Network Culture (1)

Some analysts and commentators refer to the present an information age. At the same time, others emphasize confusion, saturation, and excess. For them, networked communication brings with it not so much information as it does noise. Terranova's discussion begins from the premise that these two insights are two sides of the same coin, two aspects of the same network culture. Her goal in this book is to conceptualize this abundant, accelerating culture. She thinks that it is possible to analyze it, to grasp what makes it unique, without getting bogged down in specific applications (like blogs or Facebook) or in cultural differences (whether those are generational or linguistic).

Accordingly, in the introduction she emphasizes that our current setting is one of a global culture characterized by multiple channels and a single informational milieu (p. 1).

When we look at contemporary culture (and/or the internet) we easily get overwhelmed by multiplicity, singularity, commonality, uniqueness, differentiation in scale, as well as interconnectivity. All these amplify and inhibit the emergence of commonality and antagonism. For Terranova, this means that network culture brings with it possibilities for transformation (particularly political transformation) that might go in directions of capture or closure but could also portend openness and emergence (hint for understanding the text: Terranova's basic strategy is to set out a position or idea, locate its limits, and then find within the position or idea an option or alternative that it opens up). The book explores these directions (in fact, much of the discussion is aimed at activists and theorists, to try to get them to recognize that the setting of politics isn't the same as it used to be--network culture brings with it a new combination of culture, power, and communication, p. 9).

Its first exploration focuses on the idea of information. The term is frequently repeated. Yet this repetition tends to confuse everyday notions of information with some of the insights of information theory. For example, folks generally think that information refers to content and that it is "immaterial" (an idea in our heads rather than stuff in the world). Terranova rejects these assumptions (p. 7), doing so via a discussion of three key insights from an important 1948 paper on information theory by Claude Shannon). She emphasizes the difference between signal and noise, information's dependence on uncertainty (or entropy), and the connection between information and nonlinearity (as in powerlaws). Each of these aspects of information will have repercussions (be correlative to) for what she calls the cultural politics of information (p. 9).


Information and Noise
P: information is what stands out from noise; it involves signals (not signs)
C: cultural politics of information operates at basic level of contact and noise (not meaning)

From the perspective of information theory, the challenge of information isn't meaning. It's noise, that is, the disruptions and distortions that inhibit the clear transmission of a message through a channel from the sender to the receiver. Goal: getting the message through. Need: clear channel (not one with a lot of noise disrupting it, need to filter out other signals). Basic minimum: contact. (example: JD college experience).

Meaning is reduced to information. Information is a signal transmitted through a channel.

Politics: culture jamming, try to disrupt the signal; some attempt amplification, that tends to backfire.

Simondon: information is a dimension of communication, not a content; everything that impacts transmission, so distraction and material setting, a whole field of possibilities that themselves have effects on senders, receivers, messages, a dynamic milieu.

The Limits of Possibility
P:  information is a measure of probability
C: cultural politics of information involves the virtual

In his theory of information, Shannon associated information with entropy or uncertainty (what is not known). This entropy or the unknown can be rendered mathematically in terms of probability. (Example: the game hangman or "Wheel of Fortune", there are fewer words with the sequence of letters "platap" than with the sequence "pla"). Figuring out a code or deciphering a message is a matter of probabilities (Example: REM song, "Tie my hat 'cause I'm a gnome"). Information is an exclusion of alternatives. The more alternatives, the less information. (look at top of page 24).


Information expresses probability--but this doesn't exclude the unpredictable. Thus, the cultural politics of information can open up the virtual, not as a utopian dream but as an irruption, flash, or positive feedback (26-27).

Nonlinearity and Representation



P: Information processes are nonlinear.
C: The cultural politics of information relies on movement and mutation

Don't think in terms of averages and norms. Averages apply to structured, low entropy settings. In settings that are more volatile and confused, there are not direct and causal relations between the micro and the macro level (examples: grains of sand in a sand pile, stock trades, montage and mash up).

Need to associate information as concept with techniques: storing and collecting information (archive, database), these can be anti-humanist, disruptive. Yet the challenge to representation opens up new possibilities, new orientations (37).