Evolving Communication Theory

Dresden
It always surprises me that even brand-new convention centres are so poorly set up for the obvious, basic needs: power supply for delegates' laptops. Luckily I've been able to burrow into the underbelly of the conference hall floor, and found a socket - so the last couple sessions won't go unblogged.

This next session deals with the question of the network society and the theories surrounding it - still a somewhat underresearched area deserving further attention. 'Network research' is likened here to 'lunch' - a broad, perhaps overly broad area which needs to be better and more narrowly defined in order to be effectively studied. Network theory and network society theory need to be further and more effectively interconnected. Jan van Dijk starts off by outlining the claims of network theory and analysis about contemporary society: there is the observation that we are moving towards a network society (where according to Castells networks are already the basic units of society - and van Dijk suggests that perhaps individuals still remain the basic units but are increasingly linked by networks). So, in a network society the social relations are gaining influence as compared to the social units they are linking. Despite their articulation all social relations remain inextricably bound up with units.

Main research topics then deal with social cohesion (the world is becoming smaller, but at the same time also more fragmented), contagion (the accelerating spread of ideas), social inequality, the complexity of organisation (with new types of organisations arising), and crises (where a breakdown of systems causes further cascade effects). New perspectives are emerging from this: these utilise a multi-level, multi-theoretical approach (and network theory then is more of a meta-theory), and also incorporate outside influences (from maths, physics, and biology, for example). But it remains necessary to extend network theory from the meso-level of social and organisational networks to the macro-level of society, and the micro-level of individuals and their network individualisation. Further, network analysis needs to further include quantitative as well as qualitative research; at the moment its focus is too morphological.

Peter Monge follows on from this - he notes the long history of network society theory across a variety of disciplines from economics to social theory to anthropology and sociology, ranging all the way back to work such as the theories of Adam Smith. In recent years, of course, we have seen even more of this emerge, particularly also in relation to Internet studies. Monge suggests that there is a network structuring process in which exogenous attributes of actors and exogenous relations in the network feed into the structure of the focal network, and theories to predict mutuality, cyclicality, etc., can be brought to bear on this; in addition, there are endogenous mechanisms to drive the network structuring process itself.

Monge suggests that there are seven families of social science theories which have their own theoretical mechanisms - theories of self-interest, collective action, cognitive theories, contagion theories, exchange and dependency theories, homophily theories, and network-evolutionary theories. Using this framework, a multi-level, multi-theoretical framework for the study of the network society can be developed. He also suggests that the evolutionary process is of particular importance here, though - variation, selection, retention; competitive and cooperative relations over scarce niche resources; genealogical transmission; and birth, growth, transmission, decline and death via evolutionary principles can all be observed in this network structuring process. But what, then, are network theory and especially the theory of the network society - are they multitheoretical or unified, and are they evolutionary?

Finally, then, to Noshir Contractor, who demonstrates the variety in theories on the network society by presenting a map of available books on the topic in Amazon, and of their relations by using the Amazon 'related purchases' functions. Some clusters of theory already clearly emerge here, even in spite of the obviously non-scientific source of data. He suggests that it is now increasingly possible to test and challenge some of the theories Monge outlined, by using and studying the increasingly sophisticated cyberinfrastructures which are available to us, perhaps especially in a Web2.0 context. Such new tools do for creating and sustaining networks what the Web browser did for retrieving information - but they also do for studying the creation and sustainment of networks what the Web browser did for the study of information retrieval!

This is all about relational metadata, then - and we have seen the rise of technologies that capture communities' relational meta-data. In this context, the network consists no longer only of links and nodes, but there are multiple types of nodes and network connections; the network is multidimensional. We are moving from syntactic (1.0) to semantic (2.0) Web frameworks here, and perhaps even to a pragmatic Web, where the focus is not on information or meta-data, but on cyberinfrastructure workflows or itineraries. The same cyberinfrastructure also creates a massive increase in the amount of data that is available for the study of such network society interactions - but it needs to be harvested (while paying attention to the privacy implications of this harvesting), and it requires a large deal of computing capacity for its analysis, as well as (of course) further development in the methodologies used to study and analyse these data.

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