The Network Society

The New Social Formation
The new structure of dominant processes and functions: interconnected networks of variable geometry (504). According to Castells, we are entering a new era in human experience, one that has superseded the historical forms of social organization expressed through the relationship between culture and nature; just like Baudrillard’s notion of the real and hyperreal, it is no longer a question of culture versus nature– nature itself has become a cultural form, expressed through information and its flows (“the key ingredient of our social organization” – 508).

 

Fluctuating Time Horizons
Biological (attached to the rhythms of the life-cycle) and mechanical (attached to socially determined sequential ordering) time has given way to what Castells calls “timeless time” which is simultaneously eternal and ephemeral. Social dynamics of the network society…instantaneous communication, information overload, multi-tasking, etc. etc.… are mobile and non-linear, unbound by sequential time, where “elimination of sequencing creates un-differentiated time, which is tantamount to eternity” (494). Flex-time is processed through the network.

 

Politics Is Local
The top down hierarchical model of power relationships has given way to the decentralized network, where “the power of flows takes precedence over flows of power” (500); every node/hub of the network, despite its relative position within the network, is subject to the volatility of these flows. The dominant spatial logic of the networked, informational society has detached itself from the notion of geographical location or “place” (similar to DeCerteau’s differentiation – see Tensions in Interface Design response), and instead has become procedural, what Castells calls the “space of flows.” The space of flows can be understood through the network of which it constitutes, that is, different points within the network (nodes and hubs), the exchanges of flows between those points (electronic exchanges made possible by information technologies), and the social actors that exert influence on the directions of these flows – “no place exists by itself, since the positions are defined by the exchanges of flows in the network” (443). Castells says we must think of the informational city not as a form, but a process, “characterized by the structural domination of the space of flows” (429).

 

A Game of Chance
Shaviro references Castells – “financial markets are ‘systematically volatile’; they are systematically resistant to any form of stabilizing systematization” (41).” Economic value is a hyperreality. The financial market, like the network society, is an open system in a state of perpetual and nonlinear transformation or fluctuation. If we use the Prigogenian terms that Shaviro references to conceptualize this process – the network society is a self-organizing system in a far-from-equilibrium state (a dissipative structure), where at any bifurcation point, the system may reorganize itself in unforeseen ways – a singular (and marginal) event can have dramatic and far-reaching consequences. Instability gives rise to transformation. Tsing’s friction comes into play. Scientific models of analyses – physical, social, what have you – must direct themselves away from Newtonian universals and toward Prigogenian dynamics/Tsingian contingencies/Haylesian pattern/randomness dialectics. A framework of analyses must be one of probability and not determinism, temporal, nomadic – able to traverse the in-between. Complex systems do not work in a linear manner – Shaviro: “No panoramic view is possible, for the space is always folding, dividing, expanding, and contracting” (7).

 

Nature and Culture: Viruses and Memes: Cultural transmission.
Viruses and memes require a host to reproduce. If we think of viruses as biological and memes as cultural, the two differ in that the dominant mode of transmission for diseases is replication (mutation is possible, but much less common), where as representations are always transformed during transmission: “There’s an irreducible gap between replicator and vehicle, between genotype and phenotype…in short, between the ideality of a repeating informational pattern, and the contingency of any particular material embodiment” (Shaviro 15). So then we must understand cultural transmission as something that is always fluctuating and contingent, while at the same time prolific. Shaviro applies this to his discussion of viral marketing and the way the “algebra of need” is interiorized in the individual. Social based advertising models, such as the one just introduced by Facebook, provide an immediate example of the network society’s consumer-producer as corporate shill. The media industry is in a constant state of crisis – trying perpetually to adjust itself to rapid network changes, that is, reorganizing itself around these bifurcations. Targeting/behavioral marketing has emerged as the current dominant media business model in response to the dynamics of the informational society (the model itself is in a continual state of transformation) and content models are now based around users, where content is generated through immediate feedback loops between consumer-producers. The “viral” powers of the social (personal recommendations as the most effective form of marketing) and the mobile(static banner ads do not proliferate nor engage the user the way widgets do) – in marketing terms – can be seen in widget advertising networks such as Clearspring ; widget ad networks are incorporated into the new Facebook model, where you can affiliate yourself with brands through the Facebook network, or through the widget network . From the current rapid evolution of open application platforms, we see how this freedom of mobility is co-opted by the market; while users may now traverse different platforms with liquid ease, they have a job to do.

 

Biopolitical Production
Part of understanding what it means to live in the network society, I think, is understanding that information is commodity is subjectivity. Labor and capital have become primarily (though not exclusively) immaterial. Shaviro says, “my selfhood is an information pattern rather than a material substance”; on Facebook I can now express my “self” through making “friends” with corporations and through informational packets called widgets, in which I can define myself through brand and product – I am a producer and a consumer and a product. As a space of flows, capital has power. Another example: Shaviro mentions digital rights enforcement – privatization, through encryption – again, the market is constantly finding ways to co-opt digital technologies for its own uses. Information, commodity, and identity are spaces of flows; as part of the network, they are subject to us and we are in turn subject to them.

Shaviro: “Money and information transform whatever they encounter into more money and more information” (40)

Hardt and Negri: “Production and reproduction are dressed in monetary clothing” (32)

~ by glycerine517 on November 8, 2007.