essay about global network

The Global Network

Globalization is the connection of different parts of the world. Globalization results in the expansion of international cultural, economic, and political activities.

Geography, Human Geography, Social Studies, World History

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Globalization  is the connection of different parts of the world. Globalization results in the expansion of international cultural, economic, and political activities. As people, ideas, knowledge, and goods move more easily around the globe, the experiences of people around the world become more similar . Globalization in History Globalization has a long history, for example, Ancient Greek culture was spread across much of southwestern Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe. The globalization of Greek culture came with the conqueror  Alexander the Great . In fact, there are cities named for Alexander in Iraq (Iskandariya), Egypt (Alexandria), and Turkey (Alexandria Troas). The  Silk Road , a  trade route  between China and the Mediterranean, promoted the exchange of ideas and knowledge, along with trade goods and foods such as silk, spices, porcelain, and other treasures from the East. When Europeans began  establishing colonies overseas, globalization grew. Many early European explorers were eager to bring the  Christian religion to the regions they visited. The globalization of Christianity spread from Europe to  Latin America  through Christian missionaries working with the local populations. Globalization was  accelerated in the nineteenth century with the  Industrial Revolution , as mechanical  mills and factories became more common. Many companies used  raw materials from distant lands. They also sold their goods in other countries. Britain’s  colony  in India, for instance, supplied  cotton  to British  merchants and traders .  Madras , a light cotton cloth, was made in the city of Madras (now called Chennai), a major  port  in India. Eventually, madras cloth was no longer manufactured in Madras at all—the Indian  labor force  supplied the raw material , cotton . Factories in the county of Lancashire, England, created madras cloth. British factories made fabric and other goods from the cotton . British manufacturers could then sell their  finished goods , such as clothing and blankets, to buyers all over the world—the United States, Brazil, Australia, even India. Globalization sped up dramatically in the twentieth century with the  proliferation  of air travel , the expansion of  free trade , and the dawn of the  Information Age . Miles of  fiber-optic  cable now connect the continents, allowing people around the world to communicate instantly through the borderless World Wide Web. Communication Modern  communication  has played a large role in cultural globalization . Today, news and information zips instantly around the world on the  internet . People can read information about foreign countries as easily as they read about their local news. Through globalization , people may become aware of incidents very quickly. In seconds, people are able to respond to  natural disasters that happen thousands of miles away. Many people access information through improved and new technology, such as cell phones . About 70 percent of the people in the world use  cell phones . A farmer in Nigeria can easily talk to his cousin who moved to New York, New York. The success of global news  networks like CNN have also contributed to globalization . People all over the world have access to the same news 24 hours a day.

Travel Increased international  travel  has also increased globalization . Each year, millions of people move from one country to another in search of work. Sometimes, these  migrant  workers travel a short distance, such as between the Mexican state of Sonora and the U.S. state of California. Sometimes, migrant workers travel many thousands of miles. Migrant workers from the Philippines, for instance, may travel to Europe, Australia, or North America to find better-paying jobs. People do not travel just for work, of course. Millions of people take vacations to foreign countries. Most of these international  tourists are from developed countries. Many are most comfortable with goods and services that resemble what they have at home. In this way, globalization encourages countries around the world to provide typical Western services. The facilities of a Holiday Inn hotel, for instance, are very similar , whether the location is Bangor, Maine, or Bangkok, Thailand. Travel and tourism have made people more familiar with other cultures. Travelers are exposed to new ideas about food, which may change what they buy at the store at home. They are exposed to ideas about goods and services, which may increase demand for a specific product that may not be available at home. They are exposed to new ideas, which may influence how they vote. In this way, globalization influences trade , taste, and culture. Popular Culture Popular culture has also become more globalized. People in the United States enjoy listening to South African music and reading Japanese comic books. American soap operas are popular in Israel. India, for instance, has a thriving film industry, nicknamed “ Bollywood .” Bollywood movies are popular both in India and with the huge population of Indians living abroad . In fact, some Bollywood movies do much better in the United States or the United Kingdom than they do in India. Clothing styles have also become more uniform as a result of globalization . National and regional  costumes have become rarer as globalization has increased. In most parts of the world, professionals such as bankers wear suits, and jeans and T-shirts are common for young people. There has also been an increasing exchange of foods across the globe. People in England eat Indian  curry , while people in Peru enjoy Japanese  sushi . Meanwhile, American fast food chains have become common throughout the world.  McDonald's  has more than 37,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. And people all across the world are eating more meat and sugary foods, like those sold in fast food restaurants. The worldwide expansion of McDonald’s has become a symbol of globalization . Some menu items, such as the Big Mac, are the same all over the world. Other menu items are specific to that region. McDonalds in Japan features a green-tea flavored milkshake. At McDonald’s in Uruguay, a “McHuevo” is a burger topped with a fried egg. Globalization has brought McDonald’s to billions of consumers worldwide.

Economy The international  economy  has also become more globalized in recent  decades . International  trade  is vital to the economies of most countries around the world. American  software  companies, such as Microsoft, rely on international trade to make large  profits . The economy of the country of Saudi Arabia is almost entirely dependent on  oil   exports . To increase trade , many countries have created free trade agreements with other countries. Under free trade agreements, countries agree to remove trade barriers. For example, they may stop charging  tariffs , or taxes , on imports . In 1994, the United States, Mexico, and Canada signed the  North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) , which eventually ended all tariffs on trade goods between the three nations. This allowed globalization of goods and services, as well as people and ideas, between these three countries. Most large  corporations operate in many countries around the world.  HSBC , the world’s largest bank, has offices in 88 different countries. Originally, HSBC stood for Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation , which was founded in 1865 to promote trade between China and the United Kingdom. Today, HSBC has its headquarters in London, England. Economic globalization has allowed many corporations based in the West to move factories and jobs to less economically developed countries, a process called  outsourcing . The corporation can pay lower wages , because the  standard of living  in less developed countries is much lower. Laws protecting the environment and workers’ safety are less widespread in developing countries, which also lowers costs for the corporation . Often, this results in lower costs for consumers, too. Economic  markets are global. People and organizations invest in companies all over the globe. Because of this,  economic downturns in one country are repeated in other countries. The  financial crisis  that began in the United States in 2006 quickly spread around the world. The way globalization allowed this situation to spread led to the nation of Iceland nearly going  bankrupt , for example. Politics Cultural and economic globalization have caused countries to become more connected politically. Countries frequently cooperate to enact trade agreements. They work together to open their borders to allow the movement of money and people needed to keep economic globalization working. Because people, money, and computerized information move so easily around the globe, countries are increasingly working together to fight  crime . The idea of maintaining international law has also grown. In 2002, the  International Criminal Court  was established . This court, which handles cases such as war crimes , has a global reach, although not all countries have accepted it. Many problems facing the world today cross national borders , so countries must work together to solve them. Efforts to confront problems such as global  climate change  must involve many different countries. In 2009, representatives from 170 countries gathered at a conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss climate change . Other international issues include  terrorism ,  drug trafficking , and  immigration . The process of globalization is very  controversial . Many people say globalization will help people communicate. Aid agencies can respond more quickly to a natural disaster . Advanced medicines are more easily and widely available to people who may not have been able to afford them. Jobs available through globalization have lifted many people out of  poverty . Globalization has increased the number of students studying  abroad . Not everyone says that globalization is good, however. Some people worry that Western culture will destroy local cultures around the world. They fear that everyone will end up eating hamburgers and watching Hollywood movies. Others point out that people tend to adopt some aspects of other cultures without giving up their own. Ironically, modern technology is often used to preserve and spread traditional beliefs and customs. Opponents to globalization blame free trade for unfair working conditions. They also say that outsourcing has caused  wealthy  countries to lose too many jobs. Sup porters of globalization say that factory workers in poor countries are making much better wages than they would at other jobs available to them. They also argue that free trade has lowered prices in wealthier countries and improved the economy of poorer countries.

