Terranova (concluding)

Network culture: abundance of information, acceleration of dynamics. Conceived as global culture in singular informational milieu traversed by multiple channels. To analyze, look for amplification or inhibition of commonalities and antagonisms.

Explore via:
1. Information theory (signal noise)
2. Network dynamics (ex. open architecture allows for autonomy, localization, differentiation that can generate incompatibilities, technically and politically)
3.  Free labor (digital economy; social factory--knowledge labor is inherently collective)

last two chapters:
4.  soft control/biological computing
5.  communication/mass and migrant

Soft control

a.  complexity, emergence, self-organization, evolutionary theory, cellular automata, biological metaphors--brain, computer, nature, economy have same emergent structure (can become static, crash, dynamic); repercussion: individual element doesn't matter; what matters is the pattern/dynamic/mutual influence;

b.  new economy/management guys (California hippy entrepreneurs) argue for vitality, decentralization, spontaneity and against regulation, hierarchy, planning, centralization (stasis v. turbulence), both suggest approaches to control/steering (so, she wants to move beyond too easy opposition between them and focus on what is involved in soft control, particularly as it configures subjects); important to note, the two modes are not incompatible;

c.  Dawkins, selfish gene, acts either cooperatively or competitively; this provides a little diagram for a feature of soft control we encounter on reality television--these tv shows are like cellular automata, a few easy rules (space is open in a sense; space is closed in a sense; folks have to cooperate and compete). Not surprisingly, there is resistance to this machine of control. The swerve in network culture cuts through cooperate and compete with affinity and war (or friend/enemy) (look at 127-128)

d.  (repercussion--biopower via Hardt and Negri)

Communication 

a.  reasonable democracy thwarted by awful media (Habermas/public sphere/argue in terms of transparency and accountability)? or...

b.  the masses (Baudrillard)--masses prefer spectacle; what is a mass? not a determined social group/category but the dynamic emerging out of the aggregate (so, characterized by hyperconformity; Jodi--emergence of the one via powerlaw dynamics); also, receptacle for affective power of images--the mass is fascinated by images; the mass is characterized by feelings and reactions that disperse and diffuse meaning, this is their power; so, political strategy seems to involve not truth and reason and not illusion and deception but instead "images as bioweapons" to capture and hold intensity.

c.  not the whole story, also have amplification of antagonisms--migrant media, or fragments and tribes, subgroups, aggravate differences, oppositions, tensions without attempt to mediate/reconcile--in fact, these are great carriers of intensities; so looks like a battlefield (154)