History of a concept. Humanity lives in a big spider’s web. By choosing to call their hyperlinked navigation system ‘World Wide Web’, CERN scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau provided an evocative metaphor for a society their technology was about to shape. Because the “global spider’s web” would, within the Internet, become the ultra-network of an era already woven by innumerable infrastructures defined by this notion. From transport to energy, from telecommunications to IT, everything is networked in our contemporary societies… Even human relations: in the wake of Facebook and LinkedIn, friendly and professional circles have also ended up becoming “networks”. “.
This omnipresence of the network paradoxically contributes to making the notion elusive, since the term refers as much to a concept as to an imagination and a technology. In a generic sense, the network is similar to “an unstable interconnecting structure composed of interacting elements” whose variability obeys a “regulatory standard”outlines the philosopher Pierre Musso in his recent Network Imagination (Manucius, 66 pages, 5 euros). But the best expression of the network remains an image, rather than a definition: that of lines forming knots at their intersections, the meshing of which signals the rich meanings buried by the profuse use that industrial society will make of them. Its Latin etymology links it to the net (retis), offering it a powerful symbolism – in ancient mythology, spinning is linked to time and destiny – charging the network with an intrinsic ambivalence.
“Where the fabric is made, the opposites are tied: the place and the link, the immobile and the movement, the point and the circle”, notes Pierre Musso. The network is therefore both what retains and lets pass, what encloses the solid and connects the flows. The word enters our language after having known several forms: in 1180, Marie de France speaks of “resel” to designate a small net; sixty years later, the poet Guillaume de Lorris uses “roisiau” in a figurative sense; around 1330, the Novel of Renart the counterfeit finally writes “network” in its current spelling. But its modern meaning will only come about through the fusion of two parallel evolutions of the notion. It will first be reconfigured by the development of crystallography (the study of crystals) and military engineering, which will contribute to giving it a spatial meaning.
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