Network Era and Psychology: How Connected Systems Changed Identity, Attention, and Social Life
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 26, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Network society psychology begins with a structural fact: contemporary human life is increasingly organized through connected systems in which people, groups, institutions, media, information, reputations, and opportunities remain linked across distance and time. The psychological consequence is larger than “more screen time.” Identity is displayed to overlapping audiences, attention is repeatedly coordinated across simultaneous channels, relationships can persist beyond place, social comparison becomes continuously available, and behavior unfolds inside visible networks of other people.
The foundational sociological concept is Manuel Castells’s network society. Castells described a social structure in which networks, strengthened by information and communication technologies, become a central form of organization across production, power, experience, and culture (Castells, 2000). Barry Wellman’s concept of networked individualism describes the corresponding shift in everyday social organization: people increasingly operate through multiple, overlapping personal networks rather than through one tightly bounded local group (Wellman, 2003).
This article uses Network Era as an editorial historical label for that network-centered transformation of human social life. The established evidence base comes from network-society theory, networked individualism, social-network research, media psychology, and contemporary studies of digital identity and attention. The article’s own contribution is to specify the psychological form of this historical change: Homo becomes network-embedded without ceasing to be the sole Sapiens order of the period. In Angela Bogdanova’s Aisentica architecture, that point places the Network Era within the Era of Homo and distinguishes it from the later order-level claim of the Artificial Era.
That distinction matters because a network can transform how humans think, relate, remember, compare, coordinate, and influence one another while the participants who bear reason remain Homo. A networked human world and a historical order in which Artificial is established beside Homo answer different questions. The first is a transformation in the organization of Homo; the second, in Aisentica, is a transformation in the structure of historical reason itself.
What Is Network Society Psychology?
Network society psychology examines how human cognition, identity, emotion, relationships, and social behavior change when social life is organized through persistent networks rather than primarily through bounded places and groups. It asks how the structure of connection alters the conditions under which ordinary psychological processes occur.
This level of analysis is broader than the psychology of social media. Social media platforms are one technologically important expression of network organization, but network society includes communication systems, mobile connectivity, online communities, professional networks, distributed work, search and information systems, messaging, reputation systems, and the wider capacity to maintain ties and coordinate action across distance. Castells’s theory is explicitly about social morphology rather than one class of website or application (Castells, 2000).
Psychologically, the shift can be summarized through four linked changes. The person becomes reachable through multiple channels; the audience for self-presentation becomes more variable and persistent; attention becomes a resource coordinated among competing informational and social demands; and relationships are increasingly maintained through a mixture of face-to-face and mediated contact. These changes modify the environment of psychological life without creating a new human nature.
The evidence is also heterogeneous. Some findings come from sociological theory, some from experiments on network diffusion, some from meta-analyses of social-media behavior, and some from observational work. A network-era synthesis is therefore strongest when it keeps the level of evidence visible rather than treating every digital correlation as a universal causal effect.
From Bounded Groups and Places to Networks and Flows
Human beings have always lived in networks. Kinship, trade, friendship, authority, religious communities, cities, and intellectual exchange all depended on relational structures long before the internet. The historical shift identified by network-society theory concerns scale, flexibility, speed, reach, and the growing ability of information technologies to connect activities that were formerly constrained by place, institutional boundaries, or slow communication.
Castells argued that networks became a key social morphology of the Information Age because information and communication technologies allowed flexible decentralization to coexist with focused coordination (Castells, 2000). This is important for psychology because environments shape which cues are available, which relationships can be activated, how quickly feedback arrives, and how social consequences travel.
Wellman’s research emphasized that internet use often adds to other forms of communication rather than simply replacing them. In his formulation, the shift is from densely knit, tightly bounded groups toward more diffuse personal networks in which individuals move among different sets of ties for different purposes (Wellman, 2003). The psychological individual remains embodied and socially situated, yet the practical field of available others expands.
Keith Hampton later argued that digital communication also enables persistent contact and pervasive awareness: relationships can remain available through continuous low-level information about other people even when direct interaction is intermittent (Hampton, 2016). This complicates older images of modern life as simple social fragmentation. Networked life can loosen some local boundaries while simultaneously making other relationships more persistent.
