The contemporary basemap references the city as a collection of static landmarks defined by their official boundaries and Cartesian coordinates. However, the city is an enormously dynamic mechanism, which incorporates variable patterns of movement, occupation, and density. The fluctuating nature of wireless networks reinforces these dynamics, while simultaneously calling into question the traditional boundaries of the physical infrastructure. As we develop strategies for creating collaborative maps, using locative media, we must also develop a cartographic language that is well suited to plotting the temporal qualities of this evolving landscape. By visualizing the city through this broader notion of mapping, we have the opportunity to see the landscape in new ways, ultimately becoming aware of the changing practices that inform our notion of place.
___
"Space is a practiced place" [1] - Michel de Certeau
Digital networks and wireless technologies are radically reforming the contemporary notions of urban place. As network technologies move away from their hardwired roots, they are activating an urban dynamic that is no longer based on referencing static landmarks, but on a notion of the city in which spatial references become events. These developments imply a changing pattern of urban reference in which invisible boundaries of connectivity alternately thicken or marginalize the urban territories they overlay.
___
Lately, these unsettled debates over how to think about networks have affected major writings about where societies as a whole may be headed. Consider, for example, this treatment in Francis Fukuyama's The Great Disruption (1999), which does not view networks as a distinctive form of organization that is newly on the rise:
"If we understand a network not as a type of formal organization, but as social capital, we will have much better insight into what a network's economic function really is. By this view, a network is a moral relationship of trust: A network is a group of individual agents who share informal norms or values beyond those necessary for ordinary market transactions. The norms and values encompassed under this definition can extend from the simple norm of reciprocity shared between two friends to the complex value systems created by organized religions" (Fukuyama, 1999, p. 199, italics in original).
This is different from the view espoused by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society (1996). He recognizes, in a manner not unlike Fukuyama, the importance that values and norms play in the performance of networks and other forms of organization. Yet, his deeper point is that networks are spreading and gaining strength as a distinct form of organization:
"Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an overarching conclusion: as a historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the information age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies ... While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure" (Castells, 1996, p. 469).
Fukuyama's view reflects mainly the social network approach to analysis, Castells's the organizational approach - and his view is more tied to the influence of the information revolution. Our own view is decidedly in the latter camp (Arquilla and Ronfeldt, 1996, 2000; Ronfeldt, 1992, 1996); but that is not the main point here. The point is that these debates are far from settled; they will persist for years. Meanwhile, where netwar is the object of concern - as in assessing the degree to which an adversary is or is not a netwar actor, and how well it is designed for particular strategies and tactics - the analyst should be steeped in the organizational as much as the social approach. Organizational design is the decisive factor (even when the actors are individuals).
Against this backdrop, good progress at network analysis is being made by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists who are studying the growing roles of organizational networks in social movements. Their definitions of "network" have not always improved on prior ones. For example, a pathbreaking study of transnational advocacy movements (Keck and Sikkink, 1998) defines networks rather vaguely as "forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange" (p. 8). But their full discussion considers all the organizational, doctrinal, technological, and social dynamics that an effective social movement - and netwar actor - requires.
An early study that pointed in this direction, by sociologist Luther Gerlach and anthropologist Virginia Hine, held that U.S. social movements in the 1960s amounted to "segmented, polycentric, ideologically integrated networks" (SPINs). According to Gerlach (1987, p. 115, based on Gerlach and Hine, 1970),
"By segmentary I mean that it is cellular, composed of many different groups... . By polycentric I mean that it has many different leaders or centers of direction... . By networked I mean that the segments and the leaders are integrated into reticulated systems or networks through various structural, personal, and ideological ties. Networks are usually unbounded and expanding... . This acronym [SPIN] helps us picture this organization as a fluid, dynamic, expanding one, spinning out into mainstream society."
The SPIN concept is rarely noticed by scholars who work on social or organizational networks, but it remains highly relevant to understanding the theory and practice of netwar - in many respects, the archetypal netwar design corresponds to a SPIN. While Gerlach (e.g., 1999) has focused mainly on environmental and other social movements in the United States, the SPIN concept illuminates dynamics being developed in various terrorist, criminal, ethnonationalist, and fundamentalist networks around the world.
