Reading Terranova’s Network Culture felt something like placing the final piece of a puzzle into that last perfect fitting hole. Throughout each reading we have completed, each concept we have discussed, the same question has continually emerged: what’s at stake? In her analysis of network culture and the politics of the information age, Terranova has taken a stab at this central question, connecting the science of information and its actualization through network culture to concrete geopolitical structures and events that inform and perhaps constitute the structure of networks themselves. Rooting her analysis in the information science of Weiner, Weaver, and Shannon in particular, Terranova attempts to reveal the ways in which emerging informational networks are fundamentally changing the realities of our individual and collective lives. Similarly to Langlois, Terranova’s work on the internet suggests new possibilities for ethnographic research on changing connections between global and local, conflict and peace, privilege and oppression.
I was drawn to two specific lines of flight within Terranova’s work:
1) Mapping/Visualizing/Describing Networks
I was interested in the ways in which network culture and different networks within the internet have been described, talked about, and understood. Terranova associates networks with both separateness (“dust-like galaxies of minor and specialized nodes”… ) and interconnectedness (hence “vulnerability to informational dynamics, chain reactions, viral infections, &c”). Society has mapped certain shapes and forms onto the internet, visualizing the internet as a variation on interlocking spiderwebs, hub-and-spoke models, “sphere” shapes (“blogosphere”), and countless others.
Concurrent with these attempts to describe the shape of the internet have been new efforts to map and quantify the flow of information throughout the network. Algorithms from search engines no longer just track the pages and site that exist on the web but the flow patterns and movement between each page and server (48). As web access (and information traffic) increase, information scientists will create new metrics by which to quantify and document patterns of information flow and access.
Attempting to account for the emergence of the internet visually, Terranova sees the internet as an interconnected assemblage of microsegmented, highly differentiated pieces. Information is not, as hayles suggests, disembodied; rather, it’s body is dissected on the micro scale, segmented into infinitesimal fragments.
2) Politics of access/usership/information
Attempting to understand the interplay between network culture and its broader social context, Terranova sees the network as ““literally contracted by the intensity of the informational flows that reach it from the outside” in response to “geopolitical events, social debates and cultural trends.” 71 As network culture follows and tracks the ebb and flow of geopolitics, new questions emerge regarding stratification, domination, and global connection. Is network culture creating a globally connected elite positioned to continually dominate those bound to the world of locality in what Manuel Castelles terms a “structural domination of the space of flows over the space of places?” 43 If so, can we identify sites of resistance to this hegemonic ordering, and where?
Lastly, similarly to last week I was interested in how all of this talk of mapping, domination, and global/local could be enhanced and better informed by new ways of measuring and visualizing the flows of information across the web. In analyzing how national, cultural, and geographic boundaries are being affected by global network culture; in exploring which people are being included and which people are being excluded in the ever-growing “global village;” and in fleshing out the new, electronically-mediated connections between global and local can we finally begin to answer ever-present questions of “what’s at stake” in our study of informational theory.
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