The limits of networks as models for organizing the social

Abstract

Social network services exhibit dual processes that enable both the creation of new public spaces and the controlling and monitoring of these spaces through mechanisms facilitated by the architecture of the network itself. This article explores how network science informs the design of for-profit networking services by providing templates for organizing the social. As the case of social networking websites illustrates, networks have gone from scientific frameworks or even mere descriptive metaphors to actualized models that normalize a particular kind of privatized sociality. In an attempt to theorize forms of resistance to these templates of social organization, I suggest two concepts crucial to the articulation of a critical theory of networks: nodocentrism and paranodality. The goal of such a critique is not a complete rejection of networks as models for organizing sociality but rather a shift in our ways of knowing the world through the epistemological exclusivity of the node.