network culture: Politics for the information age (Tiziana Terranova)

Introduction
p.2  It is a tendency of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a large milieu. What we used to call "media messages" no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane. Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and antagonisms.

p.4 In particular, I will follow the Autonomist Marxist suggestion that the extension of production to the    totality of a social system (the 'social factory' thesis) is related to the emergence of a 'general intellect' and 'mass intellectuality' pointing to capital's incapacity to absorb the creative powers that it has effectively unleashed.

Chapter 1  Three Propositions on Informational cultures
The Meaning of Information
(a)s a historical concept pointing to the definition, measurement, analysis and control of a mathematical function, information does not coincide with the rise of a digital media system. On the contrary, the appearance of information theory parallels the emergence and development of modern mass media such as telegraphy, telephony, radio and television. Unlike previous media such as print and writing, modern media, in fact, do not use the code of workday language, but 'make use of physical process which are faster than human perception and are only susceptible of formulation in the code of modern mathematics.'1 We could refer to the informatization of culture as starting with the analogue function of frequency, that is with the encoding of sound in the grooves of a gramophone record, where speech phonemes and musical intervals were recognized for the first time as complex frequency mixtures open to further mathematical analysis and manipulation, For Friedrich Kittler, it is also with telegraphy that information, in the form of massless flows of electromagnetic waves, is abstracted for the first time. In this sense, information is not simply the content of a message, or the main form assumed by the commodity in late capitalist economics, but also another name for the increasing visibility and importance of such 'massless flows' as they become the environment within which contemporary culture folds. In this sense, we can refer to informational cultures as involving the explicit constitution of an informational milieu– a milieu composed of dynamic and shifting relations between such 'massless flows.'
(1. Friedrich Kittler "The history of communication media")

Information and Noise

Proposition I: Information is what stands out from noise
Corollary Ia: Within informational cultures, the struggle over meanings is subordinated to that over "media effects"
corollary Ib: The cultural politics of information involves a return to the minimum conditions of communication (the relation of signal to noise and the problem of making contact)
p14 (a)n informational culture marks the point where meaningful experiences are under siege, continuously undermined by a proliferation of signs that have no reference, only statistical patterns of frequency, redundancy and resonance.
p15 The minimum condition for communication is contact–  a temporary suspension of the multitude of tiny and obscure perceptions out of which information emerges as a kind of fleeting clarity, as if a space had been successfully cleared.
The scