Rogers, Richard, Noortje Marres
Richard Rogers and Noortje Marres
The practices of selective hyperlinking by institutional and
extra-institutional actors make it possible to locate issue-networks on the
Web: networks of government, non-government, corporate, scientific, grassroots
and/or individual's sites, mobilizing and organising around a common issue.
With the aid of co-link analysis software as well as a new means of visualising
networks and their development over time, these otherwise "invisible
networks" may be charted. Building on previous social network analysis,
actor-network theory and social network analysis of communities and movements,
we move to the trans-organisational level, and map the developing social relations
that hold together issues of globalisation.
Similar to the notion of "invisible colleges", these
socio-organisational networks staging issues are often referred to, but their
specific contours generally remain uncharted. As they configure on the Web,
however, they can be captured, mapped and made readable. Especially in the case
of issues of globalisation, which move beyond national and mass media
frameworks, these invisible networks become one of the crucial sites for what
we call 'issue-fication': the socio-political process by which reported events
are turned into causes of collective concern. As hyperlinking among
institutionally heterogenuous actors can be mapped on the Web, one may begin to
understand how the issues of globalisation are called into being and
collectively developed by such heterogenuous actor sets. As we approach it, one
begins to understand how issues of globalization are held together,
trans-organisationally.
Generally, we have begun to identify a series of issue network types, which are
distinguished by the form of political procedure they evince, e.g., debate
networks, summit networks, programme networks, and scandal networks, each of
which, we are beginning to understand, has particular features as well as
dynamics. The political procedures of debate, scandal, programme, summit and
product are of course not particular to the Web. But as debates, issues,
scandals, programmes, summits and products are collectively staged by actors on
the Web, they can be seen to assume particular network-features. We hypothesize
that each of the network types can be characterized on the basis of certain
features as actor compositions and actor relations, as well as on certain
dynamics as the development of these relations over time, and the currency of
the network. Transformations from one network type to another can be charted,
for example, when a network matures or dies out, or when it moves from summit
network to debate network, or from programme to scandal network. For the
dynamics of scandals, for example, we note the currency of accusations, for
summits the currency of agenda items et cetera. Such particular network
transformations provide a further grasp of how the issues of globalisation are
being held together. Ultimately, this type of research would bring into view
the networked forms of the political that are currently being articulated to
accommodate issues of globalisation, by extra-institutional as well as
institutional actors.
Panelists
Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam/University of Vienna
Noortje Marres, University of Amsterdam
Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges