I take the question ‘what is network politics’ to be a solicitation to
think what might be the most interesting avenues of research into the
politics of network. There are two directions of such research that I
would find interesting to pursue at the moment.
The first one would imply a re-assessment of some of the early theses in
the cultural and political discourse of new media that suggested that
the latter would trigger a reinvention of mass participation to the
public sphere. I would be interested in investigating the means by which
the very terms of that statement have been recast by the subsequent
development of networks – and in particular with relation to the instant
mass diffusion of web-based platforms for social networking across a
multiplicity of devices. In particular, I am interested in the character
that this conjunction of social networks of acquaintances and contacts;
flows of images, sounds, and texts; screen-based interfaces; and
cultural-technical protocols has assumed with relation to the
heterogeneous and multi-scaled levels of network spatialities and
temporalities. What have been the recombinant effects of the encounter
between social networks, multimedia networks and news networks? How do
we think about the mutations in subjectivity triggered by the social
networking of opinions, beliefs, and affects?
The second avenue of research that I would find quite fruitful is an
engagement with the emerging field of network science – as a form of
power/knowledge that produces specific types of statements about the
nature of networks and also contributes to the invention of new
dispositifs of network management. In the work of mathematicians and
physicists such as Barabasi, Watts, Lewis, Newman, but also public
agencies such as the ‘Committee on Network Science for Future Army
Applications and National Research Council’ one finds an emerging
science of networks that carries a further reformulation of questions of
power and control by means of specific techniques of abstraction that
topologically translate across the biological, the physical, the
technological, the social, the economic and the cultural fields. What
can we learn from this emerging network science about the reinvention of
network power?
Tiziana Terranova
Seb Franklin's response to Terranova's position paper
I take Tiziana Terranova’s response to the question ‘what is network politics’ as an
opportunity to reflect more broadly on the crucial notions of participation and science—and
the more fundamental ideas of the social and the technical that they encapsulate—as important
terms in the theorisation of network politics. The specific interrelationships that have
emerged between these terms in the present era of ubiquitous cybernetic systems are crucial
to thinking the historical significance of network politics.
Deploying Terranova’s aptly-chosen avenues of research as points of focus, the first
significant way in which the social and the technical become interrelated through networked
culture centres on participation, or the fuzzier, much-maligned term ‘interaction’. In
examining “the means by which the very terms of [mass participation] have been recast by
the subsequent development of networks” we may also ask the question “what constitutes
participation in an age of cybernetic systems?” Is the uploading of content under the
proprietary terms of some social networking site or other sufficient, or is it necessary to
participate in the framing and distribution of this content? Is play in a given videogame or
virtual world to be purely delimited by the coded limitations of that world and the terms and
conditions a player agrees to when signing up, or is it to be pursued outside of these
limitations? The latter possibilities in both of these questions are technical concerns as much
as they are social ones. Ultimately, the question of which specific approaches and practices
are required to participate beyond the interface layer—and whether these approaches and
practices are in fact capable of sustaining any political significance in the face of the
ubiquitous interface-based computing most obviously emblematised by the current craze for
cloud platforms—is a crucial one in thinking about participation under networked culture.
The second significant way in which the social and the technical become interrelated under
network culture relates to the scope of network science and the way in which existing
disciplines under that umbrella term constitute forms of power/knowledge. Terranova
identifies “an emerging science of networks” in the work of Barabasi, Watts, Lewis,
Newman, and the ‘Committee on Network Science for Future Army Applications and
National Research Council’. In addition to keeping abreast of emerging practices and
applications we must continue to examine the historical development of informatic
techniques for capture, definition, command and control. This can take a variety of forms,
from media-archaeological excavations of formal (logic, the algorithm, the network) and
technical (automata, programmable machines) systems to further research into the twentiethcentury
emergence of computation, cybernetics, game theory, bioinformatics and other
related fields. In each case, the historical (or archaeological) situation of network science is a
necessary companion to the examination of its emerging forms.
Finally, there is the socio-technical question of cultural politics after cybernetics. There has
been plenty of theoretical work, for example, on the ways in which digital media either do or
do not belong in a linear tradition of cultural production that runs from the epic to drama to
the novel to cinema and television, but little on the ways in which these older forms are
conceptually, materially, socially and economically transformed by the historical emergence
of computation and the network. If the social and the technical are indeed placed in a unique
interrelationship by cybernetics, then this latter approach is an essential procedure for
evaluating the political—rather than the purely formal or aesthetic—significance of the
network as a cultural form.
Seb Franklin (Anglia Ruskin University)