Connection unbound by location - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 3: Webs of Power
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Chris Chesher
WRITERS IN THE HUMANITIES ARE BETTER THAN mathematicians at analysing the texture of cultural changes associated with the rise of network culture. For example, Mark C. Taylor, in The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, surveys the work of theorists of complexity working in the same vein as Watts, but talks with more philosophical and historical grounding about the implications of such network models. He traces the emergence of a new network culture, as it is manifest in changes through time in cultural artefacts in architecture, painting and literature as well as maths, science and technology.
He shows how buildings change from the rectilinear forms of the modernist skyscrapers to more dynamic forms like Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, (or we might add Melbourne's Federation Square). Theoretical paradigms change from the structuralist emphasis on systematic, formal systems to post-structuralist emphasis on complex and dynamic processes that generate structures that are never stable or permanent. In the self-portraits of Chuck Close, Taylor traces a development from the hyper-realism of his early work towards the hyper-complexity of his later paintings. These later images are composed with fragmented grids that appear totally chaotic up close. These fragments only merge to form a cohesive image when viewed from some distance. Each of these cases is characterised by complexity rather than formalism, emergence rather than instrumental design. In these works of art, Taylor sees evidence of changing values in the wider culture.
More unsettling is the suggestion that thought itself changes dramatically with the growth of networks. Thought is not something that you simply do on your own. You don't invent the language you speak – you borrow it from your community. Your thoughts themselves are composed on the basis of shared perceptions, concepts, techniques and frameworks. If the way that the materials of thought are distributed changes, then thought itself changes. Taylor argues that recent cultural and technological shifts have passed through a tipping point beyond which turbulence has become a constant: "As networks relentlessly expand, the mix of worlds, words, sounds, images and ideas becomes much more dense and diverse. When this media-mix approaches the boiling point, multiple cognitive and cultural changes become inevitable."
Unfortunately, Taylor's journey is more interesting than the destination. After talking so much about embracing complexity, his conclusion that business and education should join forces, and that those that don't embrace this change will wither away, is laughably simplistic and self-serving.
Taylor's conclusion that we are encountering an epochal change is echoed in much recent work on technology; and, of course, belongs in a long tradition promising a sudden ascension to a new order. Damien Broderick's The Spike and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines make even more extravagant claims about an approaching age when technological innovations will make the world unrecognisable. Pierre Lévy presents a more knowing utopianism in Collective Intelligence, in which he proposes that networks can support a fluid ecological democracy. Lévy's project is to provide a vision that might influence future directions in politics and technology.
The inverse image of the utopian network theorists are the apocalyptic critics including Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard. Virilio fears the loss of "real time" in the wake of absolute speed. As technology escapes actual scale, all possibility of human control disappears. Baudrillard's anxieties centre on the pre-eminence of simulations over reality. While both the utopian and dystopian approaches present strong images of the present and the future, neither squares up with most people's actual experience of networks.
The changes associated with new media are subtler than these expressions of cultural anxiety or hope suggest. Some of the more convincing work on network cultures emphasises that networks are not some universal force, but are historically specific cultural forms. Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall's Web Theory is an accessible introductory text that positions the World Wide Web within a history of media technologies. It emphasises how difficult it is to define the web as a single medium: it is a "loose web", with sites ranging from personal home pages to corporate websites. This looseness crosses the conventional boundaries between private and public space, broadcasting and conversation, and between authors and readers.
Some other recent work reflects on how technology changes everyday experience, including that strange experience of meeting Gilbert twice. This was possible because of the quality of difference between meeting face-to-face and meeting online. John Potts and Andrew Murphie develop a philosophically inflected reading of cultural changes associated with technology. They argue that artists like Stelarc, who connected nerve stimulators to his body to allow others to move his body over the internet, play with the conventional boundaries between humans and technologies. These changes are not a total transformation of everything but a complex mix of large and subtle shifts that challenge us to renegotiate how we live.
BUT IT IS POSSIBLE TO EXPLORE THE GROWING POWER of networks without making the universalising claims such as Taylor's? Actor-network theory (ANT), which emerged from social studies of science in the 1990s, operates with a very broad conception of networks: long and complex linkages between human and technological actors. In this approach, though, every network is different and the connections between networks are as important as networks themselves. While some of the work in this tradition can be dense reading, its combination of close case studies and sophisticated theoretical analysis is compelling.
