Network Society. How social relations rebuild space(s)

The key questions the present volume seeks to answer are why and how to read society as a network. At the base, there are at least three reasons: 1. First, the fact that the network has colonized the common use of language and the collective imagination. Everyone talks about networks in different areas (politics, economics and health care, among others) and referring to different concerns (to name but a few: conformity, cooperation, multilingualism, social control and the crisis of the welfare state). In each situation, it takes on the most varied features: from a device that saves, to a mesh that traps. In all these senses, the role of the InterNet ‒ as the “network of networks” ‒ emerges. It becomes a metaphor and, at the same time, a support for the Network Society and the contemporary societies even when it creates new divisions, as exemplified by the concept and the phenomenon of the digital divide. 2. The second reason is that the study of the network enables us to describe some of the processes through which we are used to explain the contemporary society since the late ‘70s: the postmodern and post‐industrial society; the social processes as fluid and flexible; the organizations as cooperative and anti‐bureaucratic systems; the actors as results of multiple identities and points of intersection of different social circles; the end of fixed and immutable order of hierarchies and the advent of governance; the birth of the “global village”; globalization; the mobility and transnationalism; the new forms of solidarity and horizontal communities; the transition from welfare state to the welfare society, etc. 3. The third reason deals with the implications that the network society entails in terms of linguistic practices and discursive production of space in the process of construction of individual and collective identities. The movements of individuals in the geographic space, as a result of globalization processes of migration and mobility, generate a process of dislocation that involves the loss of the relationship between natural, socio‐cultural and geographical boundaries, while producing partial relocation of old and new symbolic productions. Consequently, at the base of postmodern processes of identity construction we cannot find the traditional relationship, related to socio‐territorial aspects, but a more complex net, that involves transnational and multilingual discursive practices.