Battle in Seattle The 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) was held in Seattle, Washington, United States. This meeting was protested by thousands of people opposed to globalization. The protests turned violent. Hundreds of people were arrested. Many were injured in confrontations with police. Many buildings were damaged. The incident is sometimes called "the Battle in Seattle."

Powerful Peppers Food has long been an important part of globalization. Today, foods in Korea and many parts of China are often spicy. They get their spice from chili peppers. This was not the case before the 1600s. The fiery chili pepper is native to the Western Hemisphere. Christopher Columbus first brought chilies to Europe in 1493, and from there they spread across Asia.

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October 19, 2023

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The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks, largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the 1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996 the first survey of Internet users counted about 40 million; in 2013 they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the efficiency and price of the service.

At the heart of these communication networks the Internet ensures the production, distribution, and use of digitized information in all formats. According to the study published by Martin Hilbert in Science (Hilbert and López 2011), 95 percent of all information existing in the planet is digitized and most of it is accessible on the Internet and other computer networks.

The speed and scope of the transformation of our communication environment by Internet and wireless communication has triggered all kind of utopian and dystopian perceptions around the world.

As in all moments of major technological change, people, companies, and institutions feel the depth of the change, but they are often overwhelmed by it, out of sheer ignorance of its effects.

The media aggravate the distorted perception by dwelling into scary reports on the basis of anecdotal observation and biased commentary. If there is a topic in which social sciences, in their diversity, should contribute to the full understanding of the world in which we live, it is precisely the area that has come to be named in academia as Internet Studies. Because, in fact, academic research knows a great deal on the interaction between Internet and society, on the basis of methodologically rigorous empirical research conducted in a plurality of cultural and institutional contexts. Any process of major technological change generates its own mythology. In part because it comes into practice before scientists can assess its effects and implications, so there is always a gap between social change and its understanding. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of alienation, isolation, depression, and withdrawal from society. In fact, available evidence shows that there is either no relationship or a positive cumulative relationship between the Internet use and the intensity of sociability. We observe that, overall, the more sociable people are, the more they use the Internet. And the more they use the Internet, the more they increase their sociability online and offline, their civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures—with the exception of a couple of early studies of the Internet in the 1990s, corrected by their authors later (Castells 2001; Castells et al. 2007; Rainie and Wellman 2012; Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.).

Thus, the purpose of this chapter will be to summarize some of the key research findings on the social effects of the Internet relying on the evidence provided by some of the major institutions specialized in the social study of the Internet. More specifically, I will be using the data from the world at large: the World Internet Survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future, University of Southern California; the reports of the British Computer Society (BCS), using data from the World Values Survey of the University of Michigan; the Nielsen reports for a variety of countries; and the annual reports from the International Telecommunications Union. For data on the United States, I have used the Pew American Life and Internet Project of the Pew Institute. For the United Kingdom, the Oxford Internet Survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, as well as the Virtual Society Project from the Economic and Social Science Research Council. For Spain, the Project Internet Catalonia of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC); the various reports on the information society from Telefónica; and from the Orange Foundation. For Portugal, the Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC) in Lisbon. I would like to emphasize that most of the data in these reports converge toward similar trends. Thus I have selected for my analysis the findings that complement and reinforce each other, offering a consistent picture of the human experience on the Internet in spite of the human diversity.

Given the aim of this publication to reach a broad audience, I will not present in this text the data supporting the analysis presented here. Instead, I am referring the interested reader to the web sources of the research organizations mentioned above, as well as to selected bibliographic references discussing the empirical foundation of the social trends reported here.

Technologies of Freedom, the Network Society, and the Culture of Autonomy

In order to fully understand the effects of the Internet on society, we should remember that technology is material culture. It is produced in a social process in a given institutional environment on the basis of the ideas, values, interests, and knowledge of their producers, both their early producers and their subsequent producers. In this process we must include the users of the technology, who appropriate and adapt the technology rather than adopting it, and by so doing they modify it and produce it in an endless process of interaction between technological production and social use. So, to assess the relevance of Internet in society we must recall the specific characteristics of Internet as a technology. Then we must place it in the context of the transformation of the overall social structure, as well as in relationship to the culture characteristic of this social structure. Indeed, we live in a new social structure, the global network society, characterized by the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy.

Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers, and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:

• The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache, an open-source server program.
• Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative uses.
• Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of autonomy as the culture of the network society.

I will elaborate on these major trends.

Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.

The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life, as I analyzed in my trilogy on the Information Age (Castells 1996–2003). It is based on the transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family, with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.

But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space. Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the organizational form constructed by these subjects; this is the network society, and the form of sociability is what Rainie and Wellman (2012) conceptualized as networked individualism. Network technologies are of course the medium for this new social structure and this new culture (Papacharissi 2010).

As stated above, academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce their sociability; it actually increases sociability, as shown by myself in my studies in Catalonia (Castells 2007), Rainie and Wellman in the United States (2012), Cardoso in Portugal (2010), and the World Internet Survey for the world at large (Center for the Digital Future 2012 et al.). Furthermore, a major study by Michael Willmott for the British Computer Society (Trajectory Partnership 2010) has shown a positive correlation, for individuals and for countries, between the frequency and intensity of the use of the Internet and the psychological indicators of personal happiness. He used global data for 35,000 people obtained from the World Wide Survey of the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2007. Controlling for other factors, the study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation, particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.

The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work (entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market (the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).

There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social autonomy. From 2002 to 2007 I directed in Catalonia one of the largest studies ever conducted in Europe on the Internet and society, based on 55,000 interviews, one-third of them face to face (IN3 2002–07). As part of this study, my collaborators and I compared the behavior of Internet users to non-Internet users in a sample of 3,000 people, representative of the population of Catalonia. Because in 2003 only about 40 percent of people were Internet users we could really compare the differences in social behavior for users and non-users, something that nowadays would be more difficult given the 79 percent penetration rate of the Internet in Catalonia. Although the data are relatively old, the findings are not, as more recent studies in other countries (particularly in Portugal) appear to confirm the observed trends. We constructed scales of autonomy in different dimensions. Only between 10 and 20 percent of the population, depending on dimensions, were in the high level of autonomy. But we focused on this active segment of the population to explore the role of the Internet in the construction of autonomy. Using factor analysis we identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to their practices:

a) professional development b) communicative autonomy c) entrepreneurship d) autonomy of the body e) sociopolitical participation f) personal, individual autonomy

These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web, and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy, and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age. From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked democracy. I will now turn to the analysis of these two fundamental trends at the source of current processes of social change worldwide.

