Untitled - socium.ge

Informationalism and the network society 5My hypothesis for the historical superiority of vertical-hierarchical organizationsover networks is that the networked form of social organizationhad material limits to overcome, limits that were fundamentally linked toavailable technology. Indeed, networks have their strength in their flexibility,adaptability, and self-reconfiguring capacity. Yet, beyond a certainthreshold of size, complexity, and volume of exchange, they become lessefficient than vertically organized command and control structures, underthe conditions of pre-electronic communication technology (Mokyr, 1990).Yes, wind-powered vessels could build sea-crossing, and even transoceanic,networks of trade and conquest. And horse-riding emissaries or fast-runningmessengers could maintain communication from the center to the peripheryof vast territorial empires. But the time lag of the feedback loop in thecommunication process was such that the logic of the system amounted to aone-way flow of information and instruction. Under such conditions,networks were an extension of power concentrated at the top of the verticalorganizations that shaped the history of humankind: states, religious apparatuses,war lords, armies, bureaucracies, and their subordinates in charge ofproduction, trade, and culture.The ability of networks to introduce new actors and new contents in theprocess of social organization, with relative independence of the powercenters, increased over time with technological change, and, more precisely,with the evolution of communication technologies. This was particularly thecase with the possibility of relying on a distributed energy network that characterizedthe advent of the industrial revolution: railways, ocean liners, andthe telegraph constituted the first infrastructure for a quasi-global networkwith self-reconfiguring capacity. However, industrial society (both in itscapitalist and its statist versions) was predominantly structured around largescale,vertical production organizations and extremely hierarchical stateapparatuses, in some instances evolving into totalitarian systems. This is tosay that early, electrically based communication technologies were notpowerful enough to equip networks with autonomy in all their nodes, as thisautonomy would have required multidirectionality and a continuous flow ofinteractive information processing. But it also means that the availability ofproper technology is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the transformationof the social structure. It was only under the conditions of amature industrial society that autonomous projects of organizationalnetworking could emerge. When they did, they could use the potential ofmicroelectronics-based communication technologies.Networks became the most efficient organizational form as a result ofthree major features of networks that benefited from the new technologicalenvironment: flexibility, scalability, and survivability.