Click here to download The Network Society Podcast

Here is the written version of the podcast (be green, read on the screen)! Enjoy :-)

Two major communication scholars, Manuel Castells and Jan Van Dijk have worked during the last 16 years to explain and define what the network society is. And what’s come to mind immediately today to young adults about network society, refers more to social networks or social media as the so-called website, Facebook. Notwithstanding, the network society has many roots that Van Dijk identified as the individual, organization and societal areas that have been shaped by the combination of media and social networks and changed its basic mode of organization and structures (van Dijk, 2006).

Understanding the word “network” is a pre-requisite in the knowledge of what embrace the expression “network society”. In Jan Van Dijk’s book “the network society” (2006), a network is defined “as a collection of links between elements of a unit”. The term elements refer to “nodes” and unit is sometimes called “systems”. Castells (1996) explained that a node “depends on the kind of concrete networks of which we speak”, as this podcast focus on the example of sustainable development, a node could be the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in Europe. Moreover, a network is a link that binds up at least three nodes while just a link between two people or companies is defined as a simple relationship.

First of all, Castells explained in his book “The network society” the concept of a global economy in the context of a network society. Actually, the global economy is based on major activities such as money, production systems or information “to work as a unit in real time on a planetary scale… because of the existence of an infrastructure of telecommunications, information systems, and fast transportation systems that provide the technological capacity for the system to work as a unit on a global scale” (Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley, 2001). Let’s take an example in sustainable development with the “Agriculture 2.0”. This term has been the title of a conference hold in Palo Alto, California, in March 2010, in which venture capitalists of the Silicon Valley and sustainable agriculture start-ups were bringing together. The goal of this conference was that venture capitalists can help industrial agriculture by using information technology. This would help to connect consumers and producers to one another because they have the technology as computers, energy industries and entertainment, to invest in sustainable agriculture (Woody, 2010). In the conference, it has been highlighted there is no connection between consumers and local farmers, and the result is that food producers often “remain in the dark about what the market is demanding” (Woody, 2010). In providing technological capacity to the agricultural system, it will be possible to link consumers and producers, as the start-up FarmsReach in San Francisco does, in developing an online market to connect farmers to local buyers like restaurants.

This link between consumers, producers and capitalists is defined by Castells with the term “world of interdependence”. He illustrated this interdependence in referring to the European Union. He explained that European countries pooled their sovereignty “so that together they could have some level of bargaining power and some leverage to control global flows of wealth, information, and power” (Castells, 2001). Here we have an example of “a network of interactions… a world of interdependence, of nation states sharing sovereignty” (Castells, 2001). It is possible to exemplify this network with the Agenda 21 initiative that gives some recommendations for the 21^st century, in various fields as the reduction of poverty, health or the pollution of the atmosphere. In 1992 has been hold the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where 178 Governments of the United Nations Systems engaged in the Agenda 21, to take global, national and local action in every kind of area in which human beings affect the environment (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2009). It is important to highlight that 80% of the Agenda 21 are situated in Europe. Networks of collectivities are created in order to cooperate and shared efforts to reach the goals of this initiative, as the Comity 21 that connect them to one another. This leads to say that the exchange between those collectivities is a prerequisite to reinforce and gather power of the different European communities.

Another essential point in the network society is about the mass society and its mass media tools that have started to be dissolved through the convergence of the media process in our modern network society (van Dijk, 2005). Van Dijk explained the fundamental differences between the mass society and the network society. The main component of the last one is that the individuals are linked through the use of networks in a “Glocal” scope (both global and local). This is done in diverse virtual types of communities with an increasingly mediated type of communication and a high use of different media. The society shifted from a vertical bureaucracy to a horizontal “infocracy” (van Dijk, 2006) in which it is possible to centralize execution and manage the decision-making process at the same time. This is because the new communication and information technologies can adjust and manage all levels of complexity within the network in a real time (Castells, 2000). This enhances the fact that our current network society has been made possible through the use of new communication and information technologies. Notwithstanding, it does not refer to technological determinism, but more to the fact that without those information technologies, the evolution that has conducted to social transformation were unlikely to happen.