The Rise of Social Network Sites on the Internet

Since 2002 (creation of Friendster, prior to Facebook) a new socio-technical revolution has taken place on the Internet: the rise of social network sites where now all human activities are present, from personal interaction to business, to work, to culture, to communication, to social movements, and to politics.

Social Network Sites are web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

(Boyd and Ellison 2007, 2)

Social networking uses, in time globally spent, surpassed e-mail in November 2007. It surpassed e-mail in number of users in July 2009. In terms of users it reached 1 billion by September 2010, with Facebook accounting for about half of it. In 2013 it has almost doubled, particularly because of increasing use in China, India, and Latin America. There is indeed a great diversity of social networking sites (SNS) by countries and cultures. Facebook, started for Harvard-only members in 2004, is present in most of the world, but QQ, Cyworld, and Baidu dominate in China; Orkut in Brazil; Mixi in Japan; etc. In terms of demographics, age is the main differential factor in the use of SNS, with a drop of frequency of use after 50 years of age, and particularly 65. But this is not just a teenager’s activity. The main Facebook U.S. category is in the age group 35–44, whose frequency of use of the site is higher than for younger people. Nearly 60 percent of adults in the U.S. have at least one SNS profile, 30 percent two, and 15 percent three or more. Females are as present as males, except when in a society there is a general gender gap. We observe no differences in education and class, but there is some class specialization of SNS, such as Myspace being lower than FB; LinkedIn is for professionals.

Thus, the most important activity on the Internet at this point in time goes through social networking, and SNS have become the chosen platforms for all kind of activities, not just personal friendships or chatting, but for marketing, e-commerce, education, cultural creativity, media and entertainment distribution, health applications, and sociopolitical activism. This is a significant trend for society at large. Let me explore the meaning of this trend on the basis of the still scant evidence.

Social networking sites are constructed by users themselves building on specific criteria of grouping. There is entrepreneurship in the process of creating sites, then people choose according to their interests and projects. Networks are tailored by people themselves with different levels of profiling and privacy. The key to success is not anonymity, but on the contrary, self-presentation of a real person connecting to real people (in some cases people are excluded from the SNS when they fake their identity). So, it is a self-constructed society by networking connecting to other networks. But this is not a virtual society. There is a close connection between virtual networks and networks in life at large. This is a hybrid world, a real world, not a virtual world or a segregated world.

People build networks to be with others, and to be with others they want to be with on the basis of criteria that include those people who they already know (a selected sub-segment). Most users go on the site every day. It is permanent connectivity. If we needed an answer to what happened to sociability in the Internet world, here it is:

There is a dramatic increase in sociability, but a different kind of sociability, facilitated and dynamized by permanent connectivity and social networking on the web.

Based on the time when Facebook was still releasing data (this time is now gone) we know that in 2009 users spent 500 billion minutes per month. This is not just about friendship or interpersonal communication. People do things together, share, act, exactly as in society, although the personal dimension is always there. Thus, in the U.S. 38 percent of adults share content, 21 percent remix, 14 percent blog, and this is growing exponentially, with development of technology, software, and SNS entrepreneurial initiatives. On Facebook, in 2009 the average user was connected to 60 pages, groups, and events, people interacted per month to 160 million objects (pages, groups, events), the average user created 70 pieces of content per month, and there were 25 billion pieces of content shared per month (web links, news stories, blogs posts, notes, photos). SNS are living spaces connecting all dimensions of people’s experience. This transforms culture because people share experience with a low emotional cost, while saving energy and effort. They transcend time and space, yet they produce content, set up links, and connect practices. It is a constantly networked world in every dimension of human experience. They co-evolve in permanent, multiple interaction. But they choose the terms of their co-evolution.

Thus, people live their physical lives but increasingly connect on multiple dimensions in SNS.

Paradoxically, the virtual life is more social than the physical life, now individualized by the organization of work and urban living.

But people do not live a virtual reality, indeed it is a real virtuality, since social practices, sharing, mixing, and living in society is facilitated in the virtuality, in what I called time ago the “space of flows” (Castells 1996).

Because people are increasingly at ease in the multi-textuality and multidimensionality of the web, marketers, work organizations, service agencies, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the Internet, less and less setting up alternative sites, more and more being present in the networks that people construct by themselves and for themselves, with the help of Internet social networking entrepreneurs, some of whom become billionaires in the process, actually selling freedom and the possibility of the autonomous construction of lives. This is the liberating potential of the Internet made material practice by these social networking sites. The largest of these social networking sites are usually bounded social spaces managed by a company. However, if the company tries to impede free communication it may lose many of its users, because the entry barriers in this industry are very low. A couple of technologically savvy youngsters with little capital can set up a site on the Internet and attract escapees from a more restricted Internet space, as happened to AOL and other networking sites of the first generation, and as could happen to Facebook or any other SNS if they are tempted to tinker with the rules of openness (Facebook tried to make users pay and retracted within days). So, SNS are often a business, but they are in the business of selling freedom, free expression, chosen sociability. When they tinker with this promise they risk their hollowing by net citizens migrating with their friends to more friendly virtual lands.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the transformation of sociopolitical practices on the Internet.

Communication Power: Mass-Self Communication and the Transformation of Politics

Power and counterpower, the foundational relationships of society, are constructed in the human mind, through the construction of meaning and the processing of information according to certain sets of values and interests (Castells 2009).

Ideological apparatuses and the mass media have been key tools of mediating communication and asserting power, and still are. But the rise of a new culture, the culture of autonomy, has found in Internet and mobile communication networks a major medium of mass self-communication and self-organization.

The key source for the social production of meaning is the process of socialized communication. I define communication as the process of sharing meaning through the exchange of information. Socialized communication is the one that exists in the public realm, that has the potential of reaching society at large. Therefore, the battle over the human mind is largely played out in the process of socialized communication. And this is particularly so in the network society, the social structure of the Information Age, which is characterized by the pervasiveness of communication networks in a multimodal hypertext.

The ongoing transformation of communication technology in the digital age extends the reach of communication media to all domains of social life in a network that is at the same time global and local, generic and customized, in an ever-changing pattern.

As a result, power relations, that is the relations that constitute the foundation of all societies, as well as the processes challenging institutionalized power relations, are increasingly shaped and decided in the communication field. Meaningful, conscious communication is what makes humans human. Thus, any major transformation in the technology and organization of communication is of utmost relevance for social change. Over the last four decades the advent of the Internet and of wireless communication has shifted the communication process in society at large from mass communication to mass self-communication. This is from a message sent from one to many with little interactivity to a system based on messages from many to many, multimodal, in chosen time, and with interactivity, so that senders are receivers and receivers are senders. And both have access to a multimodal hypertext in the web that constitutes the endlessly changing backbone of communication processes.

