Culture in Networks

Paul McLean

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745687179, 9780745687162
• eBook ISBN: 9780745687209
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Today, interest in networks is growing by leaps and bounds, in both scientific discourse and popular culture. Networks are thought to be everywhere – from the architecture of our brains to global transportation systems. And networks are especially ubiquitous in the social world: they provide us with social support, account for the emergence of new trends and markets, and foster social protest, among other functions. Besides, who among us is not familiar with Facebook, Twitter, or, for that matter, World of Warcraft, among the myriad emerging forms of network-based virtual social interaction?

It is common to think of networks simply in structural terms – the architecture of connections among objects, or the circuitry of a system. But social networks in particular are thoroughly interwoven with cultural things, in the form of tastes, norms, cultural products, styles of communication, and much more. What exactly flows through the circuitry of social networks? How are people's identities and cultural practices shaped by network structures? And, conversely, how do people's identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the network structures they create? This book is designed to help readers think about how and when culture and social networks systematically penetrate one another, helping to shape each other in significant ways.

1
Culture and Social Networks: A Conceptual Framework

This book provides an extended treatment of the various ways in which we can imagine social networks to intersect with culture. The term social network refers to a set of entities – actors, organizations, or locations, for example – and the ties that exist among them. Social network analysis refers to a set of concepts and procedures by means of which social network properties may be analyzed. The term culture is one of the most complex terms in the social sciences to define, but we can understand it broadly to refer to the knowledge, beliefs, expectations, values, practices, and material objects by means of which we craft meaningful experiences for ourselves and with each other. It might help a bit to think of networks as hardware (circuitry) and culture as software (rules and routines for action), although that analogy is deceptively clear. The circuitry is largely inert without rules or recipes specifying how the parts go together, how information is to be created, and how communication flow will be controlled. On the other hand, the products that may be potentially created via the software are activated only via concrete pathways and connections existing in network form. Again, the analogy is simplistic, but it has the merit of reinforcing the idea that social networks and culture go together synthetically, even necessarily. What varies is only the extent to which either network structure or cultural recipes are emphasized in order to answer specific research questions.

The amount of scholarly attention devoted to the two topics of networks and culture, taken separately, has grown tremendously in recent years. The International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) hosts an annual conference of ever-growing proportions, and it is home to a highly active listserv for the discussion of all kinds of networks-related questions. Meanwhile, the Culture section of the American Sociological Association has grown into one of the very largest since the late 1990s.

More substantively speaking, on the networks side, although the roots of social network analysis run back to the 1930s,¹ since the turn of the new century we have witnessed the birth of the so-called “new science of networks” (Watts 1999, 2003; Barabási 2002). According to this perspective, networks are understood to be everywhere – from cellular structure to the architecture of our brains and the mechanics of information processing, from transportation systems to global trade patterns. More to the point for our purposes here, networks are ubiquitous in the social world (Christakis and Fowler 2009). For example, networks provide us with social support (Wellman and Wortley 1990; Rainie and Wellman 2012), they reputedly help us find jobs (Granovetter 1995), they affect disease transmission (Morris 1993), they knit together social and political elites (Knoke 1993; Domhoff 2010), they exist in the structure of ownership in advanced capitalist economies (Mizruchi 1992; Burris 2005), they account for the emergence of new industries and organizational forms (Powell et al. 2005; Padgett and Powell 2012), they foster and support social protest (Diani and McAdam 2003), and much, much more. Besides all of that, who among us is not familiar with Facebook and Twitter, or for that matter World of Warcraft or Second Life or Reddit, among the myriad emerging forms of media where virtual social interaction takes place on a massive scale (e.g., Lewis et al. 2008)? These relatively new venues of social behavior work fundamentally on network principles, even if they remain under-explored using formal social network analytic tools.² Indeed, the internet itself is a giant network of communication links. We live in a “connected” (Christakis and Fowler 2009), “networked” (Castells 1996) world. Networks are our social “operating system” (Rainie and Wellman 2012).

With respect to the culture side of the picture, for several decades now we have understood the social world in the wake of the “cultural turn” in the social sciences (Bonnell and Hunt 1999; Jacobs and Spillman 2005).³ After the cultural turn, culture can no longer be seen as something simply derived from social structure – as if, for example, the democratic structure of government and democratic nature of our society ensured that we adhere to democratic values fully, consistently, and unquestioningly. An adequate treatment of the cultural turn would take us deep into social theory and the philosophy of knowledge, topics well beyond the scope of this book. Suffice to say for present purposes that historians and social scientists in the late 1970s began to turn away from accounts of social reality that focused on concrete material relations in society, such as instances of economic exploitation, to accounts that took culture seriously – culture not only in the sense of cultural objects such as art, music, theatre, or dance, but in the form of jointly produced language, symbols, schemas, institutions, and much more. Culture became newly understood as an engine of social change, and/or as webs of significance (Geertz 1973) through which we perceive, and operate in, the material world. Stated succinctly, culture became a vital, vibrant element of social explanation. The turn to culture also entailed for many scholars a turn away from positivist⁴ approaches to social explanation to more interpretive approaches. Frequently enough, too, the cultural turn was accompanied by more critical methods for analyzing social phenomena – methods that unpacked and historicized taken-for-granted cultural beliefs, norms, values, institutions, social classification categories, and previously unexamined practices that structure the social world and systematically privilege certain groups over others (McDonald 1996; Adams et al. 2005). By these standards – a redefinition of what culture is, a new appreciation of its various manifestations, and an awareness of its independent role in sustaining inequalities of social power – attention to culture became also a new way of doing sociology, indicated in part by use of the label “strong program” with respect to the practice of cultural sociology (Alexander 2003; Friedland and Mohr 2004; Reed and Alexander 2009; Alexander et al. 2012).

