[Vnbiz] Network Culture

[Romi]

The Rise of Network Culture

Conclusion to Networked Publics, forthcoming 2007.

Kazys Varnelis

Taken together, the essays in this book point to the development of a
new societal condition spurred by the maturing of the Internet and
mobile telephony. In this conclusion, I will reflect on that state,
which I will call "network culture," as a broadly historical
phenomenon. Defined by the very issues that these essays raise—the
simultaneous superimposition of real and virtual space, the new
participatory media, concerns about the virtues of mobilization versus
deliberation in the networked public sphere and emerging debates over
the nature of access—network culture can also reveal broader societal
structures just as modernism and postmodernism did in their day.

If subtle, this shift in society is real and radical. During the space
of a decade, the network has become the dominant cultural logic. Our
economy, public sphere, culture, even our subjectivity are mutating
rapidly and show little evidence of slowing down the pace of their
evolution. When we buy our first cell phone we are unaware of how
profoundly it will alter our lives. Soon, we find that shopping lists
are hardly necessary when it is possible to call home from the store.
Similarly, dinner plans with friends seem overly formal when they can
be made by phone at the last minute, on the way to a particular
neighborhood. When telepresence makes constant touch possible, moving
out-of-state no longer means saying goodbye to close friends and
family. One morning we note with interest that our favorite newspaper
has established a Web site, another day we decide to stop buying the
paper and just read the site, then we realize that we are spending as
much time reading blogs as we are reading the paper. Or perhaps, as
happened to me once, we visit a friend's web page only to learn that
he has passed away suddenly. Individually, such everyday narratives of
how technology reshapes our everyday lives are minor. Collectively,
they are deeply transformative.

Network culture is not merely an extension of the old "information
age."[1] On the contrary, it is markedly unlike the digital model of
computation that prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s. In Digital Culture,
his incisive historical survey of the first computational era and the
developments that led up to it, Charlie Gere describes the digital as
a socioeconomic phenomenon instead of merely as a technology. The
digital, he observes, is fundamentally a process of abstraction,
reducing complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing these
processes of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere
identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism. By removing
the physical aspect of commodities from their representations,
digitization enables capital to circulate much more freely and
rapidly. Thus, Gere suggests, the universal Turing machine|a
hypothetical computer first described by Alan Turing in 1936, capable
of being configured to do any task|is a model for not only the digital
computer but also for the universalizing ambitions of digital
culture.[2] But the digital culture that Gere describes is rapidly
being supplanted by network culture.

Today, networked connection replaces abstraction. Information is less
the product of discrete processing units than the outcome of the
networked relations between them, links between people, between
machines, and between machines and people. Contrasting the physical
sites in which the digital and the network operate illuminates the
difference between the two. The site for the former is the desktop
microcomputer, displaying information through a heavy CRT monitor,
connected to the network via dial-up modem or perhaps through a high
latency first generation broadband connection. In our own day, there
is no such dominant site. To be sure, the Wi-Fi enabled laptop is now
the most popular computing platform, but the mobile phone, Keitai, and
smart phone compete with and complement it. What unites these machines
is their mobility and interconnectivity, making them more ubiquitous
companions in our lives, key interfaces to global telecommunicational
networks. In a prosaic sense, the Turing machine is already a reality.
A supercomputer, smart phone, laptop, iPod, wireless router, xBox game
platform, Mars rover, video surveillance camera, television set-top
box, and automobile computer are essentially the same device,
running—or capable of running—operating systems derived from UNIX such
as Linux or VxWorks and becoming specific only in terms of scale and
their mechanisms for input and output, for sensing and acting upon the
world. Instead, the new technological grail for industry is a
universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video,
Internet transmissions, voice, text chat and any other conceivable
networking task.

Increasingly, the immaterial production of information and its
distribution through the network dominate the global economy. To be
sure, we certainly still make physical things and that making still
has consequences. Far from being free of pollution, Silicon Valley
contains more EPA superfund sites than any other county in the
nation.[3] Nevertheless, regardless of our continued dependency on the
physical, the production of information dominates economies today,
even at the cost of obscuring the global environmental consequences of
material production.

