Untitled - socium.ge

Informationalism and the network society 23terms (Borja and Castells, 1997). Specific societies, as defined by the currentboundaries of nation-states, or by the cultural boundaries of their historicalidentities, are deeply fragmented by the double logic of inclusion and exclusionin the global networks that structure production, consumption, communication,and power. I propose the hypothesis that this fragmentation is notsimply the expression of the time lag required by the gradual incorporation ofprevious social forms into the new dominant logic. It is, in fact, a structuralfeature of the network society. This is because the reconfiguring capacityinscribed in the process of networking allows the programs governing everynetwork to search for valuable additions everywhere and to incorporate them,while bypassing and excluding those territories, activities, and people thathave little or no value for the performance of the tasks assigned to the network.Indeed, as Geoff Mulgan observed, “networks are created not just to communicate,but also to gain position, to outcommunicate” (1991: 21). The networksociety works on the basis of a binary logic of inclusion/exclusion, whoseboundaries change over time, both with the changes in the network’s programsand with the conditions of performance of these programs.It also depends on the ability of social actors, in various contexts, to act onthese programs, modifying them according to their interests. The globalnetwork society is a dynamic structure, it is highly malleable to social forces,to culture, to politics, to economic strategies. But what remains in all instancesis its dominance over activities and people who are external to the networks.In this sense, the global overwhelms the local, unless the local becomes a nodein alternative global networks, as is the case with the incorrectly labelled “antiglobalizationmovement,” which is a global movement for global justiceaccording to its participants.Thus, the imperfect globalization of the network society is, in fact, a highlysignificant feature of its social structure. The coexistence of the network society,as a global structure, with industrial, rural, communal or survival societies,characterizes the reality of all countries, albeit with a different share of populationand territory on both sides of the divide, depending on the relevance ofeach segment for the dominant logic of each network. This is to say that variousnetworks will have different geometries and geographies of inclusion andexclusion. The map of the global criminal economy is not the same as the mapof the international location of high-technology industry, although they bothhave points of connection: drug lords depend on computers and the Internet,and quite a few Silicon Valley engineers invent with the help of cocaine.Thus, in theoretical terms, the network society must be analyzed, first, as aglobal architecture of self-reconfiguring networks constantly programmed andreprogrammed by the powers that be in each dimension; second, as the resultof the interaction between the various geometries and geographies of thenetworks that include the core activities, that is, the activities shaping life and