Abstract
Will the future be like Bradbury’s (1953) ‘Fahrenheit 451’, where people will have to meet in person to share their knowledge and cultural products through portable terabyte flash drives? Or a future where a pair of augmented reality contact lenses and haptic implants allow people to be constantly networked and whose nervous systems respond to distant physical stimuli as if they were present? These are the two scenarios depicted in the last chapter of Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman’s Networked, following a detailed and extensive description of the sociological change that first the Internet and then wireless networking have brought to every person in the world with access to such media.
Networked first describes the way in which the social network, Internet and mobile revolutions (referred to collectively by the authors as ‘The Triple Revolution’) affect networked individualism. It also looks at how the perspective of the social network changes the traditional ‘group versus individual’ way of framing human behaviour and the shift to constant accessibility brought about by mobile phones. The second part, titled ‘How Networked Individualism Works’, explores the impact of the Triple Revolution on everyday life, whether in households, communities or at work, allowing people to traverse geographical boundaries and giving them a greater opportunity to voice their creativity and to access information. The third part sums up what has been previously investigated and sets out possible future scenarios which offer greater opportunities alongside greater uncertainties.
The underlying assumption of the book is that humans determine how technologies are used as they control the new social operating system and can decide either to transform it into a Wachowskis’ ‘Matrix’ (1999) or use it to have greater power to shape their lives. The book posits that networked individualism is characterised by the fact that ‘people function more as connected individuals and less as embedded group members’ (p. 12) and assumes that this change has already happened. However, the book itself acknowledges that the main difference with the past is the framework of interpretation generated by the digitalised networked world; it is not just a shift from the group to the networked individual, but a new perspective, because as the book puts it, ‘social networks […] have been around since the beginning of time when Cain hung out with Abel’ (p. 21), and in fact, ‘we all have been using networks throughout our lives without knowing it’ (p. 56).
Rainie and Wellman’s analysis spans different aspects of social life which describe the shift towards networked individualism alongside the reinforcing of some traditional groups. Families, for example, use new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to coordinate their individual lifestyles created by the Triple Revolution and to keep their family together so that the networked individual does not experience a weaker tie with traditional groups. Rainie and Wellman’s evidence ‘shows that people use ICTs to support, supplement, and enhance face-to-face interaction with family members’ (p. 166). Similarly, ICTs are used at work to create working groups that extend beyond the physical structure of the office, as well as to reinforce the traditional group by blurring the home–work boundary. This extends the influence of work beyond the office location and increases workers’ availability outside of normal working hours, where ‘more coordination, if not control, is needed’ (p. 194) and which ‘puts work-life balance at risk’ (p. 195).
Other aspects of daily life that have been thoroughly analysed in the book and are of particular interest include human relationships which are shifting but not withering as a result of ICTs – as the authors report, ‘if anything was being substituted for – by ICT – it was television’ (p. 144); the blurring of the boundaries between producers and consumers of content (p. 197), as well as the ways in which people’s consumption of information has become tailored to their personal tastes, although the sharing of sensitive personal information brings up concerns about privacy and surveillance by governments and organisations.
One interesting point I would like to highlight from the book is that before the Triple Revolution, people could get together and organise as a social movement mainly when a critical number could meet in person (i.e. there was a need for geographical contiguity), while receiving mass media coverage allowed the group to spread beyond its geographical boundaries; now after the Triple Revolution, people can organise beyond their geographical ties and personal connections, without necessarily having to meet in person. This is particularly significant for those with physical impairments as the new social operating system allows them to have a life beyond the physical limits of their own home, an aspect touched upon by Networked when it notes that ‘people living with chronic disease who go online are finding resources that are more useful than the rest of the population’ (p. 145).
Rainie and Wellman’s Networked is a compelling book that describes the most significant changes in everyday life brought about first by the Internet, then more widely by wireless connections and Web 2.0. The book succeeds in its overarching objective which is to demonstrate that today’s intensive use of technology does not signal a shift towards a more individualistic and technocratic social system.
Students will find useful the abundance of data describing the changes in North American society in the last decades as it provides a basis for commencing their studies in social media and more broadly in the psychology and sociology of the networked individual. A thorough reading also reveals the seeds for developing a view distinct from that offered by the authors and many suggestions for deeper research. Those who are not ‘networked’, as well as laypeople, could find the practical examples of the life of networked individuals and the narrative writing style particularly interesting. While the book is repetitive in part, citing lengthy examples and occasionally lacking thorough theoretical references, it benefits from its writing style that can appeal both to the general public and to academic audiences.