Although other ages have been networked, ours is the first modern age
in which the network is the dominant organizational paradigm,
supplanting centralized hierarchies.[4] The ensuing condition, as
Manuel Castells suggests in The Rise of the Network Society, is the
product of a series of changes: the change in capital in which
transnational corporations turn to networks for flexibility and global
management, production, and trade; the change in individual behavior,
in which networks have become a prime tool individuals seeking freedom
and communication with others who share their interests, desires, and
hopes; and the change in technology, in which people worldwide have
rapidly adopted digital technology and new forms of telecommunication
in everyday life.[5]

But the network goes even further, extending deeply into social and
cultural conditions. As network culture supercedes digital culture, it
also supercedes the culture of postmodernism outlined by Fredric
Jameson in his seminal essay "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism," first written in 1983 and later elaborated upon in a
book of the same title. Postmodernism, as Jameson explains, was not
merely a stylistic movement but rather a broad cultural condition
stemming from a fundamental change in the mode of production, the
phase of history that economist Ernest Mandel called "late
capitalism." Both Mandel and Jameson argued that in this era society
had been thoroughly colonized by capital, any remaining pre-capitalist
forms of life absorbed.[6]

Mandel situated late capitalism within a historical model of long wave
Kondratieff cycles. These economic cycles, comprised of twenty-five
years of growth followed by twenty-five years of stagnation provide a
compelling model of economic history following a certain rhythm: fifty
years of Industrial Revolution and handcrafted steam engines
culminating in the political crises of 1848, fifty years of machined
steam engines lasting until the 1890s, electric and internal
combustion engines underwriting the great modern moment that
culminated in World War II and the birth of electronics marking the
late capitalism of the postwar era.[7]

Jameson observed that under late capitalism, everything was
interchangeable, quantified and exchangeable for money or other items.
After the most distant reaches of the globe and most archaic work
practices were reshaped by investment and the market as well as the
thorough capitalization of art, culture, and everyday life, Jameson
observed a new condition of postmodernism. In his analysis, the
thorough capitalization of art, culture, and everyday life led to a
new condition in which any separation between interior and exterior,
even in the subject itself, disappeared and, with it, the end of any
place from which to critique or observe. Late capitalism, Jameson
concluded, would produce postmodernism, a cultural logic dominated by
the schizophrenic play of the depthless, empty sign.

Under late capitalism, Jameson suggested, even art lost its capacity
to be a form of resistance. Postmodernism, undid all meaning and any
existential ground outside of capital. Depth, and with it emotion,
vanished, to be replaced by surface effects and intensities. In this
condition, even alienation was no longer possible. The subject became
schizophrenic, lost in the hyperspace of late capital.

No longer a place of resistance, art—under postmodernism—was colonized
by capital. The result was a cross-contamination as investors began to
see art as something to capitalize while artists, fascinated by the
market, began to freely intermingle high and low. So too, with
authenticity bankrupt as a position and capital calling for the easy
reproducibility and marketing of art, artists began to play with
simulation and reproduction. Others, finding themselves unable to
reflect directly on the condition of late capital but still wanting to
comment upon it, turned to allegory, which foregrounded its own
fragmentary, incomplete state instead.

Under postmodernism, history lost its meaning and purpose, both in
popular culture and in academia. In the former, history was instead
recapitulated as nostalgia, thoroughly exchangeable and made popular
in the obsession with antiques as well as in retro films such as
Chinatown, American Graffiti, Grease, or Animal House. In academia, a
spatialized theory replaced historical means of explanation as a means
of analysis.

Modernism's concern with its place in history was inverted by
postmodernism, which, as Jameson points out, was marked by a waning of
historicity, a general historical amnesia. But if postmodernism undid
its ties to history to an even greater extent than modernism, it still
grounded itself in history, both in name—which referred to its
historical succession of the prior movement—and in its delight in
poaching from both the pre-modern past and the more historically
distant periods of modernism itself (e.g. the Art Nouveau, Russian
revolutionary art, Expressionism, Dada, and so on).

Today, network culture succeeds postmodernism. It does so in a more
subtle way. It does not figure itself as an "ism" that would lay claim
to the familiar territory of manifestos, symposia, definitive museum
exhibits and so on, but rather servers as a more emergent phenomenon.
That we should have moved away from postmodernism should be no
surprise. To insist that late capitalism is still the economic regime
of our day would be to suggest that it be the longest lasting of all
such cycles. Instead, I see a critical break taking place in 1989 with
the fall of the Soviet Union and the integration of China into the
world market instantiating the ("new") world order of globalization
while the commercialization of the Internet set the stage for massive
investment in the crucial new technology necessary for the new, fresh
cycle. The delirious dot.com boom and the more docile, seemingly more
sustainable upswing of "Web 2.0" become legible as the first and
second booms of a Kondratieff cycle on the upswing. It is this second
upswing, then, in which network culture can be observed as a distinct
phenomenon that concerns me in this essay.