The transformation of communication from mass communication to mass self-communication has contributed decisively to alter the process of social change. As power relationships have always been based on the control of communication and information that feed the neural networks constitutive of the human mind, the rise of horizontal networks of communication has created a new landscape of social and political change by the process of disintermediation of the government and corporate controls over communication. This is the power of the network, as social actors build their own networks on the basis of their projects, values, and interests. The outcome of these processes is open ended and dependent on specific contexts. Freedom, in this case freedom of communicate, does not say anything on the uses of freedom in society. This is to be established by scholarly research. But we need to start from this major historical phenomenon: the building of a global communication network based on the Internet, a technology that embodies the culture of freedom that was at its source.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century there have been multiple social movements around the world that have used the Internet as their space of formation and permanent connectivity, among the movements and with society at large. These networked social movements, formed in the social networking sites on the Internet, have mobilized in the urban space and in the institutional space, inducing new forms of social movements that are the main actors of social change in the network society. Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, and especially in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships; in Europe and the U.S. as forms of protest against the management of the financial crisis; in Brazil; in Turkey; in Mexico; and in highly diverse institutional contexts and economic conditions. It is precisely the similarity of the movements in extremely different contexts that allows the formulation of the hypothesis that this is the pattern of social movements characteristic of the global network society. In all cases we observe the capacity of these movements for self-organization, without a central leadership, on the basis of a spontaneous emotional movement. In all cases there is a connection between Internet-based communication, mobile networks, and the mass media in different forms, feeding into each other and amplifying the movement locally and globally.

These movements take place in the context of exploitation and oppression, social tensions and social struggles; but struggles that were not able to successfully challenge the state in other instances of revolt are now powered by the tools of mass self-communication. It is not the technology that induces the movements, but without the technology (Internet and wireless communication) social movements would not take the present form of being a challenge to state power. The fact is that technology is material culture (ideas brought into the design) and the Internet materialized the culture of freedom that, as it has been documented, emerged on American campuses in the 1960s. This culture-made technology is at the source of the new wave of social movements that exemplify the depth of the global impact of the Internet in all spheres of social organization, affecting particularly power relationships, the foundation of the institutions of society. (See case studies and an analytical perspective on the interaction between Internet and networked social movements in Castells 2012.)

The Internet, as all technologies, does not produce effects by itself. Yet, it has specific effects in altering the capacity of the communication system to be organized around flows that are interactive, multimodal, asynchronous or synchronous, global or local, and from many to many, from people to people, from people to objects, and from objects to objects, increasingly relying on the semantic web. How these characteristics affect specific systems of social relationships has to be established by research, and this is what I tried to present in this text. What is clear is that without the Internet we would not have seen the large-scale development of networking as the fundamental mechanism of social structuring and social change in every domain of social life. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and a variety of networks increasingly based on wireless platforms constitute the technological infrastructure of the network society, as the electrical grid and the electrical engine were the support system for the form of social organization that we conceptualized as the industrial society. Thus, as a social construction, this technological system is open ended, as the network society is an open-ended form of social organization that conveys the best and the worse in humankind. Yet, the global network society is our society, and the understanding of its logic on the basis of the interaction between culture, organization, and technology in the formation and development of social and technological networks is a key field of research in the twenty-first century.

We can only make progress in our understanding through the cumulative effort of scholarly research. Only then we will be able to cut through the myths surrounding the key technology of our time. A digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet it continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

These references are in fact sources of more detailed references specific to each one of the topics analyzed in this text.

Abbate, Janet. A Social History of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyd, Danah M., and Nicole B. Ellison. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, no. 1 (2007).

Cardoso, Gustavo, Angus Cheong, and Jeffrey Cole (eds). World Wide Internet: Changing Societies, Economies and Cultures. Macau: University of Macau Press, 2009.

Castells, Manuel. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture. 3 vols. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–2003.

———. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. Communication Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

———. Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012.

Castells, Manuel, Imma Tubella, Teresa Sancho, and Meritxell Roca.

La transición a la sociedad red. Barcelona: Ariel, 2007.

Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 332, no. 6025 (April 1, 2011): pp. 60–65.

Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. The Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Networking Sites. Routledge, 2010.

Rainie. Lee, and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

Trajectory Partnership (Michael Willmott and Paul Flatters). The Information Dividend: Why IT Makes You “Happier.” Swindon: British Informatics Society Limited, 2010. http://www.bcs.org/upload/pdf/info-dividend-full-report.pdf

Selected Web References.   Used as sources for analysis in the chapter

Agência para a Sociedade do Conhecimento. “Observatório de Sociedade da Informação e do Conhecimento (OSIC).” http://www.umic.pt/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3026&Itemid=167

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. “Features, Press and Policy.” http://www.bcs.org/category/7307

Center for the Digital Future. The World Internet Project International Report. 4th ed. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg School, Center for the Digital Future, 2012. http://www.worldinternetproject.net/_files/_Published/_oldis/770_2012wip_report4th_ed.pdf

ESRC (Economic & Social Research Council). “Papers and Reports.” Virtual Society. http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/reports.htm

Fundación Orange. “Análisis y Prospectiva: Informe eEspaña.” Fundación Orange. http://fundacionorange.es/fundacionorange/analisisprospectiva.html

Fundación Telefónica. “Informes SI.” Fundación Telefónica. http://sociedadinformacion.fundacion.telefonica.com/DYC/SHI/InformesSI/seccion=1190&idioma=es_ES.do

IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute). UOC. “Project Internet Catalonia (PIC): An Overview.” Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, 2002–07. http://www.uoc.edu/in3/pic/eng/

International Telecommunication Union. “Annual Reports.” http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/sfo/annual_reports/index.html

Nielsen Company. “Reports.” 2013. http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/reports/2013.html?tag=Category:Media+ and+Entertainment

Oxford Internet Surveys. “Publications.” http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/publications

Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Social Networking.” Pew Internet. http://www.pewinternet.org/Topics/Activities-and-Pursuits/Social-Networking.aspx?typeFilter=5

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Internet Speech Will Never Go Back to Normal

In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong.

Updated at 3:15 p.m. ET on April 27, 2020.

C OVID-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance , to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted , “The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.”

Civil-rights groups are tolerating these measures—emergency times call for emergency measures—but are also urging a swift return to normal when the virus ebbs. We need “to make sure that, when we’ve made it past this crisis, our country isn’t transformed into a place we don’t want to live,” warns the American Civil Liberties Union’s Jay Stanley. “Any extraordinary measures used to manage a specific crisis must not become permanent fixtures in the landscape of government intrusions into daily life,” declares the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group. These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency.”

But the “extraordinary” measures we are seeing are not all that extraordinary. Powerful forces were pushing toward greater censorship and surveillance of digital networks long before the coronavirus jumped out of the wet markets in Wuhan, China, and they will continue to do so once the crisis passes. The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them.

Read: No, the internet is not good again

As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.

In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.

B eginning in the 1990s , the U.S. government and powerful young tech firms began promoting nonregulation and American-style freedom of speech as essential features of the internet. This approach assumed that authoritarian states would crumble in the face of digital networks that seemed to have American constitutional values built into them. The internet was a vehicle for spreading U.S. civil and political values; more speech would mean better speech platforms, which in turn would lead to democratic revolutions around the world.

China quickly became worried about unregulated digital speech—both as a threat to the Communist Party’s control and to the domestic social order more generally. It began building ever more powerful mechanisms of surveillance and control to meet these threats. Other authoritarian nations would follow China’s lead. In 2009, China, Russia, and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation announced their “ agreement on cooperation in the field of international information security .” The agreement presciently warned of a coming “information war,” in which internet platforms would be weaponized in ways that would threaten nations’ “social and political systems.”

