Network Society. What is it?

What is the network society? Roberta Iannone provides a complete and articulated definition of the concept of “network” that renders, in a clear and effective way, the descriptive content of the analysis, giving us at the same time a key to depict the contemporaneity. This perspective is enlarged and enriched by the interesting contributions of Cristina Marchetti, Laura Mariottini, Emanuele Ferreri and Manuela Ciprì.The key questions of the present volume are why and how to read society as a network. At the base of these interrogatives, there are at least three reasons: 1. First, the fact that the network has colonized the common use of the language and the collective imagination. Everyone talks about networks in different areas (politics, economics and health care, among others) and referring to different concerns (conformity, cooperation, multilingualism, social control and the crisis of the welfare state, to name but a few). In each situation, it assumes the most varied features: from a device that saves, to a mesh that traps. In these aspects, the role of the InterNet ‒ as the “network of networks” ‒ emerges. It becomes a metaphor and, at the same time, a support both for the Network Society and the contemporary societies even when creating 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 is essential for the description of some of the processes through which we explain contemporary society since the late ‘70s: the postmodern and post‐industrial society; the fluid and flexible social processes; the organizations as cooperative and anti‐bureaucratic systems; the actors as results of multiple identities and as points of intersection of different social circles; the end of the fixed and immutable order of hierarchies and the advent of the 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 is related to the implications the network society has in terms of linguistic practices and discursive production of space during the process of construction of both individual and collective identities. The movements of the individuals in the geographic space, resulting from the globalization processes of migration and mobility, generates a process of dislocation that involves the loss of the relationship between natural, socio‐cultural and geographical boundaries, while producing a partial relocation of old and new symbolic productions. Consequently, at the base of the 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. Therefore, to analyse society as a network means not only to respond to the “actual needs”, but also to highlight the “opportunities” and the “utilities”, and to investigate if society is really relational or only perceived as such – as exemplified by these processes and the related concepts.