Kazys Varnelis on the meaning of network culture

March 25th, 2010 | News

Kazys Varnelis on Eurozine writes an excellent piece on the meanining of network culture. In the era of postmodernism we were left in a free floating fabric of emotional intensities but in contemporary culture the self is affirmed through the network and he discusses here what this means for the democratic public sphere. He touches various topics and it’s association with the network culture: economics, art, digital culture, gaming, social networking, privacy, and many more…

On network culture:

Network culture extends the information age of digital computing.[1] But it is also markedly unlike the PC-centred time that culminated in the 1990s. Indeed, in many ways we are more distant from the era of PC-centred computing than it was from the time of centralized, mainframe-based computation. To understand this shift, we can usefully employ Charlie Gere’s insightful discussion of computation in Digital Culture. In Gere’s analysis, the digital is a socioeconomic phenomenon as much as a technology. Digital culture, he observes, is fundamentally based on a process of abstraction that reduces complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing this process of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism. By separating the physical nature of commodities from their representations, digitization enables capital to circulate more freely and rapidly. In this ability to turn everything into quantifiable, interchangeable data, digital culture is universalizing. Gere cites the universal Turing machine – a hypothetical computer first described by Alan Turing in 1936, capable of being configured to do any task – as the model for not only the digital computer but also for that universalizing aspect of digital culture.[2]

Kazys Varnelis is the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

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