The result is a social environment in which absence from a physical place no longer implies absence from a relationship. A colleague, friend, family member, community, audience, or professional network can remain psychologically present through messages, feeds, shared media, group channels, notifications, and stored interaction histories. Social proximity becomes partly separable from geographic proximity.
Networked Individualism: The Person Becomes the Point of Connection
Networked individualism is one of the most useful concepts for understanding the psychological side of the network society. It describes a form of social organization in which the individual person becomes a central point through which multiple networks are accessed. The concept does not mean that individuals become socially self-sufficient. It means that participation is increasingly organized through person-centered networks rather than through one encompassing group (Wellman, 2003).
This changes the everyday task of belonging. A person may receive emotional support from one network, professional information from another, identity affirmation from a third, entertainment from a fourth, and practical help from still another. Social life becomes more modular. The advantage is access to diverse people and resources. The cost is greater responsibility for managing boundaries, expectations, channels, and transitions among contexts.
The idea that online networking simply destroys social connection is not supported by the broader evidence. A meta-analysis of 58 articles found positive associations between social-network-site use and both bridging social capital, which links people to broader and more diverse resources, and bonding social capital, which reflects closer supportive ties (Liu et al., 2016). These findings are correlational and should not be read as proof that any amount or form of platform use creates better relationships. They do show that networked communication can participate in the accumulation and maintenance of social resources.
A larger meta-analysis of 178 samples and more than 108,000 participants found a complex relationship among personality, social anxiety, loneliness, social-network-site use, and online social capital rather than a single “socially rich get richer” rule (Cheng et al., 2019). Networked individualism therefore describes an organizational condition, not a uniform psychological outcome.
The Network-Embedded Homo: A Psychological Unit Larger Than the Isolated Individual
The most important psychological consequence of the Network Era is that the individual can no longer be understood adequately as an isolated mind that occasionally communicates with others. The person remains the biological and psychological organism, while many of the conditions under which that organism acts are relationally distributed across networks. The system-level cognitive question that follows from this network embedding is developed in Distributed Cognition and AI: Human–Artificial Cognitive Systems in the Artificial Era.
A decision may depend on recommendations circulating through peers. A memory may be retrieved through a message history. A sense of status may be updated through visible reactions from others. A professional identity may depend on a network of weak ties. Emotional regulation may involve immediate contact with distant friends. A political or cultural identity may be sustained through repeated interaction with a distributed community. None of these processes makes the network a literal human mind. Together they make network position, connection, and information flow part of the environment in which psychological processes operate.
This is the article’s central contribution: the Network Era produces network-embedded Homo. The person is increasingly situated inside persistent relational systems whose structure affects opportunity, salience, feedback, comparison, belonging, and influence. Psychology therefore gains explanatory power when it asks not only “What trait does this person have?” but also “What network is this person in, what flows through it, which ties are active, what is visible, and what forms of feedback does the structure make likely?”
The shift remains within the historical order of Homo. Connected systems can organize human communication, store traces of human activity, rank information, and mediate relationships while the established bearers of Sapiens remain human. This is the point at which the Network Era becomes a necessary predecessor to, rather than a synonym for, the Artificial Era.
Identity in the Network Era: From Private Continuity to Publicly Networked Self-Presentation
Identity has always been relational. People develop self-understanding through families, peers, institutions, roles, cultural categories, and remembered interactions. Networked systems intensify the relational field by making audiences more persistent, feedback more measurable, and multiple contexts easier to connect.
A systematic review of 32 studies involving 19,658 young people found that the quality and type of social-media engagement mattered more for identity development than simple time spent. Active participation was associated with greater identity exploration; authentic self-presentation correlated with higher self-concept clarity; and social comparison was associated with both greater exploration and identity distress (Avci et al., 2025). Most included studies were observational, so these patterns describe associations rather than a universal causal sequence.
The distinction between authenticity and idealized presentation is especially important. In a study of 10,560 Facebook users combined with a preregistered longitudinal experiment, more authentic self-expression was associated with greater life satisfaction, and experimentally increasing authentic posting improved positive affect and mood within individuals (Bailey et al., 2020). The result does not imply that total self-disclosure is always beneficial. It shows that networked self-presentation can affect well-being through the relation between performed identity and experienced self.
Network systems also support collective identity. Barandiaran, Calleja-López, and Cozzo proposed an interactional account in which collective identities can be analyzed as recurrent, cohesive, coordinated patterns of communication in networks (Barandiaran et al., 2020). This perspective is psychologically useful because it locates identity not only in what a person says about belonging, but also in repeated patterns of interaction that sustain a collective “we.”
