And this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece titled, “The Crossroads Nation,” that illuminated something about the networked-world phenomenon that I hadn’t clearly seen before. The column’s ostensible topic is the capacity of America to be the most globally networked nation for the 21st century and thus Brooks advocates an economy built on continued digital integration.

Bland and unassailable as a premise (satisfying both more left-leaning infrastructure-building advocates and more right-leaning champions of individualistic success stories)the interesting thing about Brooks’ column is a subtle shift that occurs in the way it narrates human relationships.

“The Crossroads Nation” column is itself constructed by way of interesting shifts in the terminology it uses to label human groupings. Brooks imagines a young person finding her voice and her metier by migrating from a small town to a metropolis and connecting with other creative individuals and groups in the process. Describing this trajectory Brooks begins with traditional words like “country,””place,” “circle,” “group of people,” and switches decisively mid-column to “networks” and “hubs.”

He concludes with a paeon to America’s network capacity: “The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.”

Brooks does not reflect on the significance of this shift, or of the consequences of abandoning these traditional ideas about social and political collectivities. But reading the column made me realize that my diffidence toward on-line social networks has something to do with this transformation in our understanding of groups.  I realized that I do not see myself as part of networks, that such a self-identification is actually anathema. Rather, I think about my life as one that is embedded in a world of families, communities, neighborhoods, workplaces, institutions and social classes.

This stubbornly off-line relational imaginary may have a generational foundation – born in the mid twentieth century I am stuck in its world of relationships. But perhaps it entails some inchoate political resistance to re-imagining myself as a node of a network, a kind of collectivity without face-to-face enduring ties or without a clear connection to a particular historical formation.

What does it mean, after all, to be part of a network? I don’t think we have even begun to answer that question.