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A network society is a society whose social structure is made of networks
powered by microelectronics-based information and communication
technologies. By social structure I understand the organizational arrangements
of humans in relationships of production, consumption, reproduction,
experience, and power expressed in meaningful communication coded by
culture. A network is a set of interconnected nodes. A node is the point where
the curve intersects itself. 
When nodes become redundant or useless, networks tend to reconfigurate themselves, deleting some nodes, and adding new ones. Nodes only exist and function as components of networks. The network is the unit, not the node. 
Networks work on a binary logic:
inclusion/exclusion. Within the network, distance between nodes tends to zero,
as networks follow the logic of small worlds´ properties: they are able to
connect to the entire network and communicated networks from any node in the
network, on the condition of sharing protocols of communication. Between
nodes in the network and outside the network, distance is infinite, since there is
no access unless the program of the network is changed. Thus, networks are
self-reconfigurable, complex structures of communication that ensure at the
same time the unity of the purpose and the flexibility of its execution, by the
capacity to adapt to the operating environment. 
 The ability of networks to introduce new actors and new contents in the process of social organization, with relative independence to the power centers, increased over time with technological change, and more precisely, with the evolution of communication technologies. This was particularly the case with the possibility of relying on a distributed energy network that characterized the advent of the industrial revolution: railways, ocean liners, and the telegraph constituted the first infrastructure for a quasi-global network with selfreconfigurating capacity. However, the industrial society (both in its capitalist and its statist versions) was predominantly structured around large scale, vertical production organizations and extremely hierarchical state apparatuses, in some instances evolving into totalitarian systems. This is to say that early, electrically based communication technologies, were not powerful enough to equip networks with autonomy in all its nodes, as this autonomy that would have required multidirectionality and a continuous flow of interactive information  processing.  
Networks became the most efficient organizational forms as a result of three
major features of networks that benefitted from the new technological
environment: flexibility, scalability, and survivability. Flexibility: they can
reconfigurate according to changing environments, keeping their goals while
changing their components. They go around blocking points of communication
channels to find new connections. Scalability: they can expand or shrink in size
with little disruption. Survivability: because they have no center, and can
operate in a wide range of configurations, they can resist attacks to their nodes
and codes, because the codes of the network are contained in multiple nodes,
that can reproduce the instructions and find new ways to perform. So, only the
material ability to destroy the connecting points can eliminate the network.