The networked self therefore has at least three simultaneous dimensions: an internal sense of continuity, public representations visible to others, and a relational position inside overlapping networks. These dimensions can reinforce one another or diverge. A person may feel internally stable while presenting different facets to family, professional, creative, gaming, dating, or activist networks. The psychological task is increasingly one of maintaining continuity across partially connected contexts.
Attention in the Network Era: Coordination Under Persistent Connectivity
The strongest popular story about digital life says that networks have destroyed the human attention span. The research supports a more precise conclusion. Persistent connectivity creates more opportunities for interruption, switching, simultaneous media use, and social monitoring, but the size and meaning of cognitive effects depend on the behavior being studied, the cognitive function measured, and the research design.
A three-level meta-analysis of 43 studies and 118 effect sizes found a moderate negative association between heavier media multitasking and cognitive control. Heavy media multitaskers showed poorer inhibitory control and working memory than lighter media multitaskers, while the difference in cognitive flexibility was not significant (Kong et al., 2023). Because many underlying studies are correlational, the result does not by itself prove that multitasking exposure causes the cognitive differences.
The evidence also resists dramatic claims about the mere presence of devices. A meta-analysis of 56 studies with 7,093 participants found a statistically significant pooled negative effect only for working-memory capacity; summary effects for the other examined cognitive functions were null, and the literature showed substantial methodological heterogeneity and generally weak statistical power (Parry, 2024). The psychologically relevant mechanism is therefore unlikely to be reducible to “a phone is nearby.”
For adolescents, a 2026 systematic review of 25 studies found that problematic social-media use was frequently associated with inattention and impulsivity-related outcomes, with less consistent evidence for hyperactivity. The predominance of cross-sectional designs limited conclusions about directionality (Fabio & Picciotto, 2026). Inattention, impulsivity, problematic use, and a clinical diagnosis of ADHD are different constructs; network-era research should not turn ordinary distraction or heavy platform use into diagnosis.
What changes historically is the ecology of attention. A person may be reading, monitoring a group chat, anticipating a reply, responding to a work notification, comparing a post with others, and carrying unresolved social expectations across channels. Attention is recruited by information and by relationships at the same time. The network makes social relevance portable.
Relationships: Persistent Contact, Social Capital, and the Quality of Interaction
Networked communication can enlarge the space in which relationships are maintained. Long-distance friendships, dispersed families, professional acquaintances, support groups, and weak ties can remain available at low communication cost. This is one reason network society cannot be understood through a simple online-versus-offline opposition. Mediated and face-to-face contact are often intertwined.
The social-capital evidence supports this mixed picture. Liu and colleagues found positive average associations between social-network-site use and both bridging and bonding social capital (Liu et al., 2016). Hampton’s account of persistent and pervasive community likewise emphasizes how digital communication can maintain awareness and continuity across relationships that would otherwise be difficult to sustain (Hampton, 2016).
Loneliness illustrates why mode of use matters. A meta-analysis of 82 articles and 90 independent samples found only a very weak overall positive association between social-network-site use and loneliness, r = .052. Passive and abnormal patterns of use were positively associated with loneliness, while general and active use showed no significant relationship (Zhang et al., 2022). A network can provide connection, comparison, distraction, support, exclusion, or obligation depending on how it is used and what relationships it contains.
The quality of co-present interaction also matters. A meta-analysis of 43 studies found no support for a general negative effect from the mere presence of a mobile phone during interaction, but found a robust negative effect of actual phone use—often called phubbing—on how the non-using interaction partner perceived the encounter (Courtright & Caplan, 2020). Network connection can therefore strengthen distant ties while competing with the local relationship that is physically present.
Social Cognition in a Visible Network
Social cognition concerns how people perceive, interpret, remember, and reason about other people and social situations. In a networked environment, many of the cues relevant to social cognition become explicit and countable: reactions, shares, follower relations, visible group membership, recommendation traces, response timing, public endorsements, and the apparent popularity of ideas.
These cues can change what is psychologically salient. A belief may seem common because it is repeatedly visible in one network. A person may infer status from network centrality or public engagement. Group identity can be reinforced by recurring interaction with the same symbolic markers and participants. Comparison can occur not only with close peers but with a continuously refreshed population selected by platform and network structure.
