Category Archives: Network Norms

the rules of networking

The Socio-Sphere

1 Reply

The digital media revolution has largely made both the private sphere and the public sphere obsolete, or at least questionable, and has created a domain that is neither private nor public, a domain in which traditional forms of association, including politics, are being called into question.  Bruno Latour (Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) chooses not to use the terminology of modern social theory at all and speaks of the “collective,” a space of networks instead of a public sphere bound on the one side by a radically individualized privacy and on the other by hierarchical and oppressive social structures. Following Latour we propose dropping the categories of private and public and exchanging them for a new term, the socio-sphere. The socio-sphere is neither private nor public, but is based upon the new form of communication made possible by digital media, namely, “many-to-many” communication. The age old limitations on communication forcing it into either a one-to-one mode or into a one-to-many mode created a public sphere that was inherently contradictory. One-to-many communication disguised itself by means of the concept of representation and pretended to be one-to-one communication, that is, a form of communication in which all co-participate equally. The affordances of digital media create an entirely new form of communication capable of overcoming the limitations imposed upon communication since the beginnings of human history. This is what the technology does. The possibility of many-to-many communication brings with it the hope of resolving the contradiction of representation created by traditional media, namely, that one speaks for the many by means of speaking to the many.  In the wake of the digital media revolution the public sphere, and with it, the private subject of modernity, vanish into the socio-sphere. There is no longer anything like privacy and there is no longer a specifically public space.

Continue reading →

Share

Private and Public

Leave a reply

Before the digital media revolution, communication articulated itself into two domains, interaction and organization. If one understands society from the perspective of the theory of communication, this distinction can be considered the foundation for the important distinction between private and public. The one-to-one communication of interaction produced a private domain in opposition to a public domain of cooperative action that was structured by hierarchical, one-to-many communication. Private and public are dependent upon each other. The one-to-one communication of interaction characterized by freedom of expression and egalitarian turn-taking in which everyone has a chance to express their opinion became the basis for economic activities in a liberal capitalistic society. In the liberal view, business takes place in a realm not directly under government control. From Luhmann’s perspective this marks the differentiation of the functional sub-system of business in distinction to the political system. From Habermas’ point of view, the realm of free and unrestricted interaction became the basis, at least in theory, for legitimating political power. It was supposed that if anyone was to take on the role of speaking to the many, then this had to arise from out of and in continuity with one-to-one communication in which everyone had a chance to speak freely. Interaction, although only possible for small groups, came in modern bourgeois society to mediate a “public sphere” in which, as Habermas has pointed out, large numbers of individuals could openly and freely discuss not only their business plans, but also criticize government policies and power. In modern democratic societies the legitimation of government power and policy, as well as hierarchy of any kind, is based upon communication in what has come to be known as the public sphere.

Continue reading →

Share

The Social Operating System

1 Reply

Mixed reality (see post on Mixed Reality) describes a form of social and cultural evolution that merges digital technology with all aspects of life such that houses, workplaces, offices, schools, universities, libraries, public buildings, hospitals, indeed, entire cities including the complex systems of transportation, energy, logistics, and communication they depend upon become interfaces, that is, one great complex, automated information and communication system. Building the associations, enrolling the actors, translating their programs, navigating, managing, coordinating, and making use of this heterogeneous, hybrid network of humans and non-humans is the job of what may be called the social operating system. An operating system, such as Windows, iOS, or Linux is the key software of a computer. It enables and controls input and output devices, coordinates functions, guides processes, and monitors the operation of all elements of the complex hardware and the various applications that run on it. It holds the entire system together. The idea of a social operating system was made popular with the rise of Web 2.0 and what is called “social media.” It refers to the increasing dependence of almost all activities on digital information and communication and to the integration of technological systems into work, play, learning, health care, etc.

Continue reading →

Share

Net Locality – Space doesn’t matter, but place does.

Leave a reply

It is a commonplace as well as a premise for thinking about the global network society, that networked information and communication technologies have – for better or worse – freed us from the limiting conditions of time and space. Castells spoke about the “timeless time” and the “space of flows” typical of network society. If there was one thing everyone thought they knew about the digital media revolution, then it was that communication and action were global and instantaneous. This is the whole point of connectivity. We can access information and act upon it, whenever, wherever, independently of where we physically happen to be.

This is why the book Net Localities by Eric Gordon and Adriana de Souza e Silva (Oxford, Blackwell 2011), authors who are indisputably among the forefront of network theorists, is interesting; because the authors seem to claim the opposite: “Physical space has become the context for … information” (9).

Citing the development of location based services such as Google Maps, Four Square, etc. on the basis of geographic information systems, GPS, mobile devices, and associated technologies, the authors proclaim that space does indeed matter after all and that we need no longer feel lost in the ubiquitous cloud of information that the Web seems to be.

Continue reading →

Share

Networked Publics

Leave a reply

When talking about social changes in the wake of the digital media revolution the concept of “networked publics” (see Kazys  Varnelis (ed), “Networked Publics” MIT Press 2008) is useful and interesting. If there is such a thing as a global network society, it would be reasonable to assume that the public sphere is in some way conditioned by networked information and communication technologies (NICT). Mizuko Ito in the Introduction to the collection of essays on topics such as place, culture, politics, and media, summarizes the affordances of NICT in terms of four “technosocial trends;” 1) the accessibility to digital tools and networks; 2) many-to-many and peer-to-peer forms of distribution; 3) the creation of value at the edges of the network; and 4) aggregation of culture and information.  These trends produce “networked publics,” that is “a linked set of social, cultural, and technological developments” that replace the public sphere of traditional mass media societies; a public sphere  that was, after all, nothing more than an audience of consumers, a silent majority, or the anonymous masses.

Continue reading →

Share