For a long time, students of technology and society were stuck in a conflict over the relative importance of social or technological processes. Does technology lead to social change or do social forces create technology? ANT is one way of resolving this impasse. It suspends the question of whether the cause of any event is an object or a person and subsumes both under the term "actor" or "actant". Then it defines actants not by their intrinsic attributes, but by their relationships with other actors (their position in a network). Rather than mapping networks of one kind (social relationships, computer networks, electrical networks, ecological networks), ANT investigates the connections that cross over these conventional networks to form actor networks. So, for example, online grocery shopping involves a network of alliances that bring together not only customers and retailers, but also farmers, fertiliser supplies, international trade agreements, and even non-human actors like plants, land and the weather. Changes in any one of these networks ripple through to all the others.
Contemporary experience is conditioned by enormously complex hybrids that chain together human, technological and natural actants. Information systems may be a growing part of these, but to ignore their connection with other actants is to stop the network analysis too soon. According to Bruno Latour in We Have Never Been Modern, though, claims about the special status of modernity were based on denying such hybrids. By creating a split between nature and culture, the "modern constitution" separated the world of men from the world of nature – objective scientific facts were seen as independent of the subjective realms of politics. The complexity of networks is reduced by making sub-networks operate as black boxes, in which the decisions implicit in a system's design are set aside. ANT uses ethnography and cultural theory to break open such black boxes and to reconnect politics, facts, devices and the networks they compose. Latour's study of a failed project to create a light-rail network in France in Aramis and Steve Woolgar's ethnographic research into the development of a personal computer reveal that technologies have never proceeded according to plan.
While each of the approaches I've outlined offers a reading of the complexity of networks, there seems little prospect of unifying these into any single explanation. All of the examples show how much networks complicate the conventional politics of representation and accountability. The dispersal of power through networks displaces and defers any attribution of final responsibility that is at least theoretically possible with conventional legal and political institutions. Castells's sociology documents recent dramatic global changes in space, time and power. Watts diagrams the mathematical dynamics of networks. Taylor and Murphie and Potts show how networks have implications for thought itself, which are manifest in the material culture of architecture and the arts. ANT traces the very particular connections between power, technology and knowledge that are always at play.
AS I FOLLOWED GILBERT AND THE OTHER international communications researchers out of the Japanese car into a Mexican restaurant in Albuquerque, I thought little more about the forces that brought us all together. The growing network forces conditioning even the most mundane day-to-day experiences are almost as hard to perceive or understand as they are to escape. Knowledge about networks is as dispersed as the networks themselves. There is no way to resolve a network to a single centred point, nor any way to exhaust the chains of dependencies that link networks to each other. On the other hand, with no stable centres of power, a new force for change might emerge, as if at random, from any point. ♦
References
Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Broderick, Damien (1997) The Spike: How Our Lives are being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technologies, Kew, Victoria: Reed.
Burnett, Robert and Marshall, P. David (2003) Web Theory. An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge.
Castells, Manuel (2000 [1996]) The Rise of the Network Society, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel (2003 [1997]) The Power of Identity: The Information Age – Economy, Society and Culture, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel (2000 [1998]) End of Millennium, Massachusetts: Blackwell.
Castells, Manuel (2001) The Internet Galaxy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kurzweil, Ray (2000) The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, New York: Penguin USA.
Latour, Bruno (1993) We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lévy, Pierre (1997) Collective Intelligence, New York: Plenum Press.
Lévy, Pierre (1998) Becoming Virtual, New York: Plenum Press.
Rodman, Gilbert B. (1996) Elvis after Elvis: The Posthumous Career of a Living Legend, London: Routledge.
Taylor, Mark C. (2001) The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Virilio, Paul, translated by Julie Rose (1997) Open Sky, London and New York: Verso.
Watts, Duncan (2003) Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, New York and London: W.W. Norton.
Woolgar, Steve and Grint, Keith (1997) The Machine at Work: Technology, Work and Organization, Cambridge: Polity.