Think about what you did this morning. Maybe you checked your bank balance on your phone, paid a bill online, or watched a lecture on your laptop. Without realizing it, you participated in what scholars call a networked society – a world where daily life increasingly runs through interconnected digital networks. This shift is not just about technology; it is a fundamental reorganization of how people learn, transact, govern, and communicate. Understanding what makes this possible – and how it all holds together – is essential to grasping the digital world we now inhabit.
Table of Contents
What is a networked society?
The term “networked society” was first formally introduced by sociologist Jan van Dijk in 1991 and was later elaborated extensively by Manuel Castells in his landmark 1996 work The Rise of the Network Society. In simple terms, a networked society is one where a large portion of the global population is interconnected through telecommunication systems – and where these networks shape not just how people communicate, but how they work, learn, trade, and participate in public life.
Van Dijk defines it as a society in which a combination of social and media networks shapes its prime mode of organization at every level – individual, organizational, and societal. Castells goes further, describing it as a shift from industrial production to a knowledge economy, where information flows across global networks rather than being confined to physical locations. He identifies two key features of this society: the space of flows, meaning the technological ability to carry out activities across distances without physical presence, and timeless time, where traditional sequences of social time are disrupted and interactions can happen asynchronously across time zones.
In practical terms, this means the internet has brought interpersonal, organizational, and mass communication together into a single environment. As van Dijk observed, using the internet effectively brings the “whole world” into homes and workplaces – a claim that, decades later, has become self-evident.
The rise of e-activities
The most visible outcome of the networked society is the explosion of e-activities – everyday tasks that have migrated from physical spaces to electronic networks. The prefix “e-” simply signals that an activity is now conducted electronically over a network. What was once done in person, with paper, or through physical infrastructure is now digitized. Banking, commerce, governance, healthcare, and education have all undergone this transformation.
E-banking and e-commerce
Financial services were among the first to go fully digital. E-banking allows users to check balances, transfer funds, pay bills, and apply for loans without ever visiting a branch. In India, the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become the world’s largest digital payments network, allowing users to link multiple bank accounts into a single app and transact instantly without sharing account numbers. This is a direct product of the networked society – it works because telecommunications infrastructure, banking systems, and mobile technology have all converged on a common digital layer.
E-commerce similarly removed geography from buying and selling. A seller in a small town can now reach a global customer base; a buyer can compare prices, place an order, and track delivery from a smartphone. The entire logistics chain – from payment processing to inventory management to customer support – runs on networked systems.
E-governance
One of the most significant applications of networked society infrastructure is e-governance – the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to deliver government services, exchange information, and enable citizen participation. As Drishti IAS notes, e-governance covers a wide range: from e-administration (digitizing government records and processes) to e-services (online delivery of public services) to e-democracy (enabling public participation through online platforms).
Real-world examples demonstrate the scale of what is possible. Estonia, widely regarded as the world’s most digitally advanced society, has made 99% of its public services available online around the clock. Singapore’s SingPass app gives residents access to over 400 digital services from a single interface. In India, the Digital India initiative has driven adoption of services like Aadhaar for biometric identity verification, DigiLocker for document storage, and SWAYAM for free online courses – all made possible by the country’s expanding network infrastructure.
E-education and the e-library: learning in a networked world
Perhaps nowhere is the networked society’s impact more democratizing than in education. E-education refers to a model in which enrollment, instruction, assessment, and certification all take place electronically through a network – removing the need for students and teachers to be physically co-present.
India’s Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) is one of the world’s most prominent examples of this model in action. Established in 1985 with a mandate to democratize higher education, IGNOU now serves millions of learners across India and 32 other countries through its online Learning Management System (LMS). The platform offers complete online delivery – from registration to course content to final certification – across 45 online academic programmes. Students can attend, learn, and be assessed entirely via the network, without setting foot on a physical campus.
