Don't be afraid of the network

I hold views that could be considered radical, or avant-garde; but I take a reserved position on networks. The penetration and revolutionary nature of the world-wide-web, as well as the affect of network theory on our culture, are important and not to be discounted; but there is a note of paranoia to be heard in contemporary writing that is misplaced. Both the penetration of the network, and the negative consequences of it, are over-estimated and misunderstood. If humans were truly rational, the fears would be more justified, but our irrationality will prove to be our greatest defense against being subsumed into some sort of network machine.

The fears about penetration fail to take into account huge sections of the world that aren't networked, and won't be for a long time; as well as certain areas of personal interaction (particularly biological interactions) that won't be. Similarly, the presence of a network in a zone doesn't equate to the zone being completely consumed by, or encompassed by, the network. The network may become "ubiquitous", but it's farfetched to imagine it becoming truly universal.

The fears about the negative consequences of the network are myriad, and less easy to sum up, or address generally. Two of the main fears, however, revolve around information being collected by large corporate and governmental entities, and the change in our social interactions. The first of these may have some validity, but it isn't as new as people like to think. Entities have been tracking individuals for centuries; and while the network makes them better at it, and makes the tracking harder to avoid, it still can be avoided - and the network relies on certain physicalities that must be paid for, so if the large entities get nothing from their investment in the network, that investment would stop, and the network would cease to exist. The second argument, about changes in social interactions (linked to arguments about changes in cognition and attention) is on less steady ground. The network expands social reach, and enables new forms of communication, but if you take a prime example - 30 people on a bus all looking at their smartphones - back 20 years, those same people were staring into space, sleeping, reading, etc. Most of them aren't talking with their neighbors - and the ones that would have been 20 years ago, probably still are now.