The closest thing we have to a synthetic understanding of this era is
the political theory laid out in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
Empire. In their analysis, the old world order based on the
imperialist division of the world into spheres of influence has been
superceded by Empire, a diffuse power emanating not from any one
place, but rather from the network itself. This power, however, stems
not only from the economic force of capital, but also must be
constructed by juridical means. To ensure the mobility and flexibility
of capital across borders, Empire uses transnational governing bodies
such as the United Nations to call for a universal global order. In
doing so, however, Empire reinscribes existing hierarchies and, as the
wars in the Gulf show, has to resort to violence. Hardt and Negri
identify networked publics, which they call "the multitude" as a
counter-force. For them, the multitude is a swarm intelligence, able
to work within Empire to demand the rights of global workers. As we
have described throughout this book, this networking of individuals
worldwide gives them new links and new tools with which to challenge
the system, but as the chapter on politics suggests, whether or not
networked publics can come together to make decisions democratically
is still unclear.[8]

Empire is a political theory, but it lacks a broader cultural theory.
But although postmodernism anticipated many of the key innovations of
network culture, our time is distinctly different.[9] In the case of
art and architecture, Jameson suggests, a widespread reaction to the
elitism of the modern movement and the new closeness between capital
and culture led to the rise of aesthetic populism. Network culture
exacerbates this condition as well, dismissing the populist projection
of the audience's desires onto art for the production of art by the
audience and the blurring of boundaries between media and public. If
appropriation was a key aspect of postmodernism, network culture
almost absent-mindedly uses remix as its dominant form. A generation
after photographer Sherri Levine re-appropriated earlier photographs
by Walker Evans, dragging images from the Internet into PowerPoint is
an everyday occurrence and it is hard to remember how radical Levine's
work was in its redefinition of the Enlightenment notions of the
author and originality.[10] As Lev Manovich writes, "If a traditional
twentieth century model of cultural communication described movement
of information in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the
reception point is just a temporary station on information's
path."[11]

The nostalgia culture so endemic to postmodernism has been undone, our
experience of a world still in the throes of modernization long gone.
Unable to periodize, network culture disregards both modern and
pre-modern equally and with it too, the interest in allegory as
well.[12] Instead of nostalgia and allegory network culture delivers
remix and reality, shuffling together the diverse elements of
present-day culture, blithely conflating high and low—if such terms
can even be drawn anymore in the Long Tail of networked
micro-publics—while poaching its "as found" aesthetics from the world.
Network television is dominated by reality shows, film by
documentaries such as Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth and
Fahrenheit 911. On the Internet, popular sites such as eBaum's World
or YouTube broadcast videos that claim to be true, such as scenes of
people doing incredibly stupid or dangerous things, and video blogs.
When fiction is deployed on Internet video sites, it is either comic
parody or impersonation for viral marketing methods (e. g.
Lonelygirl15 or littleloca). If there is a dominant form of fiction
today, it is video games, which by 2004 generated more than
Hollywood's box-office receipts in revenues, but video games provide a
new sort of fiction, a virtual reality in which the player can shape
his or her own story through a process that is less original and more
a matter of a remixing a set of existing plotlines and elements. In
massively multiplayer online role playing games such as World of
Warcraft—which earns some $1 billion a year in subscription fees, a
vast sum compared to the $600 million that Hollywood's most successful
product, Titanic ever earned—the ability to play with vast numbers of
other individuals in immense landscapes thoroughly blurs the
boundaries of reality and fiction.[13]

To be clear, the tactics of remix and the rapt fascination with
reality aren't just found in GarageBand and YouTube mash-ups, they
form an emerging logic in the museum and the academy as well. Art
itself, long the bastion of expression, is now dominated by
straightforward photography while some of the most interesting
cultural work can be found in research endeavors that could easily
take place in Silicon Valley rather than in the gallery (Locative
Media), by (sometimes carefully faked) studies of the real (the Museum
of Jurassic Technology, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Andrea
Fraser, Christoph Buchel, etc.). Other works, such as Ólafur
Elíasson's ambient forms or Andrea Zittel's environments, clothing,
restaurants, and High Desert Test Sites suggest another strategy of
new realism in which art becomes a background to life. Similarly,
architecture has abandoned utopian projections, nostalgic laments, and
critical practice alike for a fascination with the world. Arguably the
world's foremost practitioner, Rem Koolhaas, produces book after book
matter-of-factly announcing his fascination with Shopping, the Pearl
River Delta, or Lagos, Nigeria.

