The Polish edition of Manuel Castells’ “The Rise od the Network Society” has been published recently. Better late than never. Here is my review for “Kultura Popularna” (Polish only).
Biblia społeczeństwa informacyjnego
Największym mankamentem polskiego wydania „Społeczeństwa sieci”, pierwszego tomu słynnej trylogii Manuela Castellsa, jest to, że ukazuje się tak późno. Polski czytelnik ma okazję zapoznać się z książką z 2000 roku, której pierwsza edycja miała miejsce w roku 1996. Niebezpieczeństwo dezaktualizacji zatem istnieje, choć dobre książki długo zachowują świeżość .
Książka opisuje wyłanianie się nowego systemu społecznego, nazwanego „społeczeństwem sieci”. Choć Castells wprost odżegnuje się od determinizmu technologicznego, Read the rest of this entry »
Today Polish PM revealed that there are some attempts made to analyze computer models of “the set-up”. “The set-up” (”arrangement”, if you will) denotes the entirety of informal relationships between business circles, politicians ruling in Poland (before the party of said PM ), former communist secret police and intelligence agents and criminal underground. The the destruction of “the arrangement” is presented as one of the main political goals of polish government. However “the set-up” still remains a figure of political rhetoric rather than well defined entity that law enforcement would have chance to attend to. As such, it adds to the steadily growing repertoire of government’s ideas and actions criticized, nay, ridiculed by opposition and some of the public.
Now, however, somebody is doing Social Network Analysis for PM Kaczynski in order to make the concept of “the set-up” more concrete - this is an instant interpretation of PM’s words about computer model of informal political-business-criminal arrangement.
The whole thing is troubling for SNA analyst. The word used in Polish for “set up” or “arrangement” is układ, which is also a synonym for “system”. On his blog Dominik Batorski argues that SNA will always reveal some kind of set-up/system of social ties. My concern is that after the government’s study is published it might become difficult to perform SNA in Poland especially when it comes to acquiring data from third parties. When the governments study is revealed and the notions of SNA or even network itself become associated with chasing quasi-criminal activity, every manager, every internet site admin will think twice before presenting social researcher with data, fearing that they will reveal some kind of “arrangement”. Explaining that we only want to described the “setup of social system” might prove to be of little help.
It is hard to expect that methodological side of the study will be presented with all nuances and qualifications; after all the results are meant to be used politically, most likely during parliamentary election campaign. In the result the whole area of SNA might be ridiculed along with the idea of “the set-up” and lives of Polish SNA researchers might become even harder.
Here is a practical problem for all interested in artificial societies, cellular automata and agent simulations. How many professional singers should sit there among the spectators and how should they be distributed so that the whole audience could produce a nice and clean ‘Ave Maria’ thanks to the social influence (G. Tarde would say ‘imitation’) processes?:
Following the link bellow you will see Bobby McFerrin replicating the above experiment with a different set of subjects:
Interesting thing, looking for forefathers of academic disciplines. While researching on French classic sociologist Gabriel Tarde, I came across two contemporary social scientists who independently claimed Tarde to be their intellectual ancestor. One of them was Bruno Latour, founder of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the other Paul Marsden, social psychologist with an interest in memetics. Both gentlemen advocate the recognition of Tarde as the forefather of the theories they develop or work with. The interesting thing is that these theories represent paradigms situated on the opposite sides of the front lines of so called “science wars”.
It was Latour who was defending the French intellectual ethos in the aftermath of the “Sokal Affair” (by writing refutations and presenting Sokal with the bottle of wine from his family’s winery on some occasion). If natural scientists don’t dismiss Actor-Network Theory instantly on the grounds that it contains no meaningful statements, i.e. it is gibberish, they tend to view it as an ultimate example of the imperialism of social sciences in their efforts to provide alternative explanations for scientific and technological activities. On the other hand the theory of memes, supported by Marsden’s paper, is a nightmare of most humanists, since it reduces the vast diversity of cultural objects and processes to a handful of concepts imported from the hostile area of evolutionism.
The fact that supporters of both points of view turn to the same source of origin and manage to make their cases can mean at least two things. Perhaps the fact that two paradigms are hostile toward each other does not just necessary mean they are contradictory. Or maybe if you just dig deep enough into somebody’s work you will be able to use it to support anything, especially when the original author cannot annotate his books anymore.
And what was the reason I was researching on Tarde in the first place? Why, he is the forefather of diffusion of innovations, one of my PhD’s main topics.
Very nice visualization, illustrating 1) how complex some aspects of our world are, and 2) that “complex” usually implicates “aesthetically appealing”.
There was a story in the news in Poland, few months ago, about a peculiar baby-swap and reunion. Identical twins were born and soon one of them was incidentally swapped with other baby girl during the bathing at the hospital. Two mothers returned home (one no longer considering her twins identical, the other not even suspecting that anything wrong had happened to her child) and so the twins have been separated for seventeen years. The press accounts of their reunion suggested that their eventual meeting, the fact that the girls had some mutual friends or acquaintances who made the reunion possible, was to some extent accidental. However, the network structure and dynamics of social world, and the fact that twins are actually so similar, should make such reunions rule rather than exception. Read the rest of this entry »
This should be a good way to start a web page: announcing the second edition of Social Aspects of Internet conference, 8-10.12.2006, Warsaw School of Social Psychology. The keynote speaker will be prof. Henry Jenkins from MIT, the author of “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide”. You will find the information about the conference here (in Polish).
In case you’re wondering what this site is about, take a look at the top of the page. Next to the page name you can see a “tag cloud,” a list of “tags” (keywords) that describe each piece of content published here. The list is weighted, which means that the more frequent a tag is, the bigger it appears in the tag cloud. Right now there are only two tags, “conferences” and “internet,” and they describe the only tagged post published so far.
The cloud will expand as more content is added, describing what is on the site. I am guessing that in the near future the cloud will list: networks, complexity, internet, books, two cultures, music. So stay tuned!