Evelyn Douek: The internet’s titans make a power grab

During the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, the United States helped secure digital freedoms for people living in authoritarian states. It gave them resources to support encryption and filter-evasion products that were designed to assist individuals in “circumventing politically motivated censorship,” as then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in 2010 . And it openly assisted Twitter and other U.S. tech platforms that seemed to be fueling the Arab Spring.

In these and so many other ways, the public internet in its first two decades seemed good for open societies and bad for closed ones. But this conventional wisdom turned out to be mostly backwards. China and other authoritarian states became adept at reverse engineering internet architecture to enhance official control over digital networks in their countries and thus over their populations. And in recent years, the American public has grown fearful of ubiquitous digital monitoring and has been reeling from the disruptive social effects of digital networks.

Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.

The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious cyber operations from abroad.

These constitutional limits help explain why, since the Russian electoral interference, digital platforms have taken the lead in combatting all manner of unwanted speech on their networks—and, if anything, have increased their surveillance of our lives. But the government has been in the shadows of these developments, nudging them along and exploiting them when it can.

T en years ago, speech on the American Internet was a free-for-all. There was relatively little monitoring and censorship—public or private—of what people posted, said, or did on Facebook, YouTube, and other sites. In part, this was due to the legal immunity that platforms enjoyed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act . And in part it was because the socially disruptive effects of digital networks—various forms of weaponized speech and misinformation—had not yet emerged. As the networks became filled with bullying, harassment, child sexual exploitation, revenge porn, disinformation campaigns, digitally manipulated videos, and other forms of harmful content, private platforms faced growing pressure from governments and users to fix the problems.

The result a decade later is that most of our online speech now occurs in closely monitored playpens where many tens of thousands of human censors review flagged content to ensure compliance with ever-lengthier and more detailed “ community standards ” (or some equivalent ). More and more, this human monitoring and censorship is supported—or replaced—by sophisticated computer algorithms. The firms use these tools to define acceptable forms of speech and other content on their platforms, which in turn sets the effective boundaries for a great deal of speech in the U.S. public forum.

After the 2016 election debacle, for example, the tech platforms took aggressive but still imperfect steps to fend off foreign adversaries. YouTube has an aggressive policy of removing what it deems to be deceptive practices and foreign-influence operations related to elections . It also makes judgments about and gives priority to what it calls “ authoritative voices .” Facebook has deployed a multipronged strategy that includes removing fake accounts and eliminating or demoting “inauthentic behavior.” Twitter has a similar censorship policy aimed at “platform manipulation originating from bad-faith actors located in countries outside of the US.”  These platforms have engaged in “ strategic collaboration ” with the federal government, including by sharing information , to fight foreign electoral interference.

The platforms are also cooperating with one another and with international organizations, and sometimes law enforcement, on other censorship practices. This collaboration began with a technology that allows child pornography to be assigned a digital fingerprint and placed in centralized databases that the platforms draw on to suppress the material. A similar mechanism has been deployed against terrorist speech—a more controversial practice, since the label terrorist often involves inescapably political judgments. Sharing and coordination across platforms are also moving forward on content related to electoral interference and are being discussed for the manipulated videos known as deepfakes . The danger with “ content cartels ,” as the writer Evelyn Douek dubs these collaborations, is that they diminish accountability for censorship decisions and make invariable mistakes more pervasive and harder to fix.

And of course, mistakes are inevitable. Much of the content that the platforms censor—for example, child pornography and content that violates intellectual-property rights—is relatively easy to identify and uncontroversial to remove. But Facebook, for example, also takes down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, “cruel and insensitive” speech, and bullying speech, which are harder to identify objectively and more controversial to regulate or remove. Facebook publishes data on its enforcement of its rules. They show that the firm makes “mistakes”—defined by its own flexible criteria—in about 15 percent of the appealed cases involving supposed bullying and about 10 percent of the appealed hate-speech cases .

All these developments have taken place under pressure from Washington and Brussels. In hearings over the past few years, Congress has criticized the companies—not always in consistent ways—for allowing harmful speech. In 2018, Congress amended the previously untouchable Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to subject the platforms to the same liability that nondigital outlets face for enabling illegal sex trafficking. Additional amendments to Section 230 are now in the offing, as are various other threats to regulate digital speech. In March 2019, Zuckerberg invited the government to regulate “harmful content” on his platform. In a speech seven months later defending America’s First Amendment values, he boasted about his “team of thousands of people and [artificial-intelligence] systems” that monitors for fake accounts. Even Zuckerberg’s defiant ideal of free expression is an extensively policed space.

Against this background, the tech firms’ downgrading and outright censorship of speech related to COVID-19 are not large steps. Facebook is using computer algorithms more aggressively, mainly because concerns about the privacy of users prevent human censors from working on these issues from home during forced isolation. As it has done with Russian misinformation, Facebook will notify users when articles that they have “liked” are later deemed to have included health-related misinformation.

But the basic approach to identifying and redressing speech judged to be misinformation or to present an imminent risk of physical harm “ hasn’t changed ,” according to Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management. As in other contexts, Facebook relies on fact-checking organizations and “authorities” (from the World Health Organization to the governments of U.S. states) to ascertain which content to downgrade or remove.

Read: How to misinform yourself about the coronavirus

What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to. We live—and for several years, we have been living—in a world of serious and growing harms resulting from digital speech. Governments will not stop worrying about these harms. And private platforms will continue to expand their definition of offensive content, and will use algorithms to regulate it ever more closely. The general trend toward more speech control will not abate.

O ver the past decade , network surveillance has grown in roughly the same proportion as speech control. Indeed, on many platforms, ubiquitous surveillance is a prerequisite to speech control.

The public has been told over and over that the hundreds of computers we interact with daily—smartphones, laptops, desktops, automobiles, cameras, audio recorders, payment mechanisms, and more—collect, emit, and analyze data about us that are, in turn, packaged and exploited in various ways to influence and control our lives. We have also learned a lot—but surely not the whole picture—about the extent to which governments exploit this gargantuan pool of data.

Police use subpoenas to tap into huge warehouses of personal data collected by private companies. They have used these tools to gain access to doorbell cameras that now line city bloc ks , microphones in the Alexa devices in millions of homes, privately owned license-plate readers that track every car , and the data in DNA databases that people voluntarily pay to enter. They also get access to information collected on smart-home devices and home-surveillance cameras—a growing share of which are capable of facial recognition—to solve crimes. And they pay to access private tow trucks equipped with cameras tracking the movements of cars throughout a city.

Derek Thompson: The technology that could free America from quarantine

In other cases, federal, state, and local governments openly work in conjunction with the private sector to expand their digital surveillance. One of the most popular doorbell cameras, Ring, which is owned by Amazon, has forged video-sharing partnerships with more than 400 law-enforcement agencies in the United States. Ring actively courted law-enforcement agencies by offering discounted cameras to local police departments, which offered them to residents. The departments would then use social media to encourage citizens to download Ring’s neighborhood application, where neighbors post videos and discuss ostensibly suspicious activity spotted on their cameras. (A Ring spokeswoman said the company no longer offers free or discounted cameras to law enforcement.) *

Meanwhile, the company Clearview AI provides law-enforcement agents with the ability to scan an image of a face across a database of billions of faces, scraped from popular apps and websites such as Facebook and YouTube. More than 600 law-enforcement agencies are now using Clearview’s database.

