Society: A lost cause(?)

"To call this population of strangers in the midst of which we live "society" is such a usurpation that even sociologists wonder if they should abandon a con­cept that was, for a century, their bread and butter.

Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cybernetic solitudes, the inter-meshing of weak interactions under names like "colleague," "contact," "buddy," "acquaintance," or "date." Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant recomposition of identity."

-- shared via a professor I revere.