INTRODUCTION

The Rise of Network Society and Culture:

Should we be worried?


- Kazy’s Varnelis - ‘Networked Publics’:

- Network culture as having succeeded postmodernism and late capitalism = ‘Transcontemporaneity’

- Network culture almost absent-mindedly uses remix as a dominant form

- Network culture delivers remix and reality, shuffling together the diverse elements of present day culture, blithely conflating high and low… while poaching its “as found” aesthetics from the world.”

- Gilles Deluze - 'Postscript on the Societies of Control' (1992):

"Today the self is not so much constituted by any notion of identity but rather is reduced to “dividuals” and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks’."

- In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important that its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as interstices of multiple networks composed of both humans and things.

- Affirming ones own identity today means affirming to the identity of others in a relentless potlatch.

- Art also changes in response to this condition: Much like the contemporary media outlet, both the self and the artist of today is an aggregator of information flows, a collection of links to others.