In Darin Barney’s book The Network Society, he breaks the topic into five chapters: network society, network technology, network economy, network politics, and network identity.  Each chapter reads like a lit review of sorts, providing a useful, but rather dry overview of  the topic.  He relies quite heavily on Castells, so much so that it is difficult to determine precisely what Barney’s argument actually is.  In any case, upon reading this book, I was most drawn to the final chapter on Network Identity.  Here, among other things, he proposes that Castells’ notion of Networked Individualism is a useful paradigm for the larger topic.  He quotes Castells’ The Internet Galaxy:

The most important role of the Internet in structuring social relationships is its contribution to the new pattern of sociability based on individualism…it is not that the Internet creates a pattern of networked individualism, but the development of the Internet provides an appropriate material support for the diffusion of networked individualism as the dominant form of sociability.

So Barney concludes, along with Castells, that the Internet doesn’t cause this new phenomenological condition of networked individualism, but serves as its instrument.  It is, in Heidegger’s terminology "ready at hand".  In other words, a tool that assists in the "natural" order of the world.  But then, what has caused this networked individualism?  How can we explain the readiness to see the world as user-centered, as extending from a personal node outward towards a networked world?  I would say that the social condition of networking has long been around, but technology does more than simply mirror "the dominant form of sociability".  If identity is performative, so is its instrumental technology.  Networked individualism doesn’t exist outside of technology because that is how its recent manifestation is known to us.