Red Rock Eater Digest - Institutional Analysis for Design Even though networked individualism is a compelling idea, however,
I am always uncomfortable with theoretical constructs that declare
qualitatively new conditions to have arisen just because technology
has helped us do more of the things we already did before. As a
result, I prefer to think of networked individualism as a permanent
condition, one that already held during the Stone Age and that has
become more intense in fits and starts throughout history. On this
conception, networked individualism is independent of particular
technologies; the concept encourages us to go looking for the diverse
means by which people maintain an ongoing awareness of one another --
visits, parties, rumors, letters, phone calls, Web pages, and so on,
all of them embedded in the society's larger workings in various ways.