The amount of scholarly attention devoted to the ways network and culture combine has similarly grown since 2000. But knowledge of how they may be combined may not be widely appreciated – especially by those new to the area – in part because of the longstanding character of research on each topic. Networks and culture have sometimes seemed antithetical to each other. For one thing, it has sometimes been too easy to think of networks simply in structural terms. Recall my “hardware” analogy from the beginning of this chapter: Networks constitute the architecture of connections among objects, and so they describe spatial patterns that “determine” where we can travel or where power flows. Some early work on networks insisted on the primacy of structure over content, and the comparability of the properties of social organization across networks without attending to relational content or symbolic meanings. Actually, that is a very cool idea! We need abstract models of social structures in order to develop theoretical claims, as Georg Simmel (1971b) argued long ago in “The Problem of Sociology.” But there is justified concern that such a desire for developing arguments for the autonomy or even primacy of structure can go too far. Fascination today with the structural properties of networks – small worlds, six degrees of separation, clustering coefficients, degree distributions, preferential attachment, and so on, are some of the notions eagerly studied – under the rubric of the “new science of networks” is at risk of treating cultural processes and cultural content in a rather mechanical way, or ignoring them altogether. When we think of a social network architecture or circuitry, we ought to be thinking: what exactly is it that flows through this circuitry? What sustains this flow? How does change come about in network structures? How do people interact with each other inside these networks? How are people’s identities – the faces they present, the goals they pursue, and the interests they develop – shaped by network structures? Conversely, how do people’s identities, their beliefs about the social world, and the kinds of messages they send affect the kinds of network structures they create and how those networks evolve? How do people’s expectations shape the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of social network ties? These questions of cultural forms, content and practices seem especially important today and for the foreseeable future as we shift our attention increasingly to social media: large-scale networks of interpersonal communication.

Not only because of the structuralist bent of some network analysis, but also because of the methodological shift toward interpretation and (more or less) away from the measurement and collection of “hard” data after the cultural turn, cultural approaches and network structural approaches would seem to make strange bedfellows.⁵ Nevertheless, when starting with an interest in culture – that is, processes of meaning-making, identity formation, and communication using existing practices and symbols – thinking in network terms can help us to understand with more precision where and how new cultural ideas arise, how they are disseminated, where they collect, and why they might be unevenly distributed in society.

Throughout the rest of this book, I will adumbrate diverse analytical intersections of culture and networks: that is, various ways the analysis of social networks and the analysis of culture can be brought together. I do not argue for the superiority of one intersection over another. As I noted above, where the causal emphasis falls and how network analytical and cultural tools are used is largely a matter of the research questions one cares to answer. But all of these intersections are interesting because they address, head on, the fact that social life is comprised of both patterns of interactions and relations on the one hand, and communicative meaning-making processes on the other. I sort these different intersections of networks and culture into five main subtopics or themes, and I devote one chapter to each theme. As a shorthand tool, I use a different preposition to represent the nature of the culture/network linkage for each theme. These themes are as follows:

• Culture THROUGH networks: in chapter 4, I will discuss primarily the diffusion or flow of cultural materials – innovations, ideas, practices, frames, commitments – within networks. One of the key ways in which we can build a more culturally rich understanding of diffusion is by keeping in mind the idea that, as objects and ideas diffuse, they are frequently re-invented (Rogers 2003) or adapted to new locales. In recent times, with respect to the diffusion of memes on the internet, such re-invention is practically definitional, as people creatively adapt and/or parody visual images through the apparatus of Photoshop and similar applications. I discuss some general models put forward by sociologists of how and where culture spreads through networks, and I focus illustratively on the extensive research on social movements that stresses the spread of people, protest commitments, repertoires of action, symbols, and frames across multiple movements.
• Culture FROM networks: here I have in mind the creation of culture as a product of network structure, specifically in the form of emergent identities and roles, as well as the distinctly different idea of the production of culture via interaction in social networks. I treat these topics in chapter 5. I discuss some classic sociological research that used blockmodeling to argue that people occupy particular roles in a network structure, and that occupancy of these roles determines their social identities, thereby strongly shaping their opportunities and practices. However, I also discuss at length a strand of research stressing that networks may be particularly fecund spaces in which invention and innovation arise in all kinds of creative fields, from science and philosophy to music and visual arts.
• Networks FROM culture: in chapter 6, I pick up the idea that the shape of networks may well be based on participants’ cultural preferences and practices, and the kinds of norms that exist that compel us to look to certain people for certain kinds of social support. To think in this way lends culture a more “programmatic” function than we encountered in the previous two chapters. Culture may also be thought of in part as a toolkit of practices and styles people utilize as they manage their networks. I also discuss how culture guides the social ties we form, and how different kinds of cultural endowments (cultural capital) empower us to take advantage of network opportunities (social capital) to different extents. Networks may be seen not so much as rigid structures, but as flexible fabrics providing opportunities f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Culture and Social Networks: A Conceptual Framework
• PART I Fundamental Concepts
• PART II Linkages of Networks with Culture
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement