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The Network Society: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

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I remember reading a book by Edmund Burke which was a collection of letters written about the French Revolution in the late 1700's. The whole book consisted of just a few letters. In those days the mail moved slowly. With a lot of time being used in the communications channel, Burke could and did take the time to write long, well thought out letters that were really more like essays than simple letters.

With the advent of faster communications in the form of trains and then airplanes, letter got more frequent and shorter.

The latest changes are of course the internet and e-mail. Now communications with people across the office or across the world are all but instantaneous regardless of the distance. In turn this the length of the "documents" has gotten shorter. Today I exchanged e-mails with a person somewhere (I really don't know where) about a movie. We sent each other about three messages in only a few minutes.

This book is a series of essays on the Networked Society. It is written by a networked series of sociologists and other specialists at universities from Moscow to Barcelona to New York. They explore the impact of computer networking in terms of our society as it is developing. The essays include the development of the Internet in China where strong censorship is in place to the defacto split between the haves and have nots in regard to acces to information.

This book explores the overall implications of the evolving world.