CREATIVE NETWORKS
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have come to prefer that of water, of the hydrosphere […] At some points water does freeze, crystallizing into rigidity, but mostly it melts again, undoing one molecular form to return to a process of dynamic self-organizing […]. Thus too with ‘civil society.’ (Cleaver 1999) The two mentioned perspectives – Castells’s ‘space of flows’ and Cleaver’s ‘water metaphor’ are compared by Brian Holmes in his text ‘Flowmaps; The Imaginaries of Global Integration’. He describes them as opposites of global integration emphasizing a certain antagonism, namely, the conflicting field of culture and politics. At the same time both concepts share the association of flow relatable to computer communications. Here he speaks of the zone of overlapping where notions of today’s world meet and part. The imaginary ‘space of flows-maps’ reflect and actively influence the developments of the globally integrated society. (Holmes 2004, 73) These two views are opposites, yet they share a common notion of ‘flows’ by referring to digital networks. Therefore both of them together create the perspective through which we can understand better our network societies and the social dynamics they create within the digitally networked media space. Actor-Network Theory The French sociologist Bruno Latour and his contemporaries propose a considerably more radical network concept in their Actor-Network Theory (abbreviated as ANT). According to Latour, ‘network is a concept, not a thing out there’. (Latour 2005, 131) Latour raises an extreme contrast: ‘it is either a society or a network’ (Latour 2005, 131). By challenging the conventional notions of society in social sciences, Latour invites to reconsider the terms ‘social’ and ‘society’. He points out two different approaches in sociology. One is the following: that there exists a social ‘context’ in which non-social activities take place. The second is opposite: it claims that society is far from being the context ‘in which’ everything is framed, and that it should rather be construed as one of the many connecting elements. Latour thinks that resemblance between those two approaches is much greater than it seems. He proposes to revise the definition of sociology – to view it as ‘the tracing of associations’ instead of ‘the science of the social’. It is very remarkable that both terms share the same Latin root – socius. In this case, ‘the meaning of the adjective, “social” does not designate a thing amongst other things anymore, like a black sheep among other white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social’ (Latour 2005, 5). Such an approach in sociology resembling ‘a narrative or a description or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there’ (Latour 2005, 128) Latour calls a good ANT account. According to this theory, network ‘is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described’. This allows to apply network evaluation to a subject which does not contain a form of a network in any way, for instance, ‘a symphony, a piece of legislation, a rock from the moon, an engraving. Conversely, you may well write about technical networks – television, e-mails, satellites, salesforce – without at any point providing an actor-network account.’ (Latour 2005, 131) Despite the fact that Actor-Network Theory as a term was introduced by its proponents back in 1985 already, that is back in the day when there was neither the Internet, nor network associations with terrorist groups, Actor-Network has made the concept of network even more ambiguous. At one point Latour introduced his interpretation of the word ‘network’ as an innovation in order for it to stand out amongst such terms as ‘society’, ‘institution’, ‘culture’ and ‘sphere’, amongst others often considered as facts or real things. Despite the transformations that have occurred over the years Latour eventually decided to keep the term ‘network’ in his theoretical arsenal, by