Lina Malfona, Communication Networks and Circulation's Infrastructures

In his book "Networking the World", renewed sociologist Armand Mattelard, investigated the communication systems on which the utopia of a connected therefore better world is based, pointing out that while this utopia is rooted in the use of egalitarian communication technologies, it also triggers a challenge for world hegemony. The Internet, which has a planetary spread and control centres that can be identified with multinational corporations such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, is proof of this. According to geographer Claude Raffestin, the net liberates as much as it imprisons. That is why it is ‘instrument’ par excellence of power. In the same vein, Tony Negri and Michael Hardt have pointed out in their celebrated book "Empire" how the power of the network consists in its ‘inclusive sovereignty’, which does not annex or destroy the other powers that it faces, but, on the contrary, opens up to them, including them in its meshes. But there are significant differences between the concepts of connection, communication and circulation of which the network is an expression. Connection is realized through communication and circulation. The latter is the evidence of good communication but it is also the spectacle of power, a sign of might. Real power lies indeed in communication rather than in circulation, and today it thickens in an invisible space, the space of information rather than that of the physical infrastructure of circulation.