What of the subject in networked culture? Under modernism, for the
most part, the subject is autonomous, or at least subscribes to a
fantasy of autonomy, even if experiencing pressures and deformations
from the simultaneity generated by that era's technologies of
communication and increasing encounters with the Other. In
postmodernism, these pressures couple with a final unmooring of the
self from any ground as well as the undoing of any coherent temporal
sequence to force the subject to schizophrenically fragment. With
network culture, these shards of the subject take flight, disappearing
into the network itself. This is a development of the condition that
Castells describes in The Rise of the Network Society when he
concludes that contemporary society is driven by a fundamental
division between the self and the net. To support his argument,
Castells turns to Alain Touraine: "in a post-industrial society, in
which cultural services have replaced material goods at the core of
its production, it is the defense of the subject, in its personality
and in its culture, against the logic of apparatuses and markets, that
replaces the idea of class struggle."[14] But as Deleuze presciently
described in his "Postscript on Societies of Control," today the self
is not so much constituted by any notion of identity but rather is
reduced to "dividuals."[15] Instead of whole individuals, we are
constituted in multiple micro-publics, inhabitants of simultaneously
overlapping telecocoons, sharing telepresence with intimates in whom
we are in near-constant touch, members of the 64 clustered
demographics units described by the Claritas corporation's PRIZM
system.

In network theory, a node's relationship to other networks is more
important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate
ourselves less as individuals and more as the interstices of multiple
networks composed of both humans and things. This is easily
demonstrated through some everyday examples. First, take the way the
youth of today affirm their identities. Instead of tagging buildings
with expressive names, teens create pages on social networking sites
such as MySpace and Facebook. On these pages they list their interests
as a set of hyperlinked keywords directing the reader to others with
similar interests. Frequently, page creators use algorithms to express
(and thereby create) their identities, for example through a Web page
that, in return for responses to a set of questions, suggests what
chick-flick character the respondent most corresponds to.[16] At the
most reductive, these algorithms take the form of simple
questionnaires to be filled out and posted wholesale on one's page.
Beyond making such links, posting comments about others and soliciting
such comments can become an obsessive activity. Affirming one's own
identity today means affirming the identity of others in a relentless
potlatch. Blogs operate similarly. If they appear to be the public
expression of an individual voice, private diaries exposed, in
practice most blogs consist of material poached from other blogs
coupled with pointers to others in one's network, e.g. trackbacks
(notifications that a blogger has posted comments about a blog post on
another blogger's blog) or blogrolls (the long lists of blogs that
frequently border blog pages). With social bookmarking services such
as del.icio.us or the social music platform last.fm, even the
commentary that accompanies blog posts can disappear and one's public
face turns into a pure collection of links. Engaging in telepresence
by sending SMS messages to one's friends or calling family on a cell
phone has the same effect: the networked subject is constituted by
networks both far and near, large and small. Art—so long a bastion of
identity and expression—changes in response to this condition. Rather
than producing work that somehow channels their innermost being,
artists, musicians, videographers and DJs act like switching machines,
remixing sources and putting them out to the Internet for yet more
remixing. Much like the contemporary media outlet, both the self and
the artist of today is an aggregator of information flows, a
collection of links to others.

Under network culture, then, the waning of the subject that began
under postmodernism proves ever greater. But whereas under
postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional
intensities, today it is found in the net. The Cartesian, "I think
therefore I am," dissolves in favor of an affirmation of existence
through the network itself, a phantom "individuality" that escapes
into the network much as meaning escapes into the Derridean network of
différance, words defined by other words, significance endlessly
deferred in a ceaseless play of language.[17] The division between the
self and the Net that Castells observed a decade ago is undone.

The networks that make up the contemporary self also include things.
In Bruno Latour's analysis, things are key actors in the network, not
merely objects that do our bidding. As things get smarter and smarter,
they are ever more likely to take up larger parts of our "selves." An
iPod is nothing less than a portable generator of affect with which we
paint our environment sonically, creating a soundtrack to life. A
Blackberry or telephone constantly receiving text messages encourages
its owner to submit to a constantly distracted state, a condition much
lamented by many.[18]