These developments are often greeted with blockbuster news reports and indignant commentary. And yet Americans keep buying surveillance machines and giving their data away. Smart speakers such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home are in about a third of U.S. households . In 2019, American consumers bought almost 80 million new smartphones that can choose among millions of apps that collect, use, and distribute all manner of personal data.. Amazon does not release sales numbers for Ring, but one firm estimated that it sold almost 400,000 Ring security devices in December alone.

America’s private surveillance system goes far beyond apps, cameras, and microphones. Behind the scenes, and unbeknownst to most Americans, data brokers have developed algorithmic scores for each one of us—scores that rate us on reliability , propensity to repay loans , and likelihood to commit a crime . Uber bans passengers with low ratings from drivers. Some bars and restaurants now run background checks on their patrons to see whether they’re likely to pay their tab or cause trouble. Facebook has patented a mechanism for determining a person’s creditworthiness by evaluating their social network.

These and similar developments are the private functional equivalent of China’s social-credit ratings , which critics in the West so fervently decry. The U.S. government, too, makes important decisions based on privately collected pools of data. The Department of Homeland Security now requires visa applicants to submit their social-media accounts for review. And courts regularly rely on algorithms to determine a defendant’s flight risk, recidivism risk, and more.

The response to COVID-19 builds on all these trends, and shows how technical wizardry, data centralization, and private-public collaboration can do enormous public good. As Google and Apple effectively turn most phones in the world into contact-tracing tools , they have the ability to accomplish something that no government by itself could: nearly perfect location tracking of most the world’s population. That is why governments in the United States and around the world are working to take advantage of the tool the two companies are offering.

A pple and Google have told critics that their partnership will end once the pandemic subsides. Facebook has said that its aggressive censorship practices will cease when the crisis does. But when COVID-19 is behind us, we will still live in a world where private firms vacuum up huge amounts of personal data and collaborate with government officials who want access to that data. We will continue to opt in to private digital surveillance because of the benefits and conveniences that result. Firms and governments will continue to use the masses of collected data for various private and social ends.

Edward Tenner: Efficiency is biting back

The harms from digital speech will also continue to grow, as will speech controls on these networks. And invariably, government involvement will grow. At the moment, the private sector is making most of the important decisions, though often under government pressure. But as Zuckerberg has pleaded , the firms may not be able to regulate speech legitimately without heavier government guidance and involvement. It is also unclear whether, for example, the companies can adequately contain foreign misinformation and prevent digital tampering with voting mechanisms without more government surveillance.

The First and Fourth Amendments as currently interpreted, and the American aversion to excessive government-private-sector collaboration, have stood as barriers to greater government involvement. Americans’ understanding of these laws, and the cultural norms they spawned, will be tested as the social costs of a relatively open internet multiply.

COVID-19 is a window into these future struggles. At the moment, activists are pressuring Google and Apple to build greater privacy safeguards into their contact-tracing program. Yet the legal commentator Stewart Baker has argued that the companies are being too protective—that existing privacy accommodations will produce “a design that raises far too many barriers to effectively tracking infections.” Even some ordinarily privacy-loving European governments seem to agree with the need to ease restrictions for the sake of public health, but the extent to which the platforms will accommodate these concerns remains unclear.

We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.

* An earlier version of this article misstated the status of a now-discontinued Ring initiative providing local police with discounted cameras. The company no longer extends that offer.

Networking and Global Communication Essay

The article by Armand Mattelhart provides historical insight into networking and global communication. The author links humanity’s attempts to remove obstacles to civilization’s unity. There are two ways of achieving international networks, as seen from the text; the first is using technologies such as telegraphs or railroads. The second way is diplomacy, which creates treaties, acts, and international unities that contribute to networking development. In addition, one of the leading moving forces behind global communication was economic growth and achieving free trading opportunities between all parts of the world.

Resisting the authoritarian forms of government and hierarchical administrations was another aim key characteristic of networking development. However, the resistance was not always successful. For example, with the development of the telegraph, there were hopes that this tool would be used to provide accessible communication within France. But this technology was later used exclusively for military purposes by forces who controlled the connection. “The language of telegraphic signs was to remain a state secret for a long time. Its use by the public was first authorized over fifteen years after the invention of the electric telegraph.” (Mattelhart 4). Hence, the development of networks was constantly challenged by various obstacles.

In my opinion, the article puts an interesting perspective on well-known historical facts. The author does a great job of highlighting the most important events and creating a logical chain that unites them within networking. The article’s title creates curiosity about how such a modern term as network be referred to in the year 1794 and earlier.

Works Cited

Mattelart, Armand. Networking the world, 1794-2000 . U of Minnesota Press, 2000.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, April 19). Networking and Global Communication. https://ivypanda.com/essays/networking-and-global-communication/

"Networking and Global Communication." IvyPanda , 19 Apr. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/networking-and-global-communication/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Networking and Global Communication'. 19 April.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Networking and Global Communication." April 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/networking-and-global-communication/.

1. IvyPanda . "Networking and Global Communication." April 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/networking-and-global-communication/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Networking and Global Communication." April 19, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/networking-and-global-communication/.

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By Aaron Blank - Fearey | November 30 2018

As the end of  2018  quickly approaches, it has become more important than ever for Public Relations agencies to be available at anytime, anywhere, and devoted to the ultimate success of their clients, no matter what it takes. But, in this day and age, what does it take? What makes a PR agency stand out from the pack and excel?

Based on my experience leading The Fearey Group in Seattle, Wash. (USA) for the past six years, I can tell you it requires the ability to coordinate media events, launches, brand awareness campaigns and understanding the broad spectrum of digital marketing and how it integrated with other PR programs. This is done across time zones, borders and continents. It requires you to be everywhere at once and display innate industry expertise – in every industry. How is that possible? Well, on your own it’s not. But by banding together with 50 agencies around the world, we are making the impossible part of our normal day, and they are too. We are part of the Public Relations Global Network (PRGN), and it is this community that has allowed my agency to grow and flourish over the years, exceeding the expectations of clients who leverage it.

Here are a few reasons why.

Connections Around the Globe

Co-founded in 1992 by my predecessor and mentor, Pat Fearey, PRGN has helped our agency live up to the demanding expectations of major clients around the world. I work with 50 fully vetted PR agencies headquartered on every continent daily, and by working together, our collective global perspective and expertise is unmatched. For example, in the last two days I’ve talked to PRGN members in Germany, Ireland, Texas, Arizona, France, and Japan. While my regional skill set lies in the west coast of the U.S., I have relied on their own regional knowledge and media outreach more times than I can count.

My colleague Chuck Norman of S&A Communications in North Carolina and fellow PRGN member, said this when I asked him about what PRGN means to his company: To me, PRGN is a global support system that has helped my agency get connected to opportunities we would never have went for before.  To the client, PRGN can be seen as an extension of my team in North Carolina. Through the network, I’m able to leverage staff around the world, and that helps us win more business, but also provides our clients with a chance to work with one agency for all their international needs.”

