In many ways, what Marshall describes is similar to state of Empire depicted by Hardt and Negri, where politics and culture serve the economic interest of global corporations rather than individual nation states. However, what Hardt & Negri, and to a degree, Marshall seem to overlook is that this is not a new trend or phenomena but rather a continuation of what is afforded by technology. The invention of writing afforded greater expansion and progression of cultures through commerce, learning, and consistency of message. The invention of the printing press was significant to the Protestant Reformation because it afforded access to the word of God without the gatekeepers of the church.
In light of Barabasi’s example, I thought I would share this. This is a bacon press I made for the National Ornamental Metal Museum. 6 degrees of Kevin’s Bacon.
The basic structure of any network is the connection between nodes. Humans, like most animals are social creatures and are driven by a basic, hard-wired need to connect to others. Maslow’s ranking to the contrary, social connection may be the most basic need we have. It is our desire to connect that pushes us to mate. Our connection to the offspring of that mating drives us to feed and nurture infants when they can provide for themselves. Social connection makes fulfilling all the other needs, food, shelter, love, safety and so on much easier to acquire. That we would exploit every means of connecting afforded to us by technology or circumstance seems to surprise some theorists, when in fact it is the most fundamental urge we have as living creatures.
My views on the nature of humans, expressed above, colors how I processed boyd’s discussion of networked publics. To me, they are nothing new. The expression, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, precedes new media by a century or more. All cultures, communities, and societies are networked publics in essence where people have public and semi-public profiles, a list of “friends” (in-group and out-group members), and a means to observe the connections between other members of that network. Gossip has been around much longer than the internet.
What I did appreciate about the boyd chapter was the discussion of context. One of the most profound changes in our networking has been the change in context of our connections. We are no longer bound by special and temporal constraints to the degree we were just a few years ago.
I will end my rant, not by telling Castells to get off my lawn, but rather that it’s the same grass its always been, only the seasons have changed. It is significant that we are looking not simply at objects and nodes but also the connection and context in which they exist. The major shift is not the emergence of networks but rather the number of nodes connected to each other and perhaps more importantly, the number of connections between nodes. More frequently people are not connected to each other in a single context such as work, church, or family, but may have many lines of connection. These increased connections alters the relationship between the nodes.
I think your last point is actually also Castells’ point – networks aren’t new, and in fact can be found all around us in nature, but digital communication technologies have dramatically increased the scale and ubiquity of networks. Similar to boyd – we have always had social networks, but thanks to technology, those networks are connected and visible in ways previously unimagined. Hence context collapse.
As Castells’ pointed out, I do agree with you that networks are not new at all. However, in my point of view, the progression of network formulation cannot be identical to the past because information technologies not only increased the scale of networks, it also make network evolution more complex.
Kevin, how did you insert the image? can you walk me through via email briefly? hchoi@memphis.edu
Kevin, I think that it was you who presented some kind of point about context collapse in class. I can’t remember if it was in reference to our “actual self” or not. Do you remember?
John, I think what you are referring to is my statement that context collapse makes is more difficult to maintain separate personas based on social context, ie: work personality, family personality, social personality. From a psychotherapy perspective, that can be health because it presents a more congruent self. That is not to say there is one true or actual self, but maintaining a compartmentalized social life leads to internal conflicts and a feeling a need to perform (thought everything is a performance).
Is that what you were asking about?
Sorry for the late response, but yes that was what I was asking about. Thanks for the input!