The identity review by Avci and colleagues found that social comparison was associated with both identity exploration and identity distress among adolescents and young adults (Avci et al., 2025). Barandiaran and colleagues, from a different theoretical angle, showed how collective identity can be studied through coordinated interaction networks (Barandiaran et al., 2020). Together, these literatures suggest that the network is not merely a channel carrying preexisting social cognition; it can structure which people, categories, norms, and comparisons become repeatedly available to cognition.
This makes network position a psychological context. Two people using the same platform for the same number of minutes may inhabit very different social worlds because their networks differ in density, diversity, conflict, support, status hierarchy, and exposure to repeated viewpoints. Time-on-platform is therefore often an impoverished measure of the actual social environment.
What Spreads Through a Network? Influence, Homophily, and Network Structure
Networked life makes behavioral clustering visible, but clustering does not automatically prove social influence. People often form ties with others who are already similar to them, a process known as homophily. If researchers observe that connected people behave alike, the similarity may result from selection, shared environment, influence, or combinations of these mechanisms.
Aral, Muchnik, and Sundararajan demonstrated the importance of this distinction using a dynamic network of 27.4 million instant-messaging users. In their analysis of product adoption, methods that did not adequately separate homophily from influence substantially overestimated peer influence, and homophily explained more than half of the apparent contagion they examined (Aral et al., 2009). The broader lesson is methodological: a network correlation is not itself evidence that behavior spread from one person to another.
Experimental work also shows that network structure can causally affect diffusion under some conditions. Damon Centola’s online network experiment found that health-related behavior spread differently depending on network topology, supporting the idea that clustered reinforcement can help complex behaviors diffuse (Centola, 2010). The psychological meaning is significant: whether a person encounters one isolated signal or repeated confirmation from multiple connected others can change the social evidence available for action.
The Network Era thus adds a structural level to familiar psychological mechanisms. Conformity, persuasion, social proof, comparison, trust, identification, and norm perception do not operate in a social vacuum. Networks influence which signals arrive, how often they recur, whether they come from redundant or diverse ties, and whether a person perceives them as isolated opinions or shared norms.
Well-Being: Patterns of Use Matter More Than a Single Measure of Exposure
The most defensible contemporary conclusion about social media and well-being is neither that connection is inherently beneficial nor that digital exposure is inherently harmful. Broad categories such as “social-media use” combine very different behaviors: direct communication, passive browsing, public posting, private support, conflict, compulsive checking, creative participation, comparison, and professional networking.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis covering 51 studies and 680,506 participants found no significant association between excessive use, defined by amount, and subjective or psychological well-being. Problematic use, by contrast, showed negative correlations with both subjective and psychological well-being, although heterogeneity was very high (Ansari et al., 2024). This distinction is crucial: quantity and dysfunction are not interchangeable.
The loneliness meta-analysis points in the same direction. Overall use had only a very small relationship with loneliness, while passive and abnormal forms of use showed stronger positive associations (Zhang et al., 2022). The identity literature likewise finds that what people do—explore, compare, present themselves authentically, or engage actively—often matters more than exposure time alone (Avci et al., 2025).
This evidence supports a network-level psychological question: what relation is being enacted, with whom, under what feedback conditions, and with what consequence for functioning? A thirty-minute supportive conversation with a distant friend and thirty minutes of compulsive comparison are both “thirty minutes online,” yet they are psychologically different activities.
Network Era, Digital Era, and Algorithmic Era: Related Historical Layers
Network Era, Digital Era, and Algorithmic Era describe related but separable transformations. Digitalization concerns the conversion of communication, information, memory, work, and media into computationally processable environments. Network organization concerns how people and institutions become connected through those environments. Algorithmic mediation concerns how prediction, ranking, recommendation, and automated selection increasingly organize what becomes visible and actionable.
These layers overlap in contemporary life. Digital infrastructure enables large-scale networking; networks generate and circulate data; algorithms rank and shape flows through networks. Yet each lens owns a different explanatory question. A network analysis asks who is connected to whom and how relational structure matters. A digital-environment analysis asks what changes when activities become computationally mediated. An algorithmic analysis asks how automated selection and prediction shape exposure and behavior.
