rough guide to connected / disconnected society (for courses)
(more holes than wholes here) stages of networking: A degree zero to telegraphy: cohering with the obdurate/analogic real. to get from here to there: move from here to there. cross the rubicon. slip- pages: smoke signals, voice, military bugles, etc. but not enormous. this is the world before the jump-cut. industrial revolution. local knowledge. bullae, tablet, mail. B degree 1/2 to telephony: linear non-redundant communication, voiceless, abstracted. where wire is, communication is; the obdurate/analogic appears in the form of linear connectivity: from here to there, is wire. morse and other codings tending on one hand towards universal standards and on the other towards local compaction. mass industrialization. regional know- ledge. visual telegraphy, telegraph, pony-express. digital loom, early digital constructs. diorama, inert real-time special effects. concepts of class consciousness, alienation. C degree 3/4 to internet: multiplexing, voiced, incipient digital communi- cation. beginnings of satellite technology. party-lines, cb and ham radio - carriers are abstracted, but voice returns the analogic, presencing of the body. connection almost always appears to be one-to-one. start of internet, fidonet, bbs, buffered news including radio and television. the social characterized by intensifications and delays. fordism, beginnings of post-fordism, communication-mode community. nation-centrism, patriot- ism. airmail, telegram, tickertape. vacuum tube, mercury delay lines, mainframes, beginnings of protocol suites. role-playing games. inert and buffered special effects. concepts of mass society and culture industry. D degree 1: internet: universal abstracted digital connectivity, construc- ted truth and truth values. web 2.0, beginnings of universal interfacing, community, connectivity. hidden costs of industrialization 'elsewhere': universal exploitation as well. (inauthentic) transparency of time and space, collapse of histories into micro-histories. what might have been the simulacrum or society of the spectacle becomes everyday life. capital, communication, data-base, and body are one. universal knowledge for those who have both economic and cultural capital. email, online communities and virtual worlds. digital special effects, buffered and non-buffered. concepts of identity theft, conspiracy, matrix, singularity. E degree > 1: information-mass, mass individuation, encapsulation of history, tottering eco-systems, populations, massive extinctions, mass starvation, and so forth. 'the wobbling pivot.' degrees of disconnect: this is a mapping of 'degrees of separation' with dual tendencies: 1. towards the elimination of alterity in favor of protocol-relationships. complex relation with capital, personal accumulation; local, national, and international knowledge, sequestered fundamentalisms. accommodation to power. (exceptions abound.) 2. towards clandestine, hidden, or effaced alterity and analogic labor, governance, regional knowledge. top-down multinationals, regional con- flicts, gangsterisms, overpopulation, open fundamentalisms. (exceptions abound.) as with lyotard, we look entanglement of 1 and 2, and of network degrees. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