It is in this context that networked publics form. Of all the changes
that network culture brings us, this is likely to be the most
significant, a distinction that makes our moment altogether unlike any
other in three centuries. Beginning with the Enlightenment era, the
public came to be understood as a realm of politics, media and
culture, a site of display and debate open to every citizen while, in
turn, the private was broadly understood as a realm of freedom,
inwardness, and individuality. The public sphere was the space in
which bourgeois culture and politics played out, a theater for the
bourgeois citizen to play his role in shaping and legitimating
society. In its origin as a body that the king would appear to, the
public is by nature a responsive, reflexive, and thereby a responsible
and empowered body. Founded on the sovereign's need for approval
during the contentious later years of the aristocracy (an approval
that eventually was withdrawn), the public sphere served as a check on
the State, a key force in civil society. In that respect, the public
sphere served in the same capacity as media: at the same time that the
newspaper, the gallery, the novel, the modern theater, music, and so
on emerged, the public produced voices of criticism. And even if the
equation of public space and public sphere would be a tricky one, by
understanding media as a space (or conversely space as a medium), it
was nevertheless possible to draw a rough link between the two.

As many theorists have observed, the twentieth century was witness to
a long, sustained decline in the public sphere. In Habermas's
analysis, this came about due to the contamination of the public
sphere by private matters, most crucially its colonization by capital
and the consequent flight of the media from a space of discourse to a
commodified realm. During the twentieth century, media concentrated in
huge conglomerates that were more interested in the marketing of
consensus than in a theater of deliberation with little use for
genuinely divergent positions. Instead mass media sought consensus in
the middle ground, the political apparatus that Arthur Schlesinger
called "The Vital Center."[19] The model of the public became one-way,
the culture industry and the political machine expecting approval or,
at most, dissent within a carefully circumscribed set of choices.[20]
The public is an audience, by nature reactive, consumers of culture
and politics, at home not in the one-way, space in front of the TV
where response remains private or, at best, filtered through the
Nielsen rating system, but rather in a public venue such as the
theater, gallery, public square, café, salon, or periodical, a space
in which the private individuals comprising the audience can make
their voices heard in a dialogue. Public space was not left
unmolested. On the contrary, it was privatized, thoroughly colonized
by capital, less a place of display for the citizen and more a theater
of consumption under high security and total surveillance.[21] Under
postmodernism the condition seemed total, the public privatized,
reduced to opinion surveys and demographics. If there was hope for the
public sphere, it came in the form of identity politics, the
increasing voices of counterpublics composed of subaltern peoples (in
the developed world this would have been nonwhites, gays, feminists,
youth, and so on), existing in tension with the dominant public. But
if counterpublics could define and press their cases in their own
spheres, for the broader public they were marginalized and
marginalizing entities, defined by their position of exclusion.[22]
Towards the end of postmodernism in the early 1990s, even identity
politics became colonized, understood by marketers as another
lifestyle choice among many.[23] But if this was the last capitulation
of the old publics as an uncommodified realm for discourse, it was
also the birth of the networked publics.

Today, we inhabit multiple overlapping networks, some composed of
those very near and dear to us, others at varying degrees of physical
remove. The former of these networks are private and personal,
extensions of intimate space, incapable of forming into networked
publics. Instead, interest communities, forums, newsgroups, blogs, and
so on are the sites for individuals who are generally not on intimate
terms to encounter others in public. As we have described throughout
the book, these networked publics are not mere audiences of consumers.
On the contrary, today political commentary, propaganda, cultural
criticism are generated as much from below as from above. From the
deposal of Trent Lott to Rathergate, networked publics have drawn
attention to issues that traditional media outlets missed or were
reluctant to tackle.

The ideal model for networked publics, is as, Yochai Benkler suggests,
that of a "distributed architecture with multidirectional connections
among all nodes in the networked information environment." This vision
of the network, commonly held as a political ideal for networked
publics and sometimes misunderstood as the actual structure on which
the Internet is based is taken from RAND researcher Paul Baran's
famous model of the distributed network. Where centralized networks
are dominated by one node to which all others are connected and
decentralized networks are dominated by a few key nodes in a hub and
spoke network, under the distributed model, each node is equal to all
others.[24] Baran's diagram has been taken by taken up as a foundation
myth for the Internet, but not only was Baran's network never the
basis for the Internet's topology (moreover it was merely a
communication system, designed to ensure survival of top-down command
in the post-apocalyptic battlefield), it bears little resemblance to
the way networked publics are organized. Benkler concedes this,
pointing out that the distributed model is merely ideal and if we seek
a networked public sphere with "everyone a pamphleteer," we will be
disappointed. Networked publics are by no means purely democratic
spaces in which every voice can be heard. That would be cacophony.
But, Benkler continues, if we compare our current condition to the
mass media of the 1990s and earlier as a baseline instead, we can
observe real changes. Barriers for entry into the public sphere have
been greatly reduced. It is possible for an individual or group of
individuals to put out a message that could be heard globally with
relatively little expense.[25]

