Parsing Network Effects

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter Organization After Social Media

In the information society passivity rules. Browsing, watching, reading, waiting, thinking, deleting, chatting, skipping, and surfing are the default conditions of online life. Total involvement implies madness to the highest degree. What characterizes networks is a shared sense of a potentiality that does not have to be realized. Millions of replies from all to all would cause every network, no matter what architecture, to implode. Within every network there are prolonged periods of interpassivity, interrupted by outbursts of interactivity. Networks foster and reproduce loose relationships - and it's better to face this fact straight in the eye. They are hedonistic machines of promiscuous contacts. Networked multitudes create temporary and voluntary forms of collaboration that transcend but do not necessarily disrupt the Age of Disengagement.

Disengagement is associated with aging. Here the "Age of Disengagement" means something else.

Multitude: The multitude is a concept of a population that has not entered into a social contract with a sovereign political body, such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination.

Transcend vs disrupt. Involuntary collaboration? Possible in scenes of occupation.

Unoccupied networks... Partial noninvolvement...

default conditions of online life
custom conditions of offline death

Partial noninvolvement...
default conditions of offline life
disruption without transcendence

And so for day 2166
17.11.2012

Pre-machine Clues to Post-machine Experience

J. David Bolter in Turing's Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age distinguishes an epoch of tool use from one of machine use. It is useful to be reminded of such a distinction when the common discourse often conflates tools and machines. He moves from speculating about the ancients and their failure to adopt machines to a set of considerations about the imbrication of technology and world view.

[T]here was something in the world outlook of the ancients (perhaps the reliance on slavery) that kept them satisfied with traditional sources of power and did not compel them, like later Europeans, to seek to increase efficiency, invent new prime movers, and in general expand their control and domination of nature.

The result was a simple but elegant technology of the hand rather than of the machine. The ancient craftsman worked with tools that became extensions of his hands in the manipulation of his materials. There was no real mass production. Although a pottery shop in Athens might employ seventy men who worked from specified designs, each thrown pot carried to some extent the impress of the hand that made it. Also, all technical discoveries were the product of clever observation and innovation without a theoretical basis, for the relationship between science and technology, so much a part of our own industrial society, did not exist.

And one wonders what power sources will emerge in the transition to a networked culture. No telling from which quarter elegance might flow.

And so for day 726
08.12.2008