Making PR More Affordable and Effective

Working with PRGN member agencies is also cost-effective and efficient. Many companies who have a national or international reach can’t afford to hire and manage three different agencies, with different policies, communication styles, and budgets. That’s incredibly inefficient and can lead to inconsistent results and a decreased ROI. Through PRGN, member agencies source valuable information such as local media lists and local influencers. We leverage contacts from different regional headquarters to keep costs down for our client. We also work together to coordinate media tours – for example, while my agency might take the lead on a restaurant opening on the west coast, one of our members may help that same client with another opening in Texas or Milan.

“PRGN helps my agency expand our scope, services, and overall reach,” says Chuck, “being part of the network has opened up the world to my agency and to my clients that are seeking international reach but need to make sure every dollar counts.”

A Community of Vetted Peers

  There’s a reason why members of PRGN feel so comfortable contacting each other for help, why they don’t think twice about sharing sources and lending their expertise to another agency when needed. We hang out – a lot. All PRGN members – meaning the agency owners – gather in person two times a year for a multi-day meeting and attendance is mandatory. This week, we’re in Romania for our second-half of the year meeting. These meetings take place around the world and they are by far the most important piece of the puzzle.

It’s during these face-to-face interactions that agency owners bond, they break the ice, and feel comfortable. It makes virtual relationships real and fuels international collaboration for the next six months. I feel completely at ease dialing up my contact in Chile for help, because we’ve spent quality time together over the years, and I consider him my friend.

All members of PRGN have gone through an intense vetting process and understand the world better than anyone. During these meetings, all members are able to share the challenges they face and successes they’ve experienced as agency owners. We learn and grow together, working through the nuances of how business is conducted internationally. By sitting down and sharing a meal with someone, I feel much more comfortable reaching out to them in the future.”

For me, it all boils down to relationships. That’s at the core of The Fearey Group; when working with any client, our goal is always a personal connection and long-term relationship building. PRGN places equal importance on the human element of public relations – and it’s what keeps me coming back year after year.

Aaron Blank is CEO and President of The Fearey Group in Seattle, Washington (USA). He’s also president-elect of the global network with a term set to begin in April 2019.

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A public relations, brand management, digital strategies, social media, content marketing and crisis communications expert, Alessandra is strongly passionate about innovation and new trends and has a lively talent for international relations. Besides being Vice President of Global Women in PR for Italy, she has been a jury member of the IMC European Awards and Chair of the PRGN Membership Committee. Among her interests are skiing, trekking, music, arts, books and more.

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Call for Narrative Essays: Global Essay Project

A Joint Project with t he American Association of Colleges and Universities

Share Your Global Journey! 🌍

Everyone has a memorable story of studying or working outside their country of birth. What is your story about studying or working overseas? What are your cross-cultural experiences from exchange programs or study abroad? Are you a current or former international student or scholar? Did you participate in Fulbright or any faculty exchange program?  Tell your stories  of exploring the words, the world, and the wonders.

Essay Categories

• International Student & Scholar Experience
• Study Abroad Experience (short or long term)
• Faculty/Staff International Experience

Join us in celebrating transnational narratives. Illuminate our “Global Essay Project” with your experiences. Contribute to this exceptional initiative by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and STAR Scholars Network.

Languages Accepted

You can write your story/essay in any of the following eight languages:

English | Spanish | French | German | Hindi | Arabic | Chinese | Russia

dive into ideas meet the winners, read essays

• Crossing Borders, Bridging Cultures (book) ( video )
• Cross-Cultural Narratives: Lived Experiences of Global Scholars (book) ( video )
• Institutional Commitment to Global Engagement (book)
• Global Footprints in Higher Education (book)
• Cross-Cultural Narratives: Stories and Experiences of International Students (book)

Essay Writing Suggestions

• Share a story : Focus on moments, encounters, and experiences that shaped your journey as an international student. Tell a story that no one else could tell. Your story can be about friendship, service, freedom, discrimination, injustice, activism, belonging, family, courage, resilience, citizenship, academics, spirituality, parenthood, discovery, inclusion, self-discovery, growth, etc. 
• Be brief: Your statement should be between 1,000 and 1,500 words ( use template ). That’s about 5-10 minutes when read aloud at your natural pace.
• Write about real events: Write your true journey as an international student; exchange student; study abroad student; or scholar, current or former. 
• Describe how you changed: Wrap-up the essay by sharing what you learned from the experience, how it has changed your beliefs, perspectives, or identity, or what the story means to you now as you look back on the events and how it has shaped you. 
• Be personal: Tell a story from your own life, not an opinion piece or commentary about an issue. Write using words and phrases that are natural for you. Read your story aloud several times, and simplify it so it captures the story as you experienced it.
• Tell your challenges and lessons. Flavor your writing with idioms and figures of speech from your language. Paint the picture. Be concrete about what you have seen in your travels, academic encounters, woes, and wows! 

Format Requirements

A story or essay of 1000-1,500 words; Typed in 12-pt size, Times Roman font; includes page numbers. We accept Microsoft Word files only. Please use this template to write your essay

Award Includes : All authors will receive a complimentary copy of publications (book). Selected top three authors will receive certificates, special recognition, and membership to the STAR Scholars Network.

Eligibility

All faculty, staff, and students (including international, study abroad, and exchange students, including former international students) from schools, colleges, and universities can submit their narrative essays.

Application Deadline

All essays must be submitted online by 11:59 p.m. EST on October 30 each year. 

Permission Notice

By submitting your entry, you agree that your essay/story might be published by the STAR Scholars on the web or in a publication. You will receive a copy of the publication.

About STAR Scholars 

The Society of Transnational Academic Researchers (STAR Scholars Network) is an international forum of scholars that advances global social mobility by using research and advocacy. Our mission is to carry out scholarly research and publication related to international education, exchange programs, academic mobility, and employability. We envision a humane world and we fulfill our mission by creating dialogue forums of exchange through our activities such as conferences and consultations. 

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Global Youth Advancement Network

Essay Contest

The Global Voices Essay Contest offers a platform for young people around the world to advocate for their communities, share their opinions and stories about local and national challenges.

The voices of young people have always been and always will be critical to the evolution of a just society. To provide a platform for their voices, Michigan State University's Global Youth Advancement Network (GYAN) hosts an annual regional essay competition for 15 – 24 year olds. Choosing from several themes, the participants submit a 600-900 word essay about how they are addressing a challenge their communities face. A panel of MSU faculty and staff review the essays and GYAN awards prizes to the top three entries. GYAN also publishes their essays, along with the honorable mention essays within each theme, to publicize these young leaders’ voices to the world.

2023 - Central and Eastern Europe

GYAN and  MSU’s Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES)  are happy to announce the winners and honorable mentions of the Global Voices 2023 Essay Contest, and we invite you to read youth inspirational stories of RESILIENCE.

2021 - Southeast Asia

In partnership with MSU's Asian Studies Center , GYAN announces the winners for the 2021 Global Voices essay contest. Contestants submitted essays about their specific interventions to confront inequity in their local communities. 

