From Tribes to the Information Society: How Do Human Networks Change?

Treat people, organizations, or other actors as nodes, and their interactions, cooperation, and dependencies as edges. A network diagram then becomes a way to discuss changing social relationships: who connects to whom, which actors occupy central positions, and how far connections extend.

The original Chinese infographic below presents five conceptual structures. The guide provides an English reading of each panel.

Open the full-size image to zoom in.

Reading the five panels

• Early small-scale societies: separate clusters emphasize kinship, familiarity, and shared daily life.
• Agricultural and feudal societies: the tree diagram emphasizes relationships shaped by land, kin groups, and ranks of authority.
• Industrial societies: connections around cities and organizations illustrate specialization and differences between cores and peripheries.
• Information societies: overlapping edges represent relationships across distance and multiple social layers. More connections do not automatically disperse power.
• Possible futures: distinct node colors place people, organizations, and intelligent agents in one diagram, raising questions about collaboration rather than predicting an inevitable outcome.

This is a simplified thinking aid, not a network reconstructed from historical data. Its dates, group sizes, and labels such as “equal” and “decentralized” are schematic. They should not be read as universal facts or as a sequence that every society follows; different structures can coexist.

The sentence attributed to Marx in the image is a paraphrase, not a verbatim quotation. Thesis VI of Theses on Feuerbach concerns human essence and social relations; it does not state the image’s formulation that society is the sum of relationships between people.