Network Culture

Network Culture is a major Netlab project 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. We explore the network not merely as a technology with social ramifications but rather as a cultural dominant that 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. We argue that many of the key tenets of culture since the Enlightenment: the subject, the novel, the public sphere, are being radically reshaped.

publications:

the immediated now

simultaneous environments

the rise of network culture

podcast:

network culture: a changing context for design

book in progress:

the meaning of network culture: a history of the contemporary