network culture

Preface

My current research project—already well underway—is a book that sets out to synthesize a historical understanding of our era, coming to terms with the changed conditions in culture, subjectivity, ideology, and aesthetics that characterize our new, networked age. I explore how the network is not merely a technology with social ramifications but rather unites changes in society, economy, aesthetics, and ideology.

Just as the machine made modern industrialization possible and also acted as a model for a rationalized, compartmentalized modern society while the programmable computer served the same role for the flexible socioeconomic milieu of postmodernism, today the network not only connects the world, it reconfigures our relationship to it. In this book I will argue that many of the key tenets of culture since the Enlightenment: the subject, the novel, the public sphere, are being radically reshaped.

Beyond the Introduction, now posted below, the conclusion to Networked Publics, available here is a good entry point to what I am trying to do. A two-year-old chart that contrasts network culture to modernism and postmodernism can be found here.

I am posting this work as a networked book, albeit with a caveat: like the if:book projects such as GAM3R 7H3ORY, this is a single-author work. Given some of academic necessities, I am keeping editing closed.

I do, however, absolutely encourage feedback from my readers. In order to keep it manageable, I have put comments on a separate "talk" page. To see comments side by side with the text, try opening two browser windows, one for the text and one for the talk. 

I am posting this book in draft form. As such, it is less polished than makes me comfortable. As I revise it, revisions will be visible on separate revisions tabs.