Network Sociality

Network sociality = a form of sociality determined by one's relative place in networks.

Citation 1: Andreas Wittel on network sociality

" The term network sociality can be understood in contrast to ‘community’. Community entails stability, coherence, embeddedness, and belonging. It involves strong and long-lasting ties, proximity and a common history or narrative of the collective. Network sociality stands counterposed to Gemeinschaft. It does not represent belonging but integration and disintegration… In network sociality social relations are not ‘narrational’ but informational; they are not based on mutual experience or common history, but primarily on an exchange of data and on ‘catching up’. Narratives are characterised by duration, whereas information is defined by ephemerality. Network sociality consists of fleeting and transient, yet iterative social relations; of ephemeral but intense encounters. Narrative sociality often take place in bureaucratic organisations. In network sociality the social bond at work is not bureaucratic but informational; it is created on a project by project basis, by the movement of ideas, the establishment of solely temporary standards and protocols, and the creation and protection of proprietory information. Network sociality is not characterised by a separation but by a combination of both work and play. It is constructed on the grounds of communication and transport technology. Network…, I suggest a shift away from regimes of sociality in closed social systems and towards regimes of sociality in open social systems. Both communities and organisations are social systems with clear boundaries, with a highly defined inside and outside. Networks however are open social systems." (source: A. Wittel (2001): Toward a Network Sociality. Theory, Culture & Society 18 (6), p51-76.)

More Citations

Urban societies, "which have tended more and more to an indifference towards the physical place and also evolved to links of interest with other people regardless of where they are. According to this picture of the evolution in community building and human relationships within communities, today’s tendency in the Western world is towards loosely-bounded and fragmentary ties. Rather than having to blend into the same group as those who are around them, each person has his or her own “personal community” inside a grid of networked individualism." (Yus, 2005, p. 6) (http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/12/networked_proxi_1.html#more)

"A defining characteristic of networked individuality is the overcoming of physical space, which obviously involves a paradigmatic shift to our notion of distance. The network’s indifference towards space has led many to announce—sometimes with glee, sometimes with regret—the death of distance. But more than its elimination, networked sociality promotes the reconfiguration of distance. As Borgmann points out: "Information technology in particular does not so much bring near what is far as it cancels the metric of time and space" (2000, p. 98). Nearness comes to be defined in terms of inclusion in the network, and farness in terms of exclusion." (http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/12/networked_proxi_1.html#more)

More Information

A meditation on Networked Proximity at the Ideant blog at http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2006/12/networked_proxi_1.html