deuxlits

i posted this on the IDC list and thought thought i’d repost here as well. it’s more or less my takeaways from the new network theory conference that i went to at the end of june in amsterdam. you can check out the program here and get more detailed posts on the individuals panels and presentations here.

First, there were some really interesting critiques of web 2.0 and social software more broadly.
There were overall skeptics of the promise of “openness” in open source production, Warren Sack specifically mentioned his work looking at the python development community and the hierarchal structures involved, and wikipedia was also mentioned in the same way. Several individuals questioned the novelty of notions of “user-generated-content”, which I wholly agree with and would personally argue for a reconceptualization of UGC as part of a longer tradition of cultural evolution, engagement, and, creativity, creation, and innovation. Additionally, the notion of UGC brings about a new subjectivity of users as such, which I think is an interesting idea that requires some more serious consideration. The role of private business in this larger web 2.0 framework was raised several times and Tiziana Terranova had some really interesting points about the new forms of capital in an internet economy. One of her main points was that we now see a shift where social relations and linking are the currency and capital in a net economy, where the capture of attention, memory, desires, and beliefs becomes a fundamental part of forming networks. Over the course of the conference, it became increasingly clear to me that the role of business in structuring and shaping the internet and represents a new economic logic that defines web 2.0, in spite of the rhetoric that is put forth about it. User practices and engagement may not be new, but the face there is now a business incentive to facilitate and harness this that is, in fact, new.

Metaphors of performance and performativity came up quite a bit during the conference, however often in passing. Oftentimes, there was a conflation of the two and people used these terms to describe the things that people do in networks. However, it is important to understand them as separate, where one represents (performance) and the other articulates and enacts (performative). Given the mediated dimensions of networks, btn people and digital artifacts, I think there are some interesting questions of network engagement through the prism of the performance-performative distinction. In this way, network maps or online network don’t just represent our clusters of relations but that they also enact, embody, and entail them as well.

Related to this idea, is the critique that came up of how oftentimes we also conflate the network as a diagram-representation of social phenomena and social phenomena itself. This kind of reflexive critique was part of a larger interest in the ways in which we imagine and perceive networks and how this, in turn, shapes how we engage in/with them.

Additionally, there were a lot of concerns regarding surveillance and we can clearly see how our perceptions of surveillance (from government agencies, to google, to parents and kids on myspace) might contour our understanding of network spaces and the types of actions we may taken within them. Alan Liu very elegantly discussed the dialectic between surveilling/authoritive policing versus knowledge/creativity and asked “Where should authority be placed in the data architecture of web 2.0?”

An interesting set of questions that came up relate to notions of time, memory, and history in networks. During one session (I forgot who), someone asked if networks grow and evolve, do networks ever finish? This continued in other panels with questions regarding history: do networks, in fact, have a history or histories? Does history exist in the nodes of networks or in the links of networks? Wendy Chun briefly mentioned the idea of the enduring ephemeral in networks and the role of memory in networks which she provocatively described as repetition and regeneration of storage.