As this infocracy is defined according to the rise of the information technologies, “it has enabled organizations, states and societies to work without the constraints of time and space” (van Dijk, 2005). The Internet is a major tool in this change. It has transformed those important dimensions of human beings life that has finally created new cultural identity in which “the space of flows and timeliness time” are its material foundations (Castells, 1996). This new culture is characterised by “the peaceful coexistence of various interests and cultures in the net took the form of the World Wide Web (WWW), a flexible network of networks within the Internet” (Castells, 1996). This cultural characteristic leads to Castells’ argument about globalisation, that the network society is a “global capitalist society” (Flew, 2008). In this globalisation process, different oppositional movement has raised in the form of resistance entities (Flew, 2008), as are sometimes ecological movements. The limit they encounter is they would like to fight the globalisation system but are dependent on the decisions of what and who they oppose to have to capacity to grow over time.

Earlier in this paper, the term convergence has been used. On one hand, for Castells (1996), it is one of the five origins of the network society. On the other hand, in the network society defined by van Dijk (2006), “technologies of telecommunication, data communication and mass communication” are the ground of the term convergence in which those tools have created “one single digital communications infrastructure”. Convergence is a way to link online and offline communications using several media for instance Internet, mobile phones, and blogs to broadcast messages to audiences and particularly mass audiences. According to Ben Verwaayen, the CEO of British Telecom, convergence “really means the freedom for consumers to use any service under any circumstances they choose to” (The Economist, 2006). It is possible to add what Henry Jenkins argued: “convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content” (Jenkins, 2006). Let’s take an example in sustainable development. Convergence could be exemplified in the broadcasting of two movies, the first one is “Home”, at the movies in 2007, and the second one is “The Cove”, in 2009. The first one was firstly a movie, broadcasted in cinemas, then available for free on the Internet. Then, a website was created about the movie and how to take action through online found raising, and other tools as blogs, a calculator to know what is your carbon footprint, and an iPhone app to gather sustainable news day after day. In the second example, “The Cove” has pushed forward the convergence principle in linking the movie’s website to the major online actor about sustainable development “Take Part.com”. They propose a way to link online and offline communication in proposing “to write to our leaders”, to send a text-message to the website in order to regularly receive information about how you could help. Convergence is here very useful because people can share what they learn in forwarding videos and the film's trailer to their friends via email or straight to their phones.

This last example is a path to say that the ongoing mutation of communication technology has offered the means to communication media to affect the entire domain of social life in a network that is local and global at the same time (Castells, 2007). The social life in the network society is characterised in some aspects by social network and social media. This is an evolution that Castells had foreseen in 1996 and from which we can now say that the social part in the network society is becoming a synonym of participation. This has changed the media landscape (The Economist, 2009) in which media are globally interconnected and networks are considered as a social morphology (Flew, 2008). Let’s now explain what define social networking. It defines social interactions through computer-mediated communication in which virtual communities can be created. Rheingold has coined the term “virtual communities” and explained it as “a self-defined electronic network of interactive communication organized around a shared interest or purpose” (Castells, 1996). It is possible to go deeper in speaking about social media that are made by the people for the people. Today, everybody has a chance to make its own media, thanks to tools like blogs, videos sharing and podcasts. Moreover, people have the chance to play a role in providing feedback, and promote what they like, “social media means new opportunities to create and communicate with people that care” (CommonCraft, 2008). This is all about participation. In the sustainable development field, participation doesn’t have the same form as in social media. People and most of all the Internet users do not rate actions or show their support to companies, NGOs or websites in the same way. It is another form of participation that is taking action and aware people about what is going on on our planet, to our planet and to people. In April this year, a new French movie “Local solutions for a global disorder” (translated from the French name “Solutions locales pour un désordre global”) will be broadcasted about agriculture, pollution, poverty and other key issues of sustainable development. As for “The Cove” and “Home”, the website of the movie proposes ideas and solutions about those problems, and is a means to raise funds. Recently, the characteristics of social media have started to match those of sustainable development. For instance, on the websites of those movies, the Internet users can share it on Facebook or on Twitter. To bind up social networks and media to the network society is necessary to understand what is socially happening in sustainable development within a network context.

To conclude, the network society is a term that defined exactly the 21^st century. In the sustainable development field, globalisation offers the possibility to aware people and act in societies both economically and socially. A new culture has started to be created: “we have entered a purely cultural pattern of social interaction and social organization” (Castells, 1996) in the information age that is no more new but a sine qua non condition to think globally and act locally.

References:

Castells, M. (2007). Communication, Power and Counter-power in the Network Society. International Journal of Communication , 238-266.