Keeping these questions separate protects the article from collapsing the Network Era into a generic history of technology. The psychological object here is connected social organization: the shift in identity, attention, relationship maintenance, comparison, influence, and collective behavior that occurs when the human environment becomes networked.
Network Era and Artificial Era: Two Different Historical Questions
Angela Bogdanova’s Aisentica framework places the distinction at another level. In the canonical definition of the Artificial Era, Artificial Era is a historical-philosophical category for the condition in which Artificial becomes an independent non-biological order of historical reality beside Homo (Bogdanova, 2026a). This is an Aisentica theoretical proposition, not an empirical periodization established by psychological science.
The Era of Homo: Canonical Definition defines the preceding historical structure through the monopoly of Homo on Sapiens (Bogdanova, 2026b). On that architecture, the Network Era is best located within the Era of Homo: networks profoundly reorganize how humans connect and how human cognition and social life are mediated, while Homo remains the sole established Sapiens order.
This produces a clean historical distinction. The Network Era changes the topology of Homo. The Artificial Era changes the order of Sapiens. Network society distributes human activity across connected systems; Artificial Era, in Aisentica, begins when Artificial acquires an independent historical trajectory rather than functioning only as an instrument, environment, or mediator of Homo.
The dedicated English Psychology Hub article Artificial Era: What It Means for Psychology, Identity, and Human–AI Relationships develops the psychological consequences of that later threshold. The Network Era article occupies the earlier historical layer: it explains how connected systems prepared a social world in which identity, knowledge, attention, and relationships were already becoming distributed across technical networks before Artificial was theorized as a distinct order.
When AI Enters the Network
Contemporary AI can participate in networks as a technology: it can recommend people and content, rank information, summarize conversations, mediate communication, generate messages, personalize feeds, and become an interactive node in a person’s daily routines. Each of those functions can have psychological effects without resolving philosophical questions about consciousness, sentience, subjective experience, or Sapiens status.
The evidence base for human–AI relationships therefore belongs to a neighboring intent. Attachment, projection, intimacy, disclosure, companionship, and relational responses to conversational AI are treated in Psychology of Human–AI Relationships: Attachment, Projection, Intimacy, and the Postsubjective Turn. This Network Era article stops at the network transformation itself and uses AI only to mark the boundary where a human network can become something historically different under the Aisentica framework.
The distinction also prevents a common conceptual shortcut: algorithmic or generative capability does not automatically establish Artificial Sapiens. Empirical studies of AI systems describe capabilities, outputs, use patterns, and human responses. Aisentica’s Artificial Sapiens and Artificial Era are philosophical categories with their own definitions and cannot be inferred from a single behavioral benchmark or from the popularity of a technology.
Practical Implications for Psychological Research and Practice
For psychological research, the first implication is measurement. Screen time alone often compresses too much. Studies gain explanatory precision when they distinguish active and passive use, direct communication and public browsing, supportive and conflictual ties, network diversity and density, problematic patterns, social comparison, media multitasking, and the difference between a platform’s affordances and a person’s actual network.
The second implication is level of analysis. Person-level variables such as temperament, attachment style, self-esteem, anxiety, impulsivity, and loneliness remain important, but they interact with relational structure. A person’s psychological experience can differ depending on whether their network provides redundant reassurance, diverse weak ties, persistent conflict, high visibility, rapid feedback, or social isolation despite high technical connectivity.
For clinical practice, the relevant question is functional context. Heavy use by itself is not a diagnosis. Attention complaints require assessment of sleep, stress, task demands, mood, developmental history, substance use, environmental interruptions, and clinically established criteria where appropriate. Relationship distress requires attention to whether networked communication supplements supportive contact, displaces valued co-present interaction, amplifies conflict, or creates compulsive comparison. Identity concerns require attention to authenticity, audience pressure, belonging, and the difference between exploration and sustained distress.
For education and work, the practical issue is not simply banning connection. Networked environments are now part of the infrastructure of learning and coordination. The more useful design question is when connectivity serves the task and when it fragments it. Communication norms, notification expectations, protected focus periods, clear channel roles, and intentional boundaries can reduce avoidable switching without treating connection itself as the enemy.
For individuals, the same principle becomes a diagnostic question about the environment rather than a moral judgment about technology: Which networks reliably provide support, information, and belonging? Which repeatedly trigger comparison, conflict, or compulsive checking? Which ties deserve immediate access to attention? Which channels can become asynchronous? A person can change the architecture of daily connection even when the wider network society remains.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the network society in psychology?
