Defining Network Culture

Defining Network Culture

In Network Culture, Terranova begins by discussing the “heterogeneous assemblage” of network culture. Terranova argues for the need to specifically and individually reflect on network culture because “they appear to us as a meshwork of overlapping cultural formations, of hybrid reinventions, cross-pollinations and singular variations” (p. 1-2). In particular, the interconnectedness of communication systems is not necessarily technological; rather, “it is a tendency of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a larger milieu” (p. 2). Terranova notes the change in observing what used to be called “media messages” – “the flow from a sender to a receiver,” is now countered by messages that “spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane” (p. 2). As information flows thru and from channels and mediums, and as it is decoded and recoded by local dynamics   changes occur in its form – “it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of communalities and antagonisms” (p. 2). To reiterate, Terranova elaborates that the cultural production of meaning is mainly unattached from the larger informational processes that establish the dispersement of images and words, noises and affects across a hyperconnected world.

             Terranova posits, “Are we then victims of an “informational explosion,” destructing humanity?" Terranova will argue that informational processes do not exhibit power of the ‘immaterial’ over the material; rather, because of an increase of history and annihilation of distances with an informational environment, this milieu is a “creative destruction” “composed of dynamic and shifting relations between such ‘massless flows’” that serves as productive movement “that releases (rather than simply inhibits) potentials for transformation” (p. 2-3, p. 8). Further, Terranova asserts that “a network culture is inseparable both from a kind of network physics (that is physical processes of differentiation and convergence, emergence and capture, openness and closure, and coding and overcoding) and a network politics (implying the existence of an active engagement with the dynamics of information flows” (p. 3).

            In Chapters 1, Terranova begins to center her argument by first reworking the concept of information from the ideas that information “is the content of a communication;” and secondly, from the “notion that information is immaterial” (p. 3). Here, Terranova discusses three hypotheses from Claude E. Shannon’s (1948) essay in which he formed his mathematical definition of information: “information is defined by the relation of signal to noise; information is a statistical measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system; information implies a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a physical system” (p. 9). Terranova stresses that these hypotheses also offer some other interesting corollaries – considerations – on informational cultures.

Proposition I: Information is what stands out from noise.                                                                

Corollary Ia: Within informational cultures, the struggle over meanings is subordinated to that over ‘media effects.’                                                                                                                                             

Corollary Ib: The cultural politics of information involves a return to the minimum conditions of communication (the relation of signal to noise and the problem of making contact)

And secondly,

Proposition II: The transmission of information implies the communication and exclusion of probable alternatives.                                                                                                                                   

Corollary II: Informational cultures challenge the coincidence of the real with the possible.

Here, Terranova argues:

“The communication of information thus implies the reduction of material processes to a closed system defined by the relation between the actual selection (the real) and the field of probabilities that it defines (the statistically probable). The relation between the real and the probable, however, also evokes the spectre of the improbable, the fluctuation and hence the virtual. As such, a cultural politics of information somehow resists the confinement of social change to a closed set mutually excluding and predetermined alternatives; and deploys an active engagement with the transformative potential of the virtual (that which is beyond measure)” (p.20).

                                                             

                                                      The Internet in Network Time

            In Chapter 2, Terranova uses the network example of the Internet to argue for the Internet as encompassing an active design technique “able to deal with the openness of systems – a neo-imperial electronic age – which is demonstrated “in phenomena such as blogging, mailing lists, and web rings” (p. 4). Here, Terranova stresses that communication technologies function beyond just linking different localities; more so, as we have briefly discussed when reading The Exploit, technologies “actively mould what they connect by creating new topological configurations and thus effectively contributing to the constitution of geopolitical entities such as cities and regions, or nations and empires” (p. 40). Because of the complex, interwoven features of the communication topology of Empire – such as aeroplanes, freight ships, television, cinema, computers and telephony, all these different systems correlate by converging in a hypernetwork, “a meshwork potentially connecting every point to every other point” (p. 41). Hence, the network is becoming less a description of a specific system, and more a phrase to define “the formation of a single and yet multidimensional information milieu – linked by the dynamics of information propagation and segmented by diverse modes and channels of circulation” (p. 41).

            More specifically regarding the Internet, Terrenova asserts that if the Internet does appear as a key global communication technology, it is because, unlike other global communication technologies such as television, the Internet “has been conceived and evolved as a network of networks, or an internetwork, a topological formation that presents some challenging insights into the dynamics underlying the formation of a global network culture” (p. 41). Looking at the architecture of the Internet as a turning-point within the history of communication and using previous theories by Castells and Virilio, Terranova argues that space on the Internet is specifically in direct relation to its information architecture. Through the use of addresses and urls placed in a common address space, Terrenova argues that “we are to all effects referring to a specific address in this global, electronic map…which confirms the image of a distance between a world of information and a world of embodied and bounded locality” (p. 44). Thus, as mentioned in Terranova’s introduction, the Internet is highly homogeneous because “it can be entered at any point and each movement is in principle as likely as the next” (p. 44).

            Furthermore, Terranova asks, “How can we reconcile the grid-like structure of electronic space with the dynamic features of the Internet, with the movements of information?...How do we explain chain mails and list serves, web logs and web rings, peer-to-peer networks and denial-of-service attacks?” (p. 49). Terranova argues the possibility that by contemplating the Internet through the concept of the grid, people might have “fallen into a classic metaphysical trap: that of reducing duration to movement, that is, of confusing time with space” (p. 50). And as far as the movements of information, Terranova observes that a slice of information spreading throughout the open space of the network “is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the spaced crossed that always leaves something behind – a new idea, a new affect (even an annoyance), a modification of the overall topology. Information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu” (p. 51). Lastly, drawing from Hardt and Negri’s description of network power when discussing the Internet, Terrenova agrees that its imperial sovereignity is that “its space is always open…an active openness of network spatiality” (p. 62). In such space, all objects and devices can “be networked to the network of networks in a kind of ubiquitous computational landscape” (p. 63). 

Questions for Contemplation:
As stated above, Terranova observes that a slice of information spreading throughout the open space of the network “is not only a vector in search of a target, it is also a potential transformation of the spaced crossed that always leaves something behind – a new idea, a new affect (even an annoyance), a modification of the overall topology. Information is not simply transmitted from point A to point B: it propagates and by propagation it affects and modifies its milieu” (p.51). 

We have discussed in class how information is transferred/exists in the network through websites such as 23and me and through banking systems. How else do you observe information being situated, managed, and transferred throughout the network? And secondly, how does Terranova's argument - from Chapters 1 and 2, concerning information theory influence how you might theorize the spacial activity of the network?