There are very real threats to the networked public sphere and
Benkler, like many other theorists, warns of them.[26] In terms of
infrastructure, the structure of the Internet is decentralized, not
distributed, which is why China can censor information it deems
inappropriate for public consumption or, for that matter, why the
United States's National Security Agency can monitor private Internet
traffic. So far, networked publics have found ways of routing around
such damage, providing ways of getting around China's censorship and
exposing the NSA's infamous room at the AT&T switching station in San
Francisco.[27]

But centralization that would emerge from within networked publics is
also a danger. Manuel de Landa points out that networks do not remain
stable, but rather go through different states as they evolve.[28]
Decentralized and distributed models give rise to centralized models
and vice versa as they grow. The emergence of networked publics just
as mass media seemed dominant is a case in point. In his work on blog
readership, Clay Shirky observes that diversity plus freedom of choice
results in a power-law distribution. Thus, a small number of
well-known bloggers attract the majority of the readers. If
tag-oriented search engines like Technorati or del.icio.us attempt to
steer readers into the Long Tail of readership, they also reinforce
the A-list by making evident the number of inbound links to any
particular site.[29] Moreover, even if, such sites, together with
Google, MyTube, Netflix, and iTunes and other search engines
successfully redirect networked publics to the Long Tail, another
disconcerting outcome is even harder to overcome, an A-list of big
aggregators such as, both for blogs and for all sites.

The Long Tail may prove to be a problem for another reason, what
Robert Putnam calls "cyberbalkanization."[30] Given the vast number of
possible clusters one can associate with, it becomes possible,
ultimately, to find a comfortable niche with people just like oneself,
among other individuals whose views merely reinforce one's own. If the
Internet is hardly responsible for this condition, it can exacerbate
it while giving us the illusion that we are connecting with others.
Through portals like news.google.com or my.yahoo.com and, even more
so, through RSS readers, Nicholas Negroponte's vision of a
personalized newspaper freshly constructed for us every morning,
tailored to our interests, is a reality. Even big media, under
pressures of post-Fordist flexible consumption, has itself fragmented
into a myriad of channels. But this desire for relevance is dangerous.
It is entirely possible to essentially fabricate the outside world,
reducing it to a projection of oneself. Rather than fostering
deliberation, blogs can simply reinforce opinions between like-minded
individuals. Conservatives talk to conservatives while liberals talk
to liberals. Lacking a common platform for deliberation, they
reinforce existing differences. Moreover, new divisions occur. Humans
are able to maintain only a finite number of relationships and as we
connect with others at a distance who are more like us, we are likely
to disconnect with others in our community who less like us. Filters
too can lead to grotesque misrepresentations of the world, as in the
case of happynews.com ("Real News. Compelling Stories. Always
Positive.").

Another salient aspect of network culture is the massive growth of
non-market production. Led by free, open source software such as the
Linux operating system (run by 25% of servers) and the Apache web
server (run by 68% of all web sites), non-market production
increasingly challenges the idea that production must inevitably be
based on capital. Crafted by thousands of programmers who band
together to create software that is freely distributed and easily
modifiable, non-market products are viable as competitors to highly
capitalized products by large corporations. Similarly, as our chapter
on the topic points out, cultural products are increasingly being made
by amateurs pursuing such production for networked audiences.
Sometimes producers intend such works to short-circuit traditional
culture markets, speeding their entry into the marketplace or getting
past barriers of entry. At other times, such as in the vast Wikipedia
project, however, producers take on projects to attain social status
or simply for the love of it. Often these producers believe in the
importance of the free circulation of knowledge outside of the market,
giving away the rights to free reproduction through licensing such as
Creative Commons and making their work freely accessible on the
Internet. Non-market production offers a model of non-alienated
production very different from capitalism, but it too, faces
challenges. Chief among these is new legislation by existing media
conglomerates aiming to extend the scope of their copyright and
prevent the creation of derivative work. Even if advocates of the free
circulation of cultural goods are successful in challenging big media,
it is still unclear whether the burgeoning fan culture can be truly
critical or, if it only reinscribes, to a degree that Guy Debord could
not have envisioned, the colonization of everyday life by capital,
with debates about resistance replaced by debates about how to remix
objects of consumption. Moreover, the dominance of big aggregators
such as YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, or Google suggests that if old big
media outlets are on the wane, new giants are on the ascendancy. For
now most of these are catholic in what content they include, but it is
entirely possible this may change. Furthermore, the possibility of
consumers not only consuming media but producing it for the (new)
media outlets suggests the possibility of new, hitherto unanticipated
forms of spectacular exploitation.

