Network Society Short Film

The information revolution is often identified as the most profound driver of change in our world today, enabling an ongoing disruptive transformation in the deep structure to our Industrial Age social institutions as we move further into the 21st century. Information technology is unleashing the most radical force of our time, hyperconnectivity, which is reshaping all areas of our technology, economy and social institutions according to a new set of rules; those of access, network structure, information, and knowledge. While the original revolution in technology may be at least partially behind us, the social impact is still largely ahead of us, as in many countries there remains a deep contradiction between the existing institutional structures and those that would be adapted to their underlying technological means.Within such a context many people believe that we are on the cusp of a fundamental transformation in our political-economy, in how we choose to organize society in respect to industry, organizations, and communities. This new form of society that is believed to be emerging is variously called the information or the network society. This is essentially the shift from the Industrial Age bureaucratic form of organization, the hierarchical, stable, predictable organization which is formal and rule-bound, to social organizational structures that are better adapted and more characteristic of the Information Age, a post-bureaucratic form of organization which is much flatter, much leaner, much more network-based, more informal, dynamic, open in scope, one that is really all about knowledge as opposed to execution and efficiency. What emerges out of this transformation is what has been called the network society.