It has been widely thought since
time immemorial that the ICTs are taking over every sector of life. Even after
the unprecedented dotcom crash of 2001, the optimism of government, the
business sector and the society at large was not dampened. The only thing that
diminished was the talk about the heroes of the digital age. It would seem that
every magazine and periodical was doing a story about the witty Billy Gates and
idolizing him for buying a dos program from a programmer and later turning out
to be the richest man from the proceeds the copyright generated.
Around
this Time, Billy Gates wrote two books which became instant best sellers.
Everybody wanted to read his wisdom and fin out the secret behind the empire he
had built. Other significant personalities wrote journals that were almost
idolized by the entire population. But then, almost with the same gusto that
the heroes of the digital age gained followers, people lost interest in them in
the mid nineties. The new thing was the
speeding up of computers. Everybody understood that if you can do it faster,
then you can do more and you can then be richer. This paved way to new ICTS as
well as to new technologies in the computing world.
There
was such a heightened suffusion of new PCs that had better capacities and
processors and the traditional way of admiring technological advancement of a
long time was no more. No sooner had a new technology been released than
another came out. In less than one decade, we had been bombarded with new ICTs
like PDAs, palmtops, scanners, PCs, digital cameras, and the mother of all
technological advancement, the internet. The irony of it is that we crave
continually for the newest technologies yet quickly abandon it in favor of the
other that comes up (Castell, 1989).
The
term network society was used by Castell Manuels to refer to the internet
(Hassan 2003) in his book, the internet
galaxy (2001) there are many books that have been written on the topic of
network society some of which have been implicit e.g. Harvey David’s the condition of post modernity while
others have been explicit like Manuals, the
internet galaxy
The history of the
network society
What we call the internet today
began somewhere around the early 1960s. It was a brain child of DARPA (Defense
Advanced Research Project Agency). The purpose for its inception was to form a
system of computer information that was robust enough to survive the nuclear
attack of Russia since it was the period when Russia and America were in a cold
war. Prior to this, computer networks relied on the star topology which had
many workstations but they relied on one server. If the server crashed, then
the entire network would also go down.
The concept of packet switching was
developed to solve this problem and this was achieved through the realization
of the TCP/IP protocol suite. This made it possible to break down digital data
into small fragments called packets which could actually travel via different
routes and get reassembled at the destination. The importance of this is that
the data packets could be rerouted to by pass faulty connections on the
network.
The advent of the network society
has reshaped the society that we live and operate in a big way. The economy has
been impacted, the culture has been influenced and the society has been
transformed. This new technology has affected media and politics thereby
setting a new precedence in the social structures. Hassan (2004) states that
the network society is loaded with discrepancies and is in a “state of deep
flux”
References
Hassan, R 2004, Media Politics and the Network Society, BerkShire, MacGraw Hill.
Castell, Mn2001, The Internet Galaxy, New York, Oxford
University Press.
No comments:
Post a Comment