By no means are network culture and the network economy limited to the
developed world. If in this book, we have largely looked at the most
developed parts of the world, that is the consequence of our own
individual biases, upbringings, and fields of study. Network culture
envelops the entire world. On the other hand, if imperialist
capitalism used the developing world for its resources and hand labor
and late capitalism exported manufacturing, networked capital now also
exports intellectual labor and services.

But outsourcing is only a start. The mobile phone has revolutionized
communication in the developing world, often leapfrogging existing
structures. Due to the absence of any state apparatus that might
regulate its phone system, Somalia, for example, has the most
competitive communication market in Africa.[31] Nor is innovation in
the developing world likely to cease. The developed world has only
lukewarmly adopted mobile phones as platforms for connecting to the
Internet but for the majority of the world's inhabitants living in the
developed world, such devices are likely to be the first means by
which they will encounter the Internet.[32] History suggests that as
different societies pass through similar levels of economic
development at different times, unique cultural conditions emerge
(e.g. the first country to industrialize, Britain, developed the Arts
and Crafts while some fifty years later Germans responded with the
Deutscher Werkbund). The non-English speaking developing world's
reshaping of the Internet through the mobile phone will almost
certainly be utterly unlike what we have experienced here.


baran's networks



All too often, discussions of contemporary society are depicted in the
rosiest of terms. Sometimes this relentless optimism is a product of
fatigue with outmoded models of criticism, sometimes this is just
industry propaganda. But to be sure, network culture is not without
its flaws. Many of these are nothing new, mere extrapolations of
earlier conditions. As with modernism and postmodernism before it,
network culture is the superstructural effect of a new wave of capital
expansion around the globe and with it comes the usual rise in
military conflict. Today's new wars are network wars, with networked
soldiers and unmanned search-and-destroy flying drones fighting
networked guerillas in what Castells once dubbed the "black holes of
marginality," spaces left outside the dominant network but
increasingly organized by networks of their own. Closer to home, as
Deleuze points out, the subtler, modulated forms of control in network
culture mask themselves, above all in the idea that resistance is
outmoded, that "Californian ideology" that depicts the network as the
next site for a global Jefferson democracy, a libertarian space of
freedom and equality.[33] Under network culture, the idea that the
corporation has a soul, which Deleuze declared "the most terrifying
news in the world," and that the primary route by which individuals
can achieve self-realization is through work, are commonplaces, if
perhaps treated with a little more skepticism since the collapse of
the dot-com boom.[34] Moreover, as we explore the Long Tail, we are
tracked and traced relentlessly, and as we are monitored, Deleuze
concludes, we wind up internalizing that process, so as to better
monitor ourselves.

If we have largely looked toward the Utopian, positive moment in
network culture in our essays, we note new threats emerging as well.
Sensing that their day is done and that the means of production are in
our hands, many large media outlets are fighting to extend their power
through legislation, especially through radical modifications of the
copyright law to prolong its length and expand its scope. Moreover, if
the Long Tail promises the end of big media outlets, it also threatens
to install a new regime of big aggregators instead. For now, Google's
motto is "Don't be evil," but given the corporation's recent
compromise with China, allowing the government to censor its search
engine results, precisely what is evil and what is not may be murkier
than we might hope.[35] Another danger comes from telecoms, some of
which dearly miss the monopoly status once enjoyed by AT&T and hope to
find salvation by controlling the means of distribution, profiting
from privileging certain network streams over others. Meanwhile RFIDs
and the ever-growing trail of information that we leave behind
digitally suggest that in the near-future our every action will be
trackable not just by the government, but by anyone able to pay for
that information as well. All the while, whether network culture
plants the seeds of greater democratic participation and deliberation
or whether it will only be used to mobilize already like-minded
individuals remains an open question. The question we face at the dawn
of network culture is whether we, the inhabitants of our networked
publics, can reach across our micro-clustered worlds to coalesce into
a force capable of understanding the condition we in and produce
positive change, preserving what is good about network culture and
changing what is bad, or whether we are doomed only to dissipate into
the network.

[1]. Although there is much to recommend Carlota Perez, Technological
Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden
Ages (Northampton, MA: E. Elgar, 2002), she fails to make a
distinction between network society and the information age.
Similarly, Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the
Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004) identifies network culture
but doesn't draw a distinction between it and the information age.

[2]. Charlie Gere, Digital Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 11.

[3]. Jim Fisher, "Poison Valley. (Part 1) Is Worker's Health The Price
We Pay for High-Tech Progress? " and "Poison Valley (Part 2) What New
Cocktails of Toxic Chemicals are Brewing In The High Tech Industry's
'Clean Rooms' — And Will We Ever Know What Harm They Are Causing? "
salon.com (July 30, 2001), / and (July 31, 2001) .

[4]. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, second
edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), Manuel
Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, second edition (New York:
Blackwell Publishers, 2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) and Manuel Castells, The
Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[5]. Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy, 2.

[6]. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism." New Left Review, 146 (1984): 53-92, later republished in
expanded form as Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural
Logic of Capitalism. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

[7]. Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (Verso: London, 1978).

[8]. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000).

[9]. Similarly, modernism anticipated postmodernism. On that
phenomenon, see Jameson, "Postmodernism," 56 and also Hal Foster, The
Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996).

[10]. See Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant Garde and
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).

[11]. Lev Manovich, "Remix and Remixability," posted to nettime
mailing list, November 16, 2005,

[12]. On nostalgia in postmodernism, see Jameson, "Postmodernism," 67.
On allegory see Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory
of Postmodernism," parts 1 and 2 in Owens, Beyond Recognition:
Representation, Power, and Culture. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 52-87. On periodization and network culture
see my blog post "Network Culture and Periodization."

[13]. Ronald Grover and Cliff Edwards with Ian Rowley "Game Wars,"
Business Week (Feb 28, 2005), 60.

[14]. Castells, 22.

[15]. Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies ,"
Negotiations: 1972-1990, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990),
177-182.

[16]. pink63, Quiz: What Character From a Chick Flick Are You?

[17]. cf. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1978).

[18]. Patricia Pearson, "Are BlackBerry Users the New Smokers?"
USATODAY.com OPINION, (December 12, 2006),

The way things act upon humans is nothing new, for example, the armor
of the automobile allows normally meek spirits to engage road rage
while, in a much more historically distant example, the invention of
the book undid the need for highly developed memories, bringing to an
end the culture of orality. See Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy:
The Technologizing of the Word, New Accents (London: Routledge, 1991).

[19]. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of
Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company for The Riverside Press,
Cambridge, 1949), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. John Cummings (New York: Continuum, 1991; first
published in English translation, Herder and Herder, 1972, originally
published in German as Dialektik der Aufklärung, Amsterdam: Querido,
1944).

[20]. On marketing during the 1960s, see for example, Thomas Frank,
The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise
of Hip Consumerism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

[21]. The classic work here is Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).

[22]. On counterpublics see Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public
Sphere and Experience. Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and
Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Jamie Owen Daniel Peter Labanyi, and
Assenka Oksiloff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

[23]. See for example, Steven Kates, Twenty Million New Customers:
Understanding Gay Men's Consumer Behavior, (Binghamton, NY: Haworth
Press, 1998).

[24]. Paul Baran, On Distributed Communications, (technical report,
RAND Corporation, 1964), Vol. 1, . For a discussion of Baran's model
and the Internet see my "The Centripetal City: Telecommunications, the
Internet, and the Shaping of the Modern Urban Environment," Cabinet
Magazine 17, Spring 2004/2005 and Janet Abbate, Inventing the
Internet, Inside Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

[25]. Yochai Benkler,The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006).

[26]. For example, Richard Rogers, Information Politics on the Web
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).

[27]. See "Boing Boing's Guide to Defeating Censorship," and Ryan
Singel, "Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room ," Wired.com,

[28]. Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Swerve
Editions (New York: Zone Books, 1997).

[29]. Clay Shirky, "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality ," e-mail to
Networks, Economics, and Culture mailing list, February 8, 2003,

[30]. Robert Putnam, "The Other Pin Drops," Inc. (May 16, 2000), 79, .
Carl R. Sunstein, "Democracy and Filtering," Communications Of The
ACM, 47, no 12 (December 2004): 57-59.

[31]. "Somalia Calling," The Economist, December 2, 2005 January 6,
2006, 95.

[32]. Michael Minges. "Mobile Internet for Developing Countries."
Proceedings of Internet Society Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, 3-5
June 2001,

[33]. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, "The Californian Ideology."

[34]. Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies," 181.

[35]. Josh McHugh, "Google Vs. Evil," Wired 11.01 (January 2003), .
Submitted by kazys on 27 January, 2007 - 08:44.
categories:

    * network culture
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