force for social change; for Watts they are the means of performing the complex calculations that model his imaginary networks and matching these models against data from actual networks. Networked computer databases also are a great source of such data.

Watts is particularly interested in using models to provide explanations for complex social events: from cultural/economic phenomena such as the dot-com bubble, to cultural fads such as Harry Potter, to the "small world" experiences that reveal unexpected social interconnectedness. How does an idea that necessarily begins in one location suddenly get taken up all over the world? What are the dynamics of collective opinion that allow markets to extend themselves beyond all rational bounds? What is it that makes one cultural product so successful through word of mouth alone? Are there really only six degrees of separation between everyone on the planet? In all these cases, Watts argues that the answer is not in the individuals but in the dynamic processes at play in networks.

One surprising outcome of these models is that it only takes a small number of long-distance links to model a world that operates as a "small world". With computer simulations, Watts tries out simple models of worlds with different degrees of interconnectedness. In a world where people have connections with a limited number of other people, and all of these connections are local, there is no way that an idea in one location will spread to a disconnected location. But even a small number of links across to another location will mean that the whole system operates in interconnected ways.

As well as modelling whole networks, Watts models the nature of the connections between network nodes. A relatively simple example of the importance of the ways in which nodes connect is in epidemiological models tracing the spread of diseases. Different diseases spread through different vectors – air, contact, blood, etc. Each disease's contagion profile affects how it spreads through a population. Even a small variation in contagiousness can mean the difference between an isolated outbreak and a pandemic. The critical threshold, when a local event suddenly becomes global, is often referred to as the "tipping point".

Of course, ideas don't spread in the same way as diseases, so such models don't translate directly. So Watts draws on psychological experiments for principles about how people share ideas. One experiment shows that people tend to take up a new idea only when almost all the people around them accept this idea. Incorporating this principle into a model world produces a pattern of "information cascades", where occasionally one idea is taken up right across a network. Most ideas die out early on. But sometimes an idea is initially percolated locally by a large enough critical mass of people to reach a tipping point, when it suddenly accelerates through a self-reinforcing spiral to be taken up globally. This model seems to fit the experienced dynamics of cultural fads and market bubbles.

Watts's work, and other small-world theory, offers some compelling insights. It shows how very complex patterns can emerge from interactions between quite simple basic elements and rules. The information-cascade model also shows that cultural fads can't simply be attributed to the exceptional genius of their creators. Rather, their success is to a large extent attributable to network dynamics. Similarly, the "power law" model shows that small differences in initial positions can make huge differences at a later stage – a network mechanism whereby the rich always get richer.

However, mathematical modelling of networks always involves reductionism. Most actual-world problems are just too complex to describe, so models are massively oversimplified simulations, lacking any historical specificity, even when Watts tries to incorporate sociological insights. They always beg the question of what it is that they are actually modelling, and how such information can be translated into the messy business of the social world. And a model of any single network doesn't easily take into account its intersections with the many other networks that are always at play: there are no boundaries between social, biological, technological phenomena, and all affect others at all times.

Small-world models have little capacity to address the qualitative differences in the cultural dimensions of information cascades or any other phenomena. What is it about Harry Potter that resonates with our times? Universalising models lack any historical frameworks that would explain more subtle cultural shifts that have accompanied the growth of networks.