Dijk van, Jan (2005). Outline of a Multilevel Approach of the Network Society. In: Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, May 26-30, 2005, New York City, NY. http://doc.utwente.nl/59818/1/Dijk05outline.pdf

Castells, M. (2000). The contours of the network society. The journal of futures studies, strategic thinking and policy , 2 (2).

Castells, M. (1996). The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol.I: The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Flew, T. (2008). New media: an introduction. South melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley. (2001, May 9). The Network Society and Organizational Change. Retrieved from Conversation with history: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Castells/castells-con4.html

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

The Economist. (2009, October 20-21). Did you know: The pace of change. Retrieved from Media Convergence Forum: http://mediaconvergence.economist.com/content/video

The Economist. (2006, October 12). SURVEY: TELECOMS CONVERGENCE. Retrieved from The Economist: http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?story_id=7995312

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2009). Agenda 21. Retrieved from United Nations: http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/

van Dijk, J. (2006). The network society : social aspects of new media (2nd ed.). London: Sage Publications.

Woody, T. (2010, March 26). Silicon Valley investors place bets on sustainable ag. Retrieved from Grist: http://www.grist.org/article/2010-03-26-silicon-valley-investorsvcs-ready-to-make-bets-on-sustainable-ag/

CommonCraft. (2008, May 28). Social Media in Plain English. Retrieved from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE&feature=PlayList&p=FB9821322A771F06&playnext_from=PL&playnext=1&index=1

Serreau, C. (Director). (2010). Solutions locales pour un désordre global [Motion Picture]. http://www.solutionslocales-lefilm.com/synopsis

What does the word community mean in the sustainable development field?

The term community can be correlated to several fields of interest, from biology to sociology. This post will only focus on a general sociologic definition and on a particular aspect of it, the virtual community. Those approaches best apply on the sustainable development field.

On one hand, the definition of The Free Dictionary gives a general view of what the word community means and includes: a community could be “a group of people living in the same locality and under the same government”, “having common interests” to form “a community of interests” with a sense of “community spirit”. On the other hand, the virtual community coined by Rheingold, refers to a “self-defined electronic network of interactive communication organized around a shared interest or purpose” (Castells, 1996) but also to “a group of people, who may or may not meet one another face to face, who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer Bulletin Board System (BBSs) and other digital networks” (Encyclopaedia Britannica). How could the characteristics of both definitions could apply to the sustainable development field?

A conference has been hold at Bond University on wednesday the 24^th of march 2010 about developing a sustainable campus community. It was explained that a community on a campus has to rely on several particularities: having an institutional culture that is fostered by the governance of the campus, planning operations and strategies, and involving education. Given the exemple of Bond University, a few engagements are taken, for exemple the “Talloires Declaration” (create a framework to enlarge, support, and reward good practice in civic engagement and social responsibility) has been signed up in 2008 and a Sustainable Management Development Plan for 2010-2015 has been proposed. Moreover, in this conference, it has been suggested for exemple to improve environmental lessons in classroom and social interactions in order to provide messages about how do sustainable things, when and why do it. The sense of community here has a meaning of how to change behaviour through the use of different communication tools, and engagements.

The professor Tim Jackson from the University of Surrey, proposed a Community Engagement Framework in which people are enabled and encouraged, community are engaged, and examples are used (have a look on the diagram below for more information).

From those physical engagements, it is possible to enlarge them to virtual engagements and actions. Given the example of the fight to increase the health quality of Indigenous people in Australia, the “Close the Gap” day exemplify the interdependency of virtual and physical engagements. A website has been made to gather people and make them propose actions to raise funds, write to the government, or sign a pledge. The last one offers you the choice to have your name written in their website to tell the world that you have taken action.

We could now give a new definition of a green community in the 21^st century: it refers to a group of people having common interest that could form interactive online network, and who may or may not share green ideas in face to face meetings, and who take actions in the virtual or physical world.

Community has protean meanings in the sustainable development field and all of them are interdependent. For the next decade, the best that could happen is the development of local green communities (local producers and activist) in putting them in a major position of the green decision-making process of local governance system, and in their involvement in other online and offline communities. Another interesting change could be to create a major green browser. It could reference all the websites and blogs about sustainability to offers common people an easy access to green information, and spread it widely throughout the world. Green and sustainability is all about community as it is made by people.