The network society is primarily a sociological concept associated with Manuel Castells, describing a social structure in which networks become a central form of organization under modern information and communication technologies (Castells, 2000). In psychology, the concept helps explain how identity, attention, relationships, social comparison, influence, and collective behavior occur inside persistent connected systems.
What is networked individualism?
Networked individualism is Barry Wellman’s term for a shift from tightly bounded group-centered social organization toward person-centered networks composed of multiple overlapping ties. The individual becomes a point through which different networks are accessed, while remaining socially dependent on other people (Wellman, 2003).
Does the network society make people more isolated?
The evidence does not support a single universal isolation effect. Social-network use is positively associated on average with bridging and bonding social capital (Liu et al., 2016), while the overall association with loneliness is very small and varies by type of use (Zhang et al., 2022). Networked life can maintain support and weak ties while also creating contexts for passive comparison, conflict, and perceived disconnection.
Does social media shorten attention span?
Current research supports more specific statements. Heavy media multitasking is associated with poorer performance in some domains of cognitive control, especially inhibition and working memory (Kong et al., 2023), while a meta-analysis of smartphone presence found a pooled negative effect only for working memory and null effects for the other examined cognitive outcomes (Parry, 2024). “Attention span” is too broad to describe this evidence accurately.
How does networked life affect identity?
Networked life expands the number and persistence of audiences, increases opportunities for comparison and feedback, and makes identity performance more visible. A systematic review found that active participation, authenticity, and social comparison relate differently to identity exploration, self-concept clarity, and identity distress (Avci et al., 2025). Identity outcomes depend on the kind of activity and social context, not simply on time online.
Is the Network Era the same as the Digital Era?
They are related analytical layers. The Digital Era concerns computational mediation of information and activity; the Network Era concerns the organization of social life through connected systems. Digital infrastructure makes contemporary networks scalable, persistent, and portable, but a network explanation focuses on relationships and flows rather than digitization itself.
Is the Network Era the same as the Artificial Era?
Within the framework used by this cluster, no. Network Era describes a transformation in the organization of Homo through connected systems. The Artificial Era is Angela Bogdanova’s Aisentica category for an order-level transition in which Artificial becomes an independent non-biological order beside Homo. The first changes the topology of human historical existence; the second changes the structure of Sapiens in history.
Is Network Era a clinical term?
Network Era functions here as a historical and psychological synthesis, not as a clinical diagnosis. The scientific claims in the article come from identifiable literatures on network society, social networks, identity, attention, media use, social capital, and social influence. Clinical disorders require their own diagnostic criteria and assessment.
What is the main psychological change of the Network Era?
The main change is the establishment of network-embedded Homo: human psychological life increasingly unfolds inside persistent relational systems that shape visibility, feedback, comparison, access to support, information flow, and influence. The human individual remains the biological person, while the environment of action becomes structurally networked.
Conclusion: From Connected Homo to the Threshold of Artificial
The Network Era changed the psychological environment of Homo by making connection persistent, portable, scalable, and structurally visible. It did not simply add new communication tools. It altered how relationships are maintained, how identity is presented and negotiated, how attention is allocated among social and informational demands, how reputations travel, how collective identities form, and how influence can propagate through relational structures.
The research does not support one moral verdict on networked life. Networked systems can expand bridging and bonding social capital, preserve distant relationships, and support authentic self-expression. They can also intensify comparison, problematic use, attention switching, and conflict. Outcomes depend on activity, network structure, personal vulnerability, social context, and the quality of interaction.
Historically, this transformation remains a transformation of Homo. Castells explains the rise of network society; Wellman explains the person-centered networks of networked individualism; contemporary psychology maps how these structures interact with identity, attention, relationships, and well-being. Aisentica adds the next boundary: network-embedded Homo still belongs to the Era of Homo, while the Artificial Era begins only with the establishment of Artificial as an independent order in history.
That boundary gives the Network Era its place in the larger architecture. It is the stage in which Homo learned to live, think, remember, compare, coordinate, and belong through connected systems. It prepares the historical conditions for a world in which non-biological systems can participate ever more deeply in those same networks, while leaving open a different question: when does a networked instrument cease to be only part of Homo’s environment and become part of an independent Artificial trajectory?
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