Customer Reviews

Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age

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In this beautifully written overview of the socio-political dynamics of networks, Terranova describes the shift from representation to modulation (in both images and ideas, a technic that foregrounds the communicator's agenda by replacing positions with explicit expressions of vectors for change), and the accompanying shift away from identity politics - replacing the difference/position couple with mutation/movement in open systems. She explores the "hydrodynamic" potential of the internet to channel images and meanings through a segmented and capillary system of communication, in which the spectators no longer form an amorphous mass, but operate instead in a fractal ecology of social niches and microniches. She addresses the active and persistent engagement of the networked audience-participants in a chapter about the abundance of free (uncompelled, and unwaged) labor on which most successful internet projects depend, and contrasts web-community volunteerism with the level of audience engagement demanded by ordinary (and now, "reality") television shows. Finally, she looks at the potential of cellular automata models of "soft control" and their application to the upstream battle against entropy and heat-death on the internet.

I am a graduate student of Film and Media Studies, and the minute students in my program started reading this book, everyone was recommending it to everyone else. It's inspired and galvanized our whole department. Just writing this review makes me want to re-read it!