The network society and be
There are several authors, from Husserl and Heidegger claiming to be a return to the essence of man and also its relationship with all that is around you, in a way also the nature, although this is still neglected. You can delve into this topic referring to Levinas and Ricoeur, these most current, and also somehow Habermas and Morin, but we want to focus only on “networks”.
Castells is one of the main authors to discover this topic, especially if we think that he wrote in 1996, when “social networks” were just sketches and not popular. In one of the threads of its three volumes written that society would each see a more structured bipolarity between the network and be. It is amazing and no doubt a thorough review of the anthropological and ontological being, where man must overcome resistance and barriers to emerging society that would be the “network society”.
Castells(*) captures something essential is that this historical revision or change of being (and being that eludes him) would allow the emergence of a new society, where the sense of isolation and lack of identity, where there is a lack of consistent principles and values that may guide both the behavioral process as set guidelines for a new life of every being.
The author seems to put the company on the horizon of a true humanity, and thus we still can not let disappear the tension between the ideal (which is not virtual, because it has the potential of existence) and the real, which is the life of man as a historical being. The author does not guide the ontological way for a collective society, where models, actors and locations seem to balance the technological revolution mechanically consciences in order to give consistency and objectivity to the social roots of the “revolution.”
Returning to the first principles, with all the technology, it is in society and in man (for this so ontological) that the whole structure of society change and should emerge.
* Manuel Castells write “The Rise of the Network Society”.