Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Paperback)

by Tiziana Terranova (Author) "This is a book about (among other things) information and entropy, cybernetics and thermodynamics, mailing lists and talk shows, the electronic Ummah and chaos theory,..." (more)
Key Phrases: Kevin Kelly, Norbert Wiener, World Wide Web (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This is an innovative study of digital culture, in particular the politics of the emerging digital culture, and especially the cultural and political dimensions of network technologies. Across the cybercultural landscape of mailing lists, discussion groups, e-zines and the digital press, it sees the emergence of a new collective political subject, a networked intelligence.

The author touches on key concepts and debates in cultural theory and cultural politics, and makes use of student-friendly examples including cyberfeminism, activism and cyberorganising on the net – such as J18, Seattle, and the anti-war movement.

Terranova presents a sophisticated argument about what the new forms of communication and organisation mean for politics, democracy, and identity. The book draws on online debates about labour, self-organisation, virtual activism, and future identities to outline some of the features of current societies of control (following Hardt and Negri) and the political answers that are being formulated within these new digital cultures.

About the Author
Tiziana Terranova teaches the sociology of media and culture in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She has published various pamphlets and essays on digital cultures, in Italian and English.

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Pluto Press (June 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0745317480
• ISBN-13: 978-0745317489
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #564,285 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars poetic overview of network dynamics, November 8, 2004

By	Savanna Reid "a.k.a. gavin_rose (user 8) at G... (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.