Amazon River: Internetworking Practices, Networks, Culture

Philosopher Colin Koopman contrasts his reading of the significance of the internet - partly by problematizing 'internetworking practices' - with Manuel Castells':

cwkoopman.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/castells-seeing-networks-everywhere-he-looks

I think Castells successfully characterizes the emergence of the information technology revolution vis-à-vis previous industrial revolutions, and then extrapolates about the significance of these new developments, and concludes that networks emerge and are very significant to reading socioeconomic processes that are pervasive today.


For Castells, a paradigm shift occurs vis-a-vis the Information Technology Revolution which affects every aspect of socioeconomic life. There are 5 key aspects that give rise to the paradigm shift Castells characterizes:

These include:

1 INFORMATION GENERATION and PROCESSING is what this revolution is about.

2 It's PERVASIVE - it invades and influences every domain of socioeconomic activity.

3 It's characterized by NETWORKING - mentalities, companies, people - all network - and create synergies, based on these IT-related knowledge generation processes.

4 FLEXIBILITY is a key - the system is such that it reorganizes, and reprograms its components without disintegration.

5 It's INTEGRATING - The technological convergence that has occurred is an integrating system, and it's an open system, not closing, and it's bounded only by technological developments and innovations in ...


Here's an example of how a specific internetworking practice emerged:

Tim Berners-Lee almost single-handedly started the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee wrote the protocols for HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol), HTML (hyptertext markup language), URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and posted these to a BBS (bulletin board system) in 1989, which graduate students then disseminated these through various networks. Tim Berners-Lee wrote these protocols partly with Robert Cailliau's help.

Berners-Lee is British, and was living in Geneva, Switzerland at the time. With these protocols and markup language, people could then begin to post information on the web. And HTTP, HTML, and URL then made possible the development of graphical user interface browsers (in the early 1990s).



For Castells, the significant developments giving rise to the internet, in general, occurred in microelectronics, telecommunications, computing, and also in the genetic engineering revolution - which is also about information - the code of life.



To characterize the differences between his and Castells' readings of the internet, Colin writes:

"I see networking as one element of a broader problematization and reconstruction of the existing conditions of possibility of our culture. Castells sees networks as a blueprint for our culture. I see networks as a set of practices which renders problematic our existing blueprints at the same time that it enables new blueprints which we are as yet unprepared to assess. Castells sees in networks the logic of our present such that the networking form already contains all the problems and solutions constitutive of our present. I see these problems and solutions as in need of rigorous inquiry insofar as the network form itself does not fully disclose our situation. Castells seems to see networks everywhere he looks. I am only looking at, or rather into, internetworking.

Concluding Observation: It seems that nearly every time I read a sociologist who is writing about whatever I aim to write about I detect sizable gaps. By contrast when I read historians, anthropologists, and philosophers on my objects of inquiry, I always detect more resonances. In any event, I am perfectly well aware that perhaps I am misinterpreting Castells (and so misrepresenting him here). That, in short, is why I wanted to post this. Corrections welcome and in due time before I entrench my attitude toward the network society thesis."

In my reading of Castells, he doesn't so much focus on questions of culture in his socio-historical characterizations of what were largely a series of technologically-oriented accidents giving rise to the internet. Castells is not examining 'cultural questions,' but rather, starting from a Marxian perspective decades ago, asking what 'structural conditions' the internet give rise to, and observing that networks are very significant in today's world, especially for global information capitalism. Castells doesn't reify ('thingify') networks, but rather explains "The Rise of the Network Society," while not de-emphasizing "The Power of Identity," (a different reading of 'culture' from Colin's), at "The End of the Millenium" (the three titles of Castells' "Rise of the Network Society" trilogy). Now Professor Castells co-edits "The International Journal of Communication" (annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication/CastellsM.aspx).

To complement Colin's reading of Castells, such conclusions about the internet articulate well with ways in which we might further problematize internetworking practices in terms of culture, as they develop ahead. And like Colin Koopman, I agree that networking allows for "a broader problematization and reconstruction of the existing conditions of possibility of our culture," perhaps encompassing and superseding those that readings of modernity and postmodernity seek to explain (see Scott MacLeod's Gazing at the Box: Tourism in the Context of the Internet and Globalization).