Co-Evolution of Technology, Media and Collective Action

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Age of Network Technology

I think now we are talking about the age of the network technology, and I go along with what Manuel Castells says in that regard; that this is really not particularly an information age.

I think you could argue that the ancient near east when the alphabet emerged, or Europe after the emergence of printing, experienced information ages; that, in fact, this is the network age. Building and using social networks to get things done, what some people call social capital today, that is an essential human trait that I think I don’t need to belabor the point. It’s something that people do whenever they have an opportunity to do it. They do it for beneficial reasons, they do it for destructive reasons, they band together to feed each other, they band together to fight each other, but there are limits on how humans can use their social networking capabilities.

There is a limit to how many people I can gather in my network. There is a limit to how quickly I can summon that network or how widespread that network is. With the network technologies, starting with what’s been called the Victorian internet, starting with the telegraph, and the landline telephone, and now the internet, the wireless internet.

What that enables is the lowering of thresholds and the crossing of barriers that prevented humans from creating and deploying and exploiting social networks. To do things together with people that they weren’t able to do things together with before, to organize collective action on scales that we weren’t able to organize before, in places and at speeds and paces that we weren’t able to organize before.

I would like to get to talking about the multiple literacies that are emerging today. Here we are in Second Life, and many of us use e-mail and instant messaging, and Twitter, and Flickr, and YouTube. That’s not just the alphabet and print. We have multiple literacies, and we also have a real challenge in regards to education.