Karl Long on Experience Curve blog points to this video interview of Grant McKracken on ‘Corporations & Culture’, where he talks about the end of mass marketing, the end of smithsian economics, and how organizations need to become better at reading and participating in culture. Examples from Steve Jobs to Ford Fiesta.

Grant McCracken is an anthropologist, blogger and author. A member of Convergence Culture Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, McCracken has authored several books, including Chief Culture Officer (2009), Transformations (2008), Flock and Flow (2006), Culture and Consumption II (2005), Big Hair  (1996), and Culture and Consumption (1988)

On Eurozine,  Geert Lovink examines the colonization of real-time; comment culture and the rise of extreme opinions; and the emergence of "national webs".

Web 2.0 has three distinguishing features: it is easy to use; it facilitates the social element; and users can upload their own content in whatever form, be it pictures, videos or text. It is all about providing users with free publishing and production platforms. The focus on how to make a profit from free user-generated content came in response to the dotcom crash. At the height of dotcom mania all attention was focused on e-commerce. Users were first and foremost potential customers. They had to be convinced to buy goods and services online. This is what was supposed to be the New Economy. In 1998 the cool cyberworld of geeks, artists, designers and small entrepreneurs got bulldozed overnight by "the suits": managers and accountants who were after the Big Money provided by banks, pension funds and venture capital. With the sudden influx of business types, hip cyberculture suffered a fatal blow and lost its avant-garde position for good. In a surprising turn of events, the hyped-up dotcom entrepreneurs left the scene equally fast when, two years later, the New Economy bubble burst. Web 2.0 cannot be understood outside of this context: as the IT sector takes over the media industry, the cult of "free" and "open" is nothing but ironic revenge on the e-commerce madness. more…

Lovink is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures and blog as "net critique". He is a media theorist, net critic and activist and has authored many books : Dark Fiber. Tracking Critical Internet Culture (2002), Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia (2002), My First Recession. Critical Internet Culture in Transition (2003), The Principle of Notworking (PDF) (2005), and Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (2007).

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.