Alongside its LMS, IGNOU operates eGyanKosh, its national digital repository – a classic example of an e-library. An e-library provides remote access to a digital collection of learning resources: texts, videos, research materials, and programme guides. eGyanKosh, launched in 2005, hosts over 40,000 self-instructional text materials and around 2,000 video lectures, all available as open-access content that anyone can use without visiting a physical library. The IGNOU library division explicitly aims to enable remote access to electronic content for distance learners, creating a comparable information experience to campus-based education.
This is what an e-library does at its core: it extends the reach of a library’s resources across a network so that geography, physical access, and institutional affiliation become irrelevant barriers. Whether a student is in Delhi or a remote town, the collection is equally accessible.
Global platforms and democratized learning
Beyond formal universities, platforms like Coursera, Udemy, and Khan Academy rely on the integration of video streaming, interactive tools, and social networking to offer self-paced learning and live classes to students worldwide. These platforms are products of convergence – they wouldn’t function without broadband internet, cloud computing, video compression technology, and digital payment systems working in unison. E-education, in this sense, is not just a service; it is proof that the networked society’s infrastructure can be redirected toward social good.
Convergence: the foundation that makes it all possible
All the e-activities described above share a common backbone: technological convergence. Convergence refers to the merging of previously separate technologies – computing, telecommunications, broadcasting, and data networks – into a single, integrated digital system. As LIS Academy explains, this is not merely a technological trend but a fundamental shift in how technology is organized and used.
Historically, each technology operated in isolation. The telephone was for voice calls. Television was for broadcast. Computers were for data processing. The rise of the internet in the late 20th century was the pivotal moment: it connected these independent systems into a shared digital space, enabling voice, text, video, and data to travel over a single network. The smartphone became the most vivid symbol of this convergence – a single device that merged digital photography, video, telephony, computing, and internet access into one handheld object.
Convergence is what allows a student to enroll in a university course, download study materials from a digital library, submit assignments, and receive results – all through the same device and network. It is what allows a citizen to pay taxes, access medical records, and receive government alerts from a single app. The seamlessness of e-activities in a networked society is not accidental; it is engineered by the underlying convergence of technologies and networks.
As media scholars have noted, convergence has also made multitasking far easier, since many devices now allow users to access education, handle banking, communicate, and consume media on the same machine. The “black box” vision – a single device through which all services flow – has largely been realized in the modern smartphone and laptop.
The networked society is still unequal
It would be incomplete to discuss the networked society without acknowledging its fault lines. Access to the network is not universal. The digital divide – the gap between those who have reliable internet access and those who do not – remains a significant structural problem. As Fiveable’s media studies resource points out, digital inequalities result in real disparities in access to information, education, and economic opportunity, particularly in rural areas, low-income communities, and developing regions.
E-governance initiatives also face this challenge. Governments delivering services online must reckon with the fact that not all citizens can access those services equally – whether due to lack of infrastructure, low digital literacy, or language barriers. A networked society that excludes large segments of the population from its benefits is only partially realized. Expanding the network, and ensuring meaningful access to it, remains as important as developing the services that run on top of it.
What do you think? As more of daily life – from education to governance – moves online, what responsibilities do governments and institutions have to ensure that the benefits of a networked society are genuinely accessible to everyone? And as technological convergence continues to consolidate multiple services into fewer platforms, does that create convenience or introduce new risks around dependency and control?
References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_society
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-governance
- https://www.drishtiias.com/to-the-points/Paper2/e-governance-1
- https://identityreview.com/digital-transformation-e-governance-models/
- https://thelaw.institute/cyberspace-technology-and-social-issues/key-components-e-governance-digital-society/
- https://www.ignou.ac.in
- https://egyankosh.ac.in/
- https://www.ignou.ac.in/pages/178
- https://lis.academy/ict-fundamentals/technology-convergence-networked-society/
- https://uw.pressbooks.pub/mediacriticalapproaches/chapter/1-4/
- https://fiveable.me/understanding-media/unit-2/digital-age-convergence/study-guide/T4UMjYzflZA1DEpg
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