Introduction

Most of us would agree that we live in a time of great change. A generation ago, faced by the rising complexity of a globalizing world, our faith in technology and even progress exhausted, we left the modern era for a new condition that theorists dubbed the postmodern. During the last decade, technological advancements have returned to our lives in force, even as the world seems more complex than ever. 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. In this book, I set out to account for the shift from the postmodern condition to network culture as an historical phenomenon. 

 

We would look in vain for a definitive moment when network culture emerged, even if the decade has been marked by important events such as the dot.com boom and crash, the 9/11 attacks, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the rise and fall of the real estate bubble, and the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. All of these events are historical signposts and each of them moves us further into network culture. The dot.com boom expanded digital technology and new forms of telecommunications from niche to mass markets, paving the way for the network culture of the present day while the crash proved that finding ways to profit from new networking technologies would be difficult. In the most dramatic way, the 9/11 attacks showed that networked terrorism could leverage technology to strike in the heart of the global economy. The United States invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq were the first network wars, employing the massive force of a networked military, but also demonstrating the difficulty of waging war against a networked insurgency. The rise and fall of the real estate bubble initiated another global economic crisis, underscoring the problems of sustaining profits under the changed conditions of networked capitalism. Finally, the election of Barack Obama was not only significant as an optimistic sign of earlier hierarchical systems—most obviously racism in the United States—breaking down, it was the come-from-behind victory of a candidate who excelled at using network technologies to win the election.

 

Rather than any one event, however it is the changes in everyday life that mark our transition to network culture. Digital media and network technologies have matured, becoming part of our everyday lives. The Internet has become our primary source of information. Hardly a newspaper or magazine exists without a Web site mirroring its print content. Music, and increasingly video, finds its way to our homes via the Internet. The result is massive economic upheaval in the media industries as they struggle to extract profits in this new milieu. 

 

Nor is it just a matter of a shift in media and distribution. Relatively inexpensive computers, digital cameras and camcorders allow amateur cultural production to proliferate. A laptop and a pocket video camera are more powerful than an entire television studio (or substituting other hardware for the video camera, a recording studio) of the early 1990s. Advanced image manipulation and self-publishing is now possible for anyone with time, talent, and a relatively small investment. Anyone with connectivity can upload a video, image, song, or podcast, establish a blog or Web site and potentially reach an audience that the largest of traditional media outlets would not have dreamed of. Broadband access to the Internet provides an unprecedented platform for sharing content with others. Moreover, these technologies are not developing in isolation, rather they are converging. Broadband provides a largely unified platform for communication, commerce, and media.

 

The economy is globally linked by telecommunications together with inexpensive plane travel and transport. Globalization has been the dominant catchword for economies since the mid-1990s and under its influence corporations and nations are more and more networked and decentralized. The same is also true for politics as well as for dissent and agitation, which are now on the network as much as in the streets. Globalization is no longer new, it is a starting point for us. 

 

Amidst all this, the methods by which we connect with others have changed. E-mail and chat programs allow us to message friends and colleagues easily and instantly. Social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter permit us to keep in constant touch with our family, friends, and acquaintances. Perhaps most significant is the connectivity afforded by mobile phone; being reachable anywhere undoes our traditional relationship to place. Nor is it just a change for a small minority. The mobile phone extends connectivity to individuals worldwide who had not previously experienced it.

 

All these connections seem to be overtaking individuality. Alienation may be disappearing, but solitude is following it into extinction. Even our subjectivity is mutating as we become less centered individuals and more assemblages produced out of network flows.

 

Unlike digital computing and the postmodern society associated with it, network culture is predicated on connection. In Charlie Gere’s insightful analysis of digital culture, he traces digital culture to a process of abstraction, reducing complex wholes into more elementary units, a key process of capitalism. By separating the physical nature of commodities from their representations, digitization permits capital to circulate more freely and rapidly. In this ability to turn everything into quantifiable, interchangeable data, digital culture is universalizing. Gere cites 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 not only the digital computer but also for that universalizing nature of digital culture.^[1]

 

Under network culture, in contrast, connection is more important than division. Today, information is less the product of discrete processing units and more determined by networked relations links between people, between machines, and between machines and people.

 

One striking example of the difference between digital culture and network culture can be seen in their physical sites. The digital era is marked by the desktop microcomputer, displaying information through a heavy CRT monitor, connected to the network 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 graphic rendering and cinema-quality video editing or is 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. Unlike the desktop, the laptop can be used anywhere: in the office, at school, in bed, in a hotel, in a café, or on the train or plane. Not only are networks an order of magnitude faster than they were in the dial-up days of the PC, but Wi-Fi makes them easily accessible in many locations. Smart phones such as the Blackberry, Google G1, and the iPhone complement the laptop, bringing connectivity and processing power to places that even laptops can’t easily inhabit, such as streets, subways, or automobiles. But such ultraportable devices are also increasingly competing with the computer, taking over functions that were once the universal device’s purview.

What unites these machines is their mobility and their interconnectivity, necessary to make them more ubiquitous companions in our lives and key interfaces to global telecommunications networks. 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, cable TV set top box, game console, wireless router, iPod, iPhone, 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, network culture seeks a universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video, Internet, voice, text chat, and any other conceivable networking task efficiently.

 

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