2020 - Latin America  

GYAN was pleased to partner with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) to bring the 2020 essay contest to a new region! The contest was open to youth in South and Central America and the Caribbean between the ages of 15-24. 

2018 - Africa

The 2018 contest shifted to focus on solutions . Contestants were asked to write about their specific interventions that are currently working to confront an inequity of their choosing. Essay authors wrote of their social businesses, organizations, media platforms, and more that are impacting and transforming the lives of those in their communities.

2017 - Africa

MSU's Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) and GYAN co-hosted the inaugural essay contest titled "Working Together to Create the Africa We Want". The essay contest signals a new era of engagement in Africa, where the voice of young people are the driving force behind the partnerships, strategies, and vision that move the continent forward!

Announcement of Selected Teams!

Empowering Young Leaders in Nigeria

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Essay on Internet Uses For Students

500 + words internet essay.

The internet is described as a global network of computer systems interconnected and following the internet security protocol. However, have you ever considered why the internet is important? This 500+ Words Essay on internet advantages and disadvantages will help students ace essay writing during exams.

A combination of high-end science and advanced technology, the internet is a viral invention. Here, in an essay on the internet, students can learn about the uses and impact of the internet.

Why the Internet Is Important

The internet has undergone significant development from the time of its birth to the present. Over a period of time, the internet has become more interactive and user-friendly. It has also helped man in day-to-day transactions and interactions. The Internet is widely used for numerous functions such as learning, teaching, research, writing, sharing content or data, e-mails, job hunting, playing games, listening to music, watching videos, exploring and finally surfing the internet. Meanwhile, though it makes life easy for people, the internet also comes with a lot of pros and cons. Find the advantages and disadvantages of the internet from this essay.

Also read: History of Internet

Essay on Advantages of Internet

Read this essay on internet advantages to know the effects of using the internet. Look for the points mentioned below.

• The internet has helped reduce the usage of paper and paperwork to a large extent by computerising offices, schools, NGOs, industries and much more.
• Internet helps to provide updated information and news from all over the world
• Education, business and travel have been thriving with the growth of the Internet
• The internet is of high educational and entertainment value
• The internet makes access to public resources, libraries and textbooks much easier
• The internet makes it easy by reducing the time and energy taken to do work
• Work has become more efficient, quick and accurate
• Meetings and conferences are made easier with video calls and other brilliant tools

Apart from all these, as mentioned in the above paragraph on Internet uses, it helps carry out banking activities, exchange information, shop for various goods and more.

Essay on Internet Disadvantages

Despite the use of the internet and its positives, there are also some internet disadvantages. Continuous use of the internet can affect our lifestyle and health. Let us check out the disadvantages of the internet from this paragraph.

• Over-dependence on the internet can lead to many health problems
• People tend to spend more of their productive time doing nothing but browsing
• Even if the internet is now used extensively at work, overuse of the internet could lead to depression
• Quality time with friends and relatives is primarily reduced due to the use of the internet
• Cybercrime has also increased as internet security and privacy are compromised

Thus, we have seen the uses of the internet and its impact on students and working professionals. While we know that overuse of the internet should be avoided, we also have to acknowledge that the internet has still not been exploited to its full potential, despite its massive growth. In conclusion, we can state that to make internet use more comfortable and pleasurable, school students should be taught about the pros and cons of using the internet, thus ensuring that they can stand up against cybercrime and ensure safety.

Also Read: Social Media Essay | Essay on Women Empowerment | Essay On Constitution of India

Frequently asked Questions on Internet Essay

What is the internet.

The internet is a global system of interconnected computers and this system uses a standardised Internet Protocol suite for communication and sharing information.

What are the top 5 uses of the Internet?

The Internet is mostly used by people to send emails and to search on any topic. It can be used to download large files. People depend on the internet for electronic news and magazines these days. A lot of people, especially the young generation use it to play interactive games and for entertainment.

What is WiFi?

WiFi is the latest wireless technology used to connect computers, tablets, smartphones and other electronic devices to the internet.

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Global Business Network, Case Study Example

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Global Business Network (GBN) was founded in 1987 and has been part of Monitor Group since 2000. The organization is a pioneer in the field of scenario planning and works with government, corporations, and non-profit organizations to find solutions to critical long-term issues. The organization’s headquarter is in San Francisco while it has branch offices in New York City, Cambridge (MA), and London (Global Business Network).

GBN supports scenario planning in two major ways which are training and consulting (Global Business Network). The organization provides training to both individuals and organizations. The training programs may either be conducted at a place of organization’s choosing or at client’s premises. The training programs are of two types which are Developing and Using Scenarios (DUS) and Scenarios to Strategy. DUS is aimed at beginners who have never been exposed to scenario planning before while Scenarios to Strategy is aimed at strategists and managers who are already familiar with the basics of scenario planning (Global Business Network).

GBN’s consulting services are aimed at organizations and make use of scenario planning and other strategic tools to address clients’ issues. The issues addressed by GBN’s consulting services include but not limited to strategic planning and decision-making under uncertainty, innovation, risk, organizational adaptability, alignment and visioning, and executive intelligence (Global Business Network).

GBN also offers a variety of educational topics related to scenario planning on its website. The visitor can visit the organization’s website to get an introduction to scenario planning as well as read related articles. The organization also hosts videos and podcasts related to scenario planning which can be accessed by anyone freely. GBN also collaborates with other organizations such to write research papers related to scenario planning. For example, it co-authored a paper titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” with The Rockefeller Foundation in 2010 (Global Business Network, 2010).To date, the organization has published more than 1,000 papers and reports on a wide range of topics (Global Business Network).

In order to make sure that GBN provides the best scenario planning guidance to its clients, the organization’s network consists of over hundred thinkers who come from diverse backgrounds such as science, technology, culture, arts, politics, ecology, and economics. The organization provides scenario planning services in almost every imaginable industry including high technology, medicine, energy, economic development, financial services, media, marketing, journalism, research, philanthropy, ICT, and organizational development(Global Business Network).

GBN also manages a book club which reviews books on a monthly basis. The books selected by the book club address past, present, and future events and trends. In addition, the organization also carries out quarterly interviews of its network members which yield new insights into the field of scenario planning (Global Business Network). The organization also publishes quarterly bulletins and maintains an archive of bulletins from the last four years on its website (Global Business Network).

GBN continues to be a leading authority on scenario planning because it provides a comprehensive range of tools to help clients in scenario planning. Its extensive network of professional from a diverse range of fields ensures that GBN can provide customized solutions to almost any public and private sector client.

Global Business Network. (2010, May). Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/articles/pdfs/GBN&Rockefeller%20scenarios.technology&development.pdf

Global Business Network. (n.d.). About GBN . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/about/

Global Business Network. (n.d.). Consulting . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/training/

Global Business Network. (n.d.). GBN Perspectives . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/ideas/perspectives.php

Global Business Network. (n.d.). GBN Training Offerings . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/training/

Global Business Network. (n.d.). Ideas . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/ideas/

Global Business Network. (n.d.). Our Approach . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/about/do.php

Global Business Network. (n.d.). People . Retrieved October 22, 2012, from http://gbn.com/people/

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