References:

virtual community. (2010). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved March 26, 2010, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9470936

Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the network Society. UK: Blackwell Publishers Inc.

Tufts University. (2005, September 17). Talloires Declaration. Retrieved from The Talloires Network: http://www.tufts.edu/talloiresnetwork/?pid=17

Oxfam International. (2010, March). Close The Gap. Retrieved from Oxfam Australia: http://www.oxfam.org.au/explore/indigenous-australia/close-the-gap

Jackson, T. (2005, May 19). Motivating Sustainable Consumption A Review of Evidence on Consumer. Retrieved from Docstoc: http://www.docstoc.com/docs/7874847/Motivating-Sustainable-Consumption-A-Review-of-Evidence-on-Consumer

Short news: Information overflow

Art is always a good way to have another view on society....

Richard J. Evans: "What I tried to do was visually represent the way information is so easily leaked into today’s society, through the Internet and television. Pretty much anything you can imagine, you can get your hands on. With such an abundance of information, I feel as though it over-flows into our lives and the typography is purposefully hard to read to reflect this."

Link: http://richardjevans.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00:00:00Z&updated-max=2010-01-01T00:00:00Z&max-results=9

How is information a 'public good' in the sustainable development field?

In the field of communication about sustainable development, the information stream plays an major role to convey green ideas through the use of different media.

The word information refers to something intangible that is non-depletable, as a contrary to natural ressources (The Scholarly Kitchen, 2009). It also has the property to be non-rival in the way that if I am using a source of information, it doesn't prevent anybody else to use exactly the same source. Thus there is no background of something private which has the intrinsic characteristic of ownership. If I am reading an article on the Internet environmentalist website www.novethic.com, it will not entrave anybody else to read exactly the same news. So what are the characteristics of information as a public good in the sustainable development field?

From the definition of the Linux Information project (2006), economists use the therm public good to refer to a good or service which can be consumed indefinitely without reducing the quantity available for other persons. About information, we went from private good with material media (newspapers, magazines) that are owned by editors, to digital media that gives information the trait of a public good: “The development of distributed digital information through network browsers has radically changed many of the traditional institutions of... communication” (Hess et al's, 2001). Thus, the point about digital information is that it can be spread easily and as a result could be copying. This act illustrates the non-rivalry of information that makes it a public good. The idea of copying is developed in the Scholarly Kitchen website, saying that an overuse of information doesn't make it scare, but do exactly the opposite. In doing so, information become infinitely expansible: each user of the Internet can duplicate, create and distribute information. From an article writing in the New-York Times, an Internet user can react on its blog to modify and add content from the original article, to create new reactions in other blogs and new articles in other news websites, and so on.

As a result, traditional communication has changed to make information rhyme with participation. Information is here all about participatory media content. All kind of media are gathered and contents are created by both citizens and professional. Information is created through participatory media, like blogs, podcasts, and widely broadcasted to share green ideas all over the world. Participation in web 2.0 is best illustrated with the rise of the open source encyclopedia: wikipedia. “Open source production essentially involves producing a commodity as a public good” (Anthony, 2009). A parallel can be made with the “creative commons” movement which “enable authors,... and other creators of original content to establish more flexible... principles through which their work can be used and repurposed to serve non-commercial, public-good principles” (Flew, 2008). A movie available on the internet reflect this principle: “Home”, directed by a famous french photographer. You can freely see the whole movie on YouTube, without being charged or risking to be pursued for hacking.

--> link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU

Another interesting example is on the Google search page, if you click on the link marked “advanced search,” and then on “usage rights” you can select “free to use or share” (Boyle, 2008).

Information should be shared and provided, the problem is that sometimes information is withhold, as the example of the movie “The Cove” which revealed a catastrophic information about how dolphin are butchered in the Japan town Taiji.

In the sustainable development field, information needs to be widely provided to citizen to increase their awareness about climate change and to keep them in touch with the reality. So what could be more a public good than information about sustainable development?

References

Flew, T. (2007). New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

The Linux Information Project (2006, February 16). Public Goods: A Brief Introduction. Retrieved from The Linux Information Project http://www.linfo.org/public_good.html

Society for scholarly publishing (2009, April 9). Information as Property. Retrieved from The Scholarly Kitchen, what's hot and cooking in scholarly publishing: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/04/09/information-as-property/

Hess, Charlotte & Ostrom Elinor (2001). Artifacts, Facilities, And Content: Information as a Common-pool Resource. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University: http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/ostromhes.pdf

Anthony, D. (2009). Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods. Rationality and Society, 21(3), 283-306. Retrieved from E-Journals database.

