Digifesto

Previous entries detailing the arguments of Arendt, Horkheimer, and Beniger show these theorists have what you might call a structural functionalist bent. Society is conceived as a functional whole. There are units of organization within it. For Arendt, this social organization begins in the private household and expands to all of society. Horkheimer laments this as the triumph of mindless economic organization over genuine, valuable individuality.

Structuralism, let alone structural functionalism, is not in fashion in the social sciences. Purely speculatively, one reason for this might be that to the extent that society was organized to perform certain functions, more of those functions have been delegated to information processing infrastructure, as in Beniger’s analysis. That leaves “culture” more a domain of ephemerality and identity conflict, as activity in the sphere of economic production becomes if not private, opaque.

My empirical work on open source communities is suggestive (though certainly not conclusively so) that these communities are organized more for functional efficiency than other kinds of social groups (including academics). I draw this inference from the degree dissortativity of the open source social networks. Disassortativity suggests the interaction of different kinds of people, which is against homophilic patterns of social formation but which seems essential for economic activity where the interact of specialists is what creates value.

Assuming that society its entirety (!!) is very complex and not easily captured by a single grand theory, we can nevertheless distinguish difference kinds of social organization and see how they theorize themselves. We can also map how they interact and what mechanisms mediated between them.