As the title of her first book, The Cosmic Web , implies, interconnectedness serves as the dominant architecture of the twentieth century.
Networks imply a transfer of information, a communication between parts.
Perhaps, then, we can trace the ascendancy of a network culture to the 1850s, with the transformation of America by way of telegraphy, and the human body by way of neurology. In cognitive science, the brain appears not as a simple nodal framework, but as a massively parallel system that functions as a distributed network. And one need not turn to higher-order cognition to see the difference. But even with all this information, a very rich description of the network, we still don't understand how it produces the rhythmic output we see. Perhaps we might extend this altered understanding of complex networks to theories of meaning.