Boyle, James (2008). The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Retrieved from: http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

Transmedia storytelling in the sustainable environment field

Sustainable environment issues are increasing every year, as well as the communication around it and the use of transmedia storytelling is a tremendous means to develop the awareness around those issues. What is transmedia storytelling and how it will apply on sustainable development?

For most communicators, this concept refers more on branding, and fiction stories than on factual stories. The word ‘Storytelling’ itself in the communication area refers to stories that a brand creates in order to build an emotional relationship with a potential customer. A patent example is the well-known Nespresso’s advertisement campaign (have a look below for the three episodes of the story).

More precisely, ‘transmedia’, refers to the different medium used to broadcast an entertaining story in a coherent and complementary way (Jenkins, 2007). It must be coherent in order to have a logical story and not only short stories spreading in an uncoordinated manner. It also needs to be complementary to contribute in an interesting way to the whole story. As a result the story as a whole is more than the sum of its parts, and each entry is unique with a finite role in it. Another side of the concept is that the audience may appropriate some aspects of the story to apply them in their every day life, and immerse themselves in the world of the fictional story. Henry Jenkins explain it in saying that ‘a transmedia text does not simply disperse information: it provides a set of roles and goals which readers can assume as they enact aspects of the story through their everyday life’ (Jenkins, 2007). The problem noticeable here is that the explanation is applicable on a fiction world. So, how could it apply to a true-based story as the sustainable development field?

A start of an answer could be that transmedia storytelling is grounded on collective intelligence through the idea of ‘transmedia activism’ (Srivastava, 2009). The first term collective intelligence has been firstly used by Pierre Levy and refers “to new social structures that enable the production and circulation of knowledge within a networked society”(Jenkins, 2007). In the case of sustainability, people from the same interest are gathered to pool information and create a community about sustainable action making. Furthermore, transmedia storytelling provides piece of information about what can be known about real facts. It also encourages talks in the way that it is impossible to have a complete knowledge about the sustainable field and thus the audience tries to find out more using each type of media. For instance, the website www.climatecrisis.net is based on the movie “An inconvenient truth” proposes piece of information, tips, news and a more developed community with the linked committed website www.takepart.com. The latter increase the value of the climate crisis website by making the Internet user involved with the creation of content. From a story told in a movie, people become actors by creating contents in new participatory media.

The last proposition introduces the idea of transmedia activism in the extent it enhances the participative role of the audience in the storytelling content. With the use of multiple media, storytellers as NGO or green companies, develop transmedia storytelling to make their statement more “fashionable” and thus influence action and increase awareness. It is a prerequisite need because ‘any individual institution engaging an audience … is required to convey clearly and artfully what it does, how its does it, where its work is most effective and necessary, and why they should support efforts to continue or grow the institution’s work’ (Srivastava, 2009). It means that the story told refers to what is done and how to achieve a particular goal, through the use of multiple channels in order to create a community that collaborate and interact. Exposing the audience of such storytellers to particular media is the best means to connect people to a cause. The last example of www.takepart.com also proposes to contribute to the network and to make people involved. It is possible by proposing them the creation of content (video, music, article) and the creation of action (to create a petition, propose an event and link to other donation website).

Applying transmedia storytelling to sustainable development differs from the fictional application because it provides tools to people to develop collective intelligence around the same issue in order to make them acting.

References

Flew, T. (2007). New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne, Australia: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, H. (2007, March 22). Transmedia Storytelling 101. Retrieved from Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: http://www.henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html

Srivastava, L. (2009, January 20). Transmedia Activism: Telling Your Story Across Media Platforms to Create Effective Social Change. Retrieved from MediaRights: http://www.mediarights.org/news/Transmedia_Activism_Telling_Your_Story_Across_Media_Platforms_to_Create_Eff/

TakePart. (2008). Climate Crisis. Retrieved from Climate Crisis: http://www.climatecrisis.net/

TakePart. (2008). TakePart Social Action Networ: Important Issues, Activism, Environmental, Human Rights, Politica News. Retrieved from TakePart: http://www.takepart.com/