What is at the heart of this motif? As David Harvey noted, one of the important things underlying the idea of networking is time-space compression – the reduction of perceptions of spatio-temporal distance between places and people by improvements in transport or technology such that otherwise distant points feel bound together. But something else is, I think at the heart of the idea of the network: relationships and exposure. The interconnections made possible by time-space compression foster relationships between places and people that might otherwise have been rendered weak by distance. More importantly, they render possible all sorts of projection across space and time that means people can send ideas and communications to those they might not otherwise know. And such a sending necessarily exposes the sender to the possibility of misunderstanding and/or rejection. Of course, the hope – at the heart of the social network – is that strong relationships of time/space and exposure will coincide in a good way: that we will send communications to unknown others and, felicitously, forge authentic relationships as a consequence.

But this brings me to the second thing I find interesting – facebook captures the duality of community in modern politics. On the one hand it is home to plenty of groups of people who profess some sort of common identity. These ‘communities’ recreate the same sort of inclusionary dynamic found in modern political community. They seek to be a group defined by some sort of common property or project. But there is also another kind of communit at work here – the community of those who, as Alphonso Lingis once said, have nothing in common. In the networked world one cannot – without rejecting the motif that makes sense of the world for most people (and thus making it hard for you to find common conceptual ground on which to have a conversation about the world) – refuse interconnection. It is not possible to refuse a potential relationship. That is, we are all exposed in some way. From the call centre worker taking calls from unknown customers to the academic with publicly advertised email addresses to the adverts piped in unwanted by Google AdSense to each webpage you view, there a myriad ways that we are exposed to communications we may not have solicited, each seeking an interconnection in some way. Of course, one can try to limit these interconnections, but there is always that chance that someone not the same as us tries to connect with us. As such then, the social network shows very well how communities of commonality are always – in the words of Jean-Luc Nancy – unworked: picked away at by attempts by those who are not the same as us to connect, connections that would show the artificial notion of ideas of commonality (i.e., that such closed communities rest on constructing a sense of sameness and keeping otherness out).

Thirdly, social networks rely on real infrastructure. The concentration on social relationships is a classic case of anthropocentrism. While we concentrate on the way that social networks make human relationships possible, we forget that the people engaged in these relationship are cyborgs: assemblages of machine and flesh. Without keyboards, webcams, fibre optics, routers and so on I, you or we would not be what we are. As such then concentrating on social relationships has the effect of masking the way that the very nature of human subjectivity has been changed by networked technologies.

And finally, there is a very pronounced politics to infrastructure. Although there are more internet users in the developing world than in the developed world, this tells us nothing about the actual penetration of internet infrastructure in the developing world (rather it tells us that there the population of the developing world is bigger than that of the developed world – hardly an amazing fact). If one turns to the geography of users of facebook (and other social networks), one begins to see the pattern of internet penetration. And most notably, one finds that Africa is the most common cold spot when it comes to both social networking and internet penetration. As such then the networking characteristic of global life is as uneven as the political economy that also defines our time. It is worth remembering then that while the network may be a powerful motif for understanding and envisioning the contemporary period, we should not lose sight of the geopolitics of infrastructure evident in its uneven distribution.

In the midst of the coverage one story in The Guardian struck me as particularly noteworthy: Flight ban could leave UK short of fruit and veg.¹ Noting that

Britain’s supermarkets could soon run short of perishable goods…as the ongoing ban on UK air travel brought Britain’s largest perishable air freight handling centre to a standstill today.

The story goes on – despite protestations to the contrary from the firms interviewed – that

Customers…will begin to run out of their existing supplies. Many of Britain’s supermarkets operate their supply chains incredibly tightly, using the principle of “just in time” delivery. When disaster strikes, shortages of some items can start appearing within a few days.

The story neatly ties together the constitutivity of networked infrastructure to metropolitan life and the apocalyptic imaginary that besets that form of life. Dependent on the logistics supplied by networks such as air freight, metropolitan life is forever imagining what a systemic collapse might look like.

Wilson’s account touches on several of the classic tropes of what John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt called ‘netwar‘. For example, he outlines the contrast between hierarchical organisations and horizontally affiliated networks.  This transition from the vertical to the horizontal is a common trope of discourses on networks and netwar. For example, Arquilla and Ronfeldt argued that “netwar differs from modes of conflict and crime in which the protagonists prefer to develop formal, stand-alone, hierarchical organizations, doctrines, and strategies”.¹ Mary Kaldor has similarly argued that so-called  ‘new wars‘ are characterised by horizontal affiliation rather than hierarchical organisation.

Wilson’s story also points to what Arquilla and Ronfeldt referred to as the “blurring of offense and defense”. ² That family networks are both a source of insurgent violence and protection emphasises Arquilla and Rondfeldt’s point that networks blend offensive and defensive capacities. This blurring is said to lead, moreover, to the most problematic feature of networks, namely that they tend :

to defy and cut across standard boundaries, jurisdictions, and distinctions between state and society, public and private, war and peace, war and crime, civilian and military, police and military, and legal and illegal. This makes it difficult if not impossible for a government to assign responsibility to any single agency—e.g., military, police, or intelligence—to be in charge of responding.³

This defying of ‘standard boundaries’ is exemplified in the way that the basic tools being used to capture Saddam can be used both to supply intelligence to a military campaign and for social networking such as seen on facebook. The ambivalence (literally ambi-valence) of the network means that it defies the boundary between the connectivity of friendship ⁴ and the destructive, deconstructive dynamics of warfighting. This ambivalence is, of course, precisely why networked entities are confusing and ambiguous. And why Arquilla and Ronfeldt note the difficulty the military and police will have in understanding their transgressive nature and isolating the threats they are perceived to pose.

However, in addition to being an excellent illustration of the various arguments about the potential of networks in the contemporary era,  this is also a story about the power of the network as a discursive trope. In other words, this article shows that the network is becoming a powerful trope organising the thoughts of those engaged in counter-insurgency. I have noted elsewhere that the discursive trope of interconnection associated with networks has driven practice in the US military in particular directions. In particular I have argued that it leads to a radical expansion of battlespace. Previously , for example, cities might have been regarded as a territorial zone to be avoided by forces for both ethical and operational reasons. However, the trope of the network encourages engagement with nodes in a web of interconnection rather than the assault and occupation of territorial zones. This leads to an expansion of what might be considered legitimate battlespace. Just as the target of military operations shifted from Iraq’s armed forces to its family trees, so network centric warfare has shifted from the invasion and occupation of spatial zones to the application of force to perceived nodal points, wherever they may be. ⁵ The network – whether it is a genuine empirical phenomenon or not – is thus an important discursive trope guiding the organisation of violence in the contemporary era.

You can see a further discussion of the role such network analysis might play in the war on terror based on Wilson’s Slate article here.

Footnotes