From Imagined Communities to Imagined Networks

Milwaukee.
The second keynote here at AoIR 2009 is by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. She begins by noting the theme of this conference, Internet: Critical, which she says brilliantly captures the trajectory of the Internet thus far. If television is intimately linked to catastrophe, then the Net finds its justification, temporality, and crisis in crisis itself, in the critical - it is a crisis / critical machine. But the Net has not ended theory, or the need for theory, if we see theory as a way to resolve crisis, but spread theory everywhere. It has made ubiquitous (and thus banal) networks, which themselves depend on how they are imagined.

The Net has been theorised, sold, and (sometimes) experienced as a critical machine - as a turning point in, as a solution to, the crisis of everything (a mid-90s MCI commercial for its Internet access service suggested that 'there is no race, gender, etc.' online, for example). The Net was similarly seen as dissolving the nation state (as in John Perry Barlow's declaration of the independence of cyberspace, or Al Gore's vision of the new age of Athenian democracy, or Bill Gates's utopia of friction-free capitalism). The Net was seen as a space that allows its users to critique power, to speak truth to power, as a Habermasian bourgeois public sphere. This is intertwined also with the notion of the Net as technology, as progress, as something that renders everything knowable, observable, predictable.

George Allen's infamous 'Macaca' slur during the last US election campaign is one example for this, and the New York Times asked in return whether the constant surveillance of politicians would lead to the removal of the last shred of authenticity from public officials aiming to be elected - but at the same time, people are also regularly recording and sharing their most infamous moments online. The critical ideal is that better information leads to better knowledge, and those guarantees better decisions.

New media and its technologies race towards the bleeding edge of obsolescence where we're encountering the possibility of screwing up our operating system just to get the latest upgrades - and this applies to software as much as to other areas touched by the Net. Coverage of the Iranian post-election protests was as much about the social media technologies used to organise the protests as much as about the protests themselves; at the same time as the Net is celebrated as resolving rational critical debate, though, it is also condemned as the cyberbadlands, as an unruly environment that purveys porn, dismantles the nation state, encourages cyberstalking, etc. If the Net is enlightening, then it brings the soft light of rationality as much as the harsh light of the undesirable, of crisis.

Crisis is a condensation of temporality (of normal time). If TV is a catastrophe machine, with alleged access to the live and real, to singularity within continuity, if it renders crises catastrophic and national, something we merely respond to, then the Net on the other hand privileges crisis and demands responsibility, the necessity to respond and act. This need to respond can also be viewed as an abdication of responsibility, however: it requires trivial responses rather than strategic ones, it automates decision. The Net is build on TCP/IP, a transmission control protocol, but technological control does not mean social control; freedom cannot be reduced to control but grounds and confounds control - freedom makes control necessary.

This framing is part of the framing of the Net as a crisis or critical machine: it is calling for responding to and resolving crisis conditions. This is linked to the way the Net spawns and challenges theory: theory in crisis, in the critical, resonate with one another - most importantly because theory, too, is a relation to an event, seeks to change an event. Theoria were an official group of citizens called upon to witness an event, and the opposite of this is aesthetics, or ordinary seeing.

The Net makes such witnessing both crucial and impossible - we no longer can witness all events, we no longer can know all the Net in theory, we no longer can know the total extent of the Internet and the communicative actions, the information, the knowledge it supports. A global picture of the Net is no longer possible; we are in the position of the six blind men attempting to describe the elephant but each seeing only a small part of it and thus describing it vastly differently.

The invisibility, ubiquity, and alleged power of the Net seem to lend themselves to this analogy which was originally about comprehending the divine - but now what we're trying to understand is software and networks (a theme addressed in Wendy's new book on the emergence of software as a distinct thing). Today, for example, the answer to what is new in society is usually 'the network' - whether this is global financial networks, friends networks on social media sites, networks as the diagram for bureaucratic or social organisations, or anything else.

This notion of the network as a diagramme is oddly tautological: the network itself is a diagramme, after all, or more exactly a diagrammatic representation of interconnected events, processes, nodes, etc. The definition is slippery because networks themselves are based on slipperyness, on flow, but this is very difficult to represent in network maps, as it exceeds the very network map which we attempt to capture: what slips through a network is not what is too find to be caught in its mesh - what slips through a network is what refuses to be moved, to interest others.

Wireless networks, for example, are an oxymoron - they attempt to cover all areas, rather than connecting nodes within what are otherwise blind spots. To understand this, Wendy points to the work of Jon Kleinberg, who has analysed the small-world nature of online communication - but this description is an imagined structure, a structure of understanding which is imposed on the technological network based on the interactions of its users. The network has become a cliche not because we know the network, but because we don't: networks are neither technological nor social, but imagined, and this is what makes them meaningful to us (much like Benedict Anderson's imagined communities, on which this idea draws, of course).

The current crisis in print publication makes clear that the idea of imagined communities as propped up by the operation of the mass media is in trouble - but this does not mean that people no longer feel they belong to communities: rather, the logic has moved towards the network, and we now see ourselves as belonging to a range of imagined networks.

Wendy suggests that there are two key new concepts here: the non-simultaneous new, and the enduring ephemeral. She explains this through the battle between Cyworld and Facebook, and begins by noting that the social media portal page has today become the new homepage. But such a site can only be a portal if it provides access to an otherwise closed space; yet today, the value of such portals stems from what it encloses as open - where past logic was to create gated communities, this is changing.

So, the Korean social media site Cyworld is an example for this; some 90% of all South Koreans under 20 are Cyholics, allegedly (and South Korea is one of the most wired nations in the world, of course, and has a vibrant online scene not dominated by US companies). To go on Cyworld, users must identify themselves using their citizen ID number, so there is a clear link between online and offline identities rather than a promise of anonymity. Cyworld released a US version in 2006, and it was expected to be a real competitor to MySpace, but interestingly the US Cyworld was hermetically separate from the Korean one; the US site also mimicked an earlier version of the Korean site. It did not do well, and is now becoming much more like Facebook, while Facebook is becoming more like the current Cyworld system.

These national stabilities are ephemeral, and the desire for change and mobility is increasingly sated by what can be seen as involuntary surveillance (such as the Facebook newsfeeds). Lurkers' unintentional events (such as site visits) have now become more visible, which has encouraged more lurkers to start taking control of their updates and generate real content of their own. Cyworld as a system plays on the Korean idea of family (it uses a 'first relation' rather than 'friend' metaphor to describe its user relations).

If the Internet was originally seen as beyond the nation state, then this idea is diametrically opposed to what can today be observed online, for example in the South Korean protests against US beef imports last year (fuelled also by reports that 94% of South Koreans were genetically predisposed to mad cow disease - leading to a view of the South Korean people as truly one unified people). There were massive demonstrations in the country, and this led to significant policy changes and the resignation of three cabinet ministers - so from this perspective, it can be claimed that the Internet is inherently enabling nationalism, as the protests were organised and orchestrated, as well as covered and followed, in a significant way using online and mobile technologies. (The protests were also seen as a significant advertisement for Internet TV, incidentally...)

Part of the power of the network generation stems from the imagining of Korea as a biological network that must be defended - the young people whom the protests most intended to protect were seen as the future of the nation. (The South Korean president, on the other hand, viewed these protests as an 'infodemic'...) Beef itself is a national promise as much as a reality, too - Koreans don't eat as much beef as the protests suggests.

So, returning to the elephant parable, we can only understand the network overall if someone grabs and guides our hands as we reach towards the beast, Wendy suggests.

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