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English notes taken from the lectures and the extra videos for the seminars. Including images from the corresponding slides.
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Political Action in the Network SocietyLECTURE 1 – The Network Society
What is a network? According to M. Castells, a network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is a
unit that is possibly – but not necessarily – connected. A network has the following characteristics:
- Binary logic (inclusion/exclusion)
- Decentralized structures (there is not one core being of the network)
- Utility of the nodes → if you don’t say anything, you’re not part of the network.
Ties are a type of connection between the units within a network. There are different types of ties,
such as relationships, which are often based on common friendship/love/collegiality.
Within a twitter network, the nodes are the users, the ties are the people who mention each other,
and the tie strength is the number of mentions.
Brokerage position = position of power, if the node on this position disappears, the network falls
apart.
Network society = ‘A society whose social structure is made up of networks powered by micro-
electronic-based information and communication technologies’ (Castells, 2004, p 3). Causes:
- Revolution in information technology,
- The restructuring of capitalism (informational state)
- Cultural social movements that emerged in the 1960s in the United states and Western
Europe
SEMINAR 1
Important quote from Lee Rainie, Barry Wellman, Networked : The New Social Operating System:
‘A social network is a set of relations among network members – be they people,
organizations, or nations. From a network perspective, several things matter: society is not the sum
of individuals or of two-person ties. Rather, everyone is embedded in structures of relationships that
prove opportunities, constraints, coalitions, and work-arounds. Nor is society built out of solidarity,
tightly bounded groups – like stacked series of building blocks. Rather, it is made out of a tangle of
networked individuals who operate in specialized, fragmented, sparsely interconnected, and
permeable networks. Social network analysts focus more on the characteristics of these relationships
than on the characteristics of the individual members.’
,Causes of the social network revolution:
1. Automobile and airplane trips have made travel wider-ranging and broadly affordable,
helping spread social networks worldwide.
2. The rapid growth of affordable telecommunications and computing has made
communicating and gaining information more powerful and more personal. (In short:
computers facilitate connectivity.)
3. The general outbreak of peace and spread of trade have driven commercial and social
interconnectedness.
4. Family composition, roles, and responsibilities have transformed households from groups to
networks.
5. Structured and bounded voluntary organizations are becoming supplanted by more ad hoc,
and open informal networks of civic involvement and religious practice. (There used to be a
need for face-to-face contact in politics, but it is now more informal & fluent thanks to
social media.)
6. Common culture passed along through a small number of mass media firms has shifted to
fragmented culture dispensed through more channels to more hardware.
7. Work has become flexible in the developed world, especially the shift from pushing atoms
in manufacturing bits in white-collar ‘creative’ work.
8. American society has become less bounded by ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual
orientation.
9. The decline of defined pensions and the rise of independent retirement accounts.
The group way of thinking:
‘People like to think that they operate in groups. It’s cognitively easier. “I belong to the
Putnam Bowling League” is easier to say – and remember – than “I belong to a shifting network of
people that go bowling once in a while, although some of these people plus some others like to go to
a dance club on a Saturday night a month”. In short, a group is often a stereotype – a shortcut for
how we think about our relationships. ‘
Changing from group-logic to network-logic – from groups to clusters. You need to view yourself as
the center of a network and you move between different relationships/networks.
Social network analysis:
‘In short, bridging ties are great for getting information in and out of cluster of relationships.
But bounding ties that stay within the cluster are often necessary for internal trust, efficiency and
solidarity.’ Bridging ties are weak ties, in the outer circles of our connections. Bounding ties are much
stronger. Weak ties provide us with new information, because they come from outside our circle and
know things you don’t know. The strong ties (family members, partner, close friends) provide us with
trust, solidarity, support.
‘The turn toward a network operation system has been built on flexible connectivity between
individuals and the ability to trust one another across distances and groups without requiring the
cohesive force of the tribe to punish transgressions.’ Trust is a fundamental aspect of a social
network.
LECTURE 2 – Echo chambers, filter bubbles and political polarization
There has been a change from people being the receivers of information through television
(consuming information, ‘couch potatoes’) to a network-way of spreading (and making) information.
From a hierarchy to a network. So, political communication has changed from the triangle that we
saw in lecture 1 (with citizens, journalists and politicians), to a network. Citizens are becoming
, ‘journalists’ in some sense, because they are able to record news items with their phone and sharing
them online.
Barack Obama is seen as the first US president to intentionally use the Internet for his campaign.
Spreading specific images online is a strategy to promote yourself as a politician. For example, look at
this image:
Obama profiles himself here,
as a president who views
himself as equal to ‘ordinary’
cleaning staff. Important to
note here as well, is that they
are both people of colour.
Another example of profiling online, is the following example regarding Donald Trump:
If anything, Donald Trump is
going to be remembered as
‘the Twitter President’.
Another example of online politics are memes, such as this one:
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