A Global Perspective of the Impact of the Internet on Society
While the impact of the internet on society is unquestionable, Castells brings up several key points that relate back to core network concepts we’ve discussed in class. The internet has with a doubt, changed the way people communicate with each other significantly. To be more specific, the internet has allowed people more power and autonomy over themselves and at the same time, induced rapid lateral propagation of social ties. Now, more than ever, people are connected and have access to many more people than ever did before. It allowed people expand their geographically bound social networks to people from all over the world.
The idea of more and more people being connected to one another brings up the concept of strongly connectedness in a graph. If take second and imagine a worldwide social graph before the internet, we would be able to make out large connected components surrounding major cities population dense areas. However as you zoom in on the graph to an individual level, you would see many small strongly connected components denoting families, tight knit communities and such. You may see the occasional long edge from someone to their distance acquaintances or relatives, but the strongly connected components still rather insulated and small. The internet allowed people to overcome these geographic boundaries to connect with a wider range of people at a much deeper than than before. If you would take a look at this hypothetical social network graph in the modern era, you would see large connected components that wouldn’t make geographical sense. These strongly connected components would instead be groups formed online whether they are massively online role playing games or professional networks like linkedin.
Another core concept that this article touched is the idea that the internet gave everyone who had access to it more individual power. This claim by Castells is easy to see. In the past, most people had a few main sources information that informed and shaped their opinion on the world. In this way, people who were at the lowest level, those who received the news, had the least amount of power. By “power”, I mean that those who controlled the source of information had the ability to influence and shape the ideology of the powerless. Throughout history, this imbalance has always existed and has always lessened as more and more sources of information became available. However, no one other event history has changed this power dynamic like the internet did. Tying this back to strongly connected components, the internet reduced information bottlenecks by providing more sources of information (i.e. adding more nodes the vast social graph)