Network Culture

Concept and Book.

Network Culture as a Concept

Described by Kazys Varnelis in the essay The Rise of Network Culture, which forms the concluding chapter of the book Networked Politics]

Excerpt:

"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."

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. 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.

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 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." 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. 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.

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." (http://varnelis.net/the_rise_of_network_culture)

The Network Culture book

Book: Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for theInformation Age. Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2004.

Review

By Steve Wright at Metamute at http://www.metamute.org/en/Network-Culture

" an important work that deserves to be read and discussed widely. The book is rich in its scope: in particular, in the fruitful confrontations and collisions it sets up between internet culture and contemporary movements against global capital. At the same time, it is not always an easy read, given the complexity of some of the issues addressed and arguments advanced, and the familiarity presumed with a wide range of debates. Fortunately Terranova writes well and takes her readers seriously, so that the insights provided repay persistence with some of the book’s more difficult passages.

Network Culture offers a series of distinctive and original arguments, while finding inspiration in a range of different critical perspectives. In a fundamental way, however, Network Culture is very much an engagement with many of the key themes dear to the post-operaista (post-workerist) theories that emerged from the wreckage of the Italian autonomist movement of the 1970s. These theories have become familiar to English-language readers, above all through the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Given the fascination with such ideas today in activist milieux, Network Culture is likely to find readers in circles well beyond the academy.

The first chapter explores a number of implications thrown up by Claude Shannon’s ‘classic’ conceptualisation of information in terms of the signal-noise relationship within a conduit linking sender and receiver. At this theory’s heart is a reading of the transmission of information as ‘the communication and exclusion of probable alternatives’ (p.20). What is so enjoyable about Terranova’s account here are the implications for political work that she draws out from her critical reading of this conduit metaphor of information. As Network Culture illustrates, the notion of communication that stems from this metaphor attempts to narrow the field to ‘alternatives formulated on the basis of known probabilities within the constraints set up by the interplay of code and channel or medium’ (p.25). If this is so, then what Terranova calls ‘a cultural politics of information’ must entail not merely a battle over the meaning of what currently informs us within late capitalism: It involves the opening up of the virtuality of the world by positing not simply different, but radically other codes and channels for expressing and giving expression to an undetermined potential for change. (p.26)

The second chapter of Network Culture explores a number of online practices such as packet switching, and asks whether these can help us resolve some of the more vexed problems within contemporary forms of political engagement. For example, does the internet’s open architecture – which in the face of difference, forgoes uniformity in favour of communication protocols – have something to tell us about challenges in terms of ‘extensibility’ currently facing movements against global capital and war? Here Terranova also reminds us how much online practices themselves have changed over the past decade since the takeoff of the World Wide Web, particularly in terms of community formation. The central chapter of the book is a slightly reworked version of Terranova’s essay on ‘Free Labour’. Beginning with a tilt at Richard Barbrook’s arguments concerning online anarcho-communism, the chapter grapples with the net-related unpaid labour performed outside the wage relation. Terranova is insistent that this labour, in all its pleasurableness for those concerned, is ‘a desire of labour immanent to late capitalism’ (p.94), and that claims about the anti-capitalist potentialities of movements such as open source must be offset by a healthy dose of scepticism. The fourth chapter follows on from this, discussing different aspects of that ‘soft control’ which attempts to turn labour’s potentialities towards capital’s continued reproduction. Network Culture then closes with a brief but enticing exploration of some of the key features that mark out ‘the virtual movements of this early twenty-first century’ (p.156), with the question of communication once again to the fore.

As should be obvious, Network Culture is part of a broader debate, and the book’s bibliography provides some helpful pathways into that wider discussion. Given the book’s central themes, it would be useful to examine its arguments alongside those of Ron Day, who has likewise engaged both with post-operaista theory, and information theory ‘classics’ such as Shannon, Weaver and Wiener. More provocatively, it would also be useful to read Network Culture alongside Doug Henwood’s latest offering on the ‘new economy’, and Ursula Huws thoughts on a growing ‘cybertariat’, both of which seek to meet capital’s claims about its new ‘weightless economy’ head on.

As with any text worth reading, there is much to argue with in this book. Those not enamoured of the ‘immaterial labour’ thesis advanced by the post-operaisti will be perplexed by some of Network Culture’s arguments, not least the assertion that the work of writing/reading/managing and participating in mailing lists/websites/chat lines … falls outside the concept of ‘abstract labour’ (p.84).

In a similar vein, Terranova offers the following tantalising statement about another key post-operaista concept:

Unlike class, however, a multitude is not rooted in a solid class formation or a subjectifying function (although it is also a matter of class composition) (p.130).

She elaborates a little on this: the category multitude is of necessity ‘vague’ in that it seeks to denote something that while ‘not deny[ing] the existence of the stratification of identity and class’, nonetheless threatens to reach beyond them (p.130). Is this a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too? How exactly might class composition analysis prove useful here? This question is not answered directly in Network Culture, even if a range of suggestive beginnings are provided in the second half of the book.

In the concluding paragraph of her original 2000 essay on ‘Free Labour’, Terranova argued as follows:

As the spectacular failure of the Italian autonomy reveals, the purpose of critical theory is not to elaborate strategies which then can be used to direct social change. On the contrary, as the tradition of cultural studies has less explicitly argued, it is about working on what already exists, on the lines established by a cultural and material activity which is already happening." (http://www.metamute.org/en/Network-Culture)