Introduction

Please note: this is only the first section of the introduction, the introduction of the introduction, if you will.

See the links below for the next headings. 

Life After Networks: A Critical History of Network Culture:

If we turn back to the last great cultural and socioeconomic upheaval—the prolonged period of restructuring that began in the mid-1960s and lasted into the 1980s—we observe how, facing the rising complexity and costs of a globalizing world, with our faith in technology and even progress exhausted, we left the modern era behind for a new condition that we would eventually call postmodernity.^[2] Over the course of the last two decades, but most especially during the decade from 2000 to 2010, we left postmodernity behind as well, hurtling instead into network society. Technological advancements returned to our lives in force, while social, economic, and cultural changes transformed the world we live in. The network in all its forms—communications, commerce, and transportation—is the cultural dominant of our time, much as the machine was for the modern era.

To speak of network society or network culture is not to imply that networks are somehow new or unprecedented: postmodernity is also a culture of decentralized, global networks and what is modernity but the first regime of globalization and telecommunication?^[3] But our networks are different. They are lighter, more pervasive, colonizing everyday life. There’s no way to separate out technology from mainstream culture anymore. Digital media and network technologies have matured and dispersed, winding up in our laps, beds, even our pockets. They’ve become our primary means of communication not only in the workplace but beyond. The rise of the culture industry and the saturation of everyday life by media mark postmodern culture; the fall of the culture industry and the rise of a networked media industry marks the rise of network culture. The mass audience is atomized, dispersed across the Web into networked publics.[4] Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers together with the music industry are in crisis, unable to capitalize on the new condition as individuals turn to online search engines and aggregators that tailor media to their interests, to sites that allow them to produce content of their own and interact with their friends, and to sites that hold amateur-produced content. Nor can we ignore the cultural impact of new forms of connectivity: the majority of the world’s inhabitants now own mobile phones.^[5] Being reachable anywhere, anytime transforms our traditional relationship to place.

All of these connections seem to be overtaking individuality. Alienation may be disappearing, but so is solitude. Still, laments for the solitary self are relatively rare. Constant connection can lead to overload—particularly with regard to the increasing permeation of non-work life by the office’s electronic tether—but it seems we have collectively decided it is better than being alone. Today we are less centered individuals, more assemblages produced out of network flows.

Ours is a global network economy, the product not only of networking technology but also of the inexpensive transport of people and cargo and the aggressive relaxation of trade barriers. Globalization dominates macroeconomic and foreign-trade policies since the mid-1990s and, under its influence, both nations and businesses are ever more networked, decentralized, and fluid. Or at least such is the impression that policy-makers and business leaders hope to give; amidst all this talk of decentralization and opportunity, income disparity is accelerating. Still, today even dissent and agitation mobilize on the network as much as in the streets. Globalization and networks are no longer new, they are our starting point.

Network culture is predicated on connection. Contrast this with postmodern society and the digital technology of its day. Digitization is a process of abstraction, reducing complex wholes into more elementary units. This process, as Charlie Gere observes, is fundamental to capitalism: separating the physical nature of commodities from their representations permits capital to circulate more freely and rapidly. In turning objects, places, and people into quantifiable, interchangeable data, digital culture is universalizing. Gere sees the Turing machine—a hypothetical computer first described by Alan Turing in 1936, capable of being configured to do any task—as the model for this universalizing nature of digital culture.^[6] Still, modernism is predicated not on digital technology but on the machine. Postmodernism, in turn, is based on the computer, an endlessly flexible unit, more abstract than the machine and capable of being reprogrammed to fulfill any task. But today, information is less the product of discrete processing units and more determined by networked relations between people, between machines, and between machines and people. Ours is a network culture, in which connection is more important than division.^[7]

To illustrate, compare the physical sites of computing in digital and network culture. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the desktop microcomputer displayed information through a heavy cathode-ray-tube (CRT) monitor and, if linked to the network at all, was connected via a dial-up modem or perhaps through a high-latency first-generation broadband connection. In our own day, there is no such dominant site. The desktop machine is increasingly relegated to high-end applications such as gaming, graphic rendering, and cinema-quality video editing or employed for specific, location-bound functions (at reception desks, to contain secure data, as point-of-sale terminals, in school labs, and so on) while the portable notebook or laptop has taken over as the most popular computing platform. Whether desktop or laptop—or, in its most extreme incarnation, as a tablet—the screen has dematerialized, becoming a thin plane. Unlike the desktop, the laptop can be used anywhere: in the office, at school, in bed, in a hotel, in a café, on the train or on the plane. Not only are present-day networks an order of magnitude faster than they were in the days of the dial-up modem, wireless technology makes them easily accessible in many locations. Smart phones bring connectivity and processing power to places the laptop can’t easily inhabit, such as streets, mass transit, or automobiles. But such ultraportable devices are also increasingly competing with the computer, taking over functions that were once the universal device’s purview.

In a prosaic sense, the Turing machine is already a reality, but it doesn’t take the form of one machine, it takes the form of many. With minor exceptions, the laptop, smart phone, tablet, television set top box, game console, wireless router, digital music player, even the automobile, airplane, and Mars rover are the same device, but they become specific in their interfaces, their mechanisms for input and output, for sensing and acting upon the world. Instead of a universal machine, what matters for us is the universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video, Internet, voice, text chat, and any other conceivable telecommunications task efficiently. More than that, the network is where information resides, a “place” on which network-centric applications and more and more of our data is stored.