-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jen Schradie, Networked: The New Social Operating System By Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman MIT Press. 2012. 358 pages. $29.95 hardcover, $17.95 paperback, Social Forces, Volume 94, Issue 3, March 2016, Page e89, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sou075
- Share Icon Share
Extract
Sociologists have been researching digital technology and society over the past two decades, yet our discipline has yet to fully grasp its theoretical significance. Therefore, Rainie and Wellman's book, Networked: The New Social Operating System, is a welcome addition to a broader dialogue on the role of the Internet and mobile technologies in social life. Their central argument is that digital technology is both situated in and shapes a new “networked individualism.”
Rather than households, workplaces, or civic or religious groups organizing society today, the authors contend that the individual is the “primary unit of connectivity.” This networked individual interacts with a loosely connected, diverse, and broad community of weak ties. According to Rainie and Wellman, we are in an “era of free agents and the spirit of personal agency.”
With a combination of descriptive statistics, personal anecdotes, and existing scholarship, the authors describe networked individualism in everyday life. For instance, with “networked relationships,” Rainie and Wellman explain how “personal networks have expanded, become more complex, and speeded up” (146). With “networked families,” traditional and predefined roles have dissolved, so family members no longer act as a monolithic household. Families need to spend more time and effort to communicate with one another in this networked era of less face time, yet gadgets enable them to connect more and “bridge barriers of time and space” (170). The authors also explain how the nature of work has shifted in sync with the digital era and globalization, so now employees do less “atom work” and more “bit work” that is more creative, flexible, and autonomous. In what the authors describe as less hierarchical and less bureaucratic workplaces, networked individualism can thrive. According to RW, employees are able to work anywhere with mobile technology, bridging the public and private spheres.