The new idol: networks
Since the meteoric rise of the Internet, much has been written about the transformative power of networks. Some of this writing limits itself to echoing McLuhan`s simple observation that "the medium is the mesage," that in effect every method of communication has its own style that inevitably shapes science and culture. I am inclined to think this is true, that the revolution caused by the Internet will be as big as that caused by the printing press or the radio. Still, I am worried about the tone of some sloppy writing out there that gives the Internet and other networks messianic qualities.
Exhibit 1 in this category is Hart and Negri`s enjoyable treatise Multitude, which essentially makes the case for global democracy, albeit one of a Communist bent. However, they argue that just as the nation-state required a different form of government than the city-state, a global democracy will require a different form of government than the nation-state. This new form must be a flexible, multi-level network, with the Internet the prime analogy. Similarly, many books on political theory like Future Multilateralism argue that a complex network of governance including NGOs, the UN, and international corporations will bring about stability as a neccesary consequence of its complexity.
I believe all such works ignore some very real dangers of complex networks. Ecology`s 30-year long obsession with food web dyna,ics can shed light on this. At first, ecologists assumed that more complex webs were more stable, almost as a tenent of faith. However, theoretical and (to a lessor extent) empirical studies have shown that having more nodes (species, individuals, etc.) in a network does not make it more stable, and can often make it less stable. Similarly, randomly adding connections to a food web tends to decrease its stability. What does add stability is the creation of redundant pathways, multiple routes that energy can travel through the system. I suspect the same is true for political and media systems: complexity in a network only increases stability (in the sense of responsiveness to the needs of its actors) only when it increases the nu,ber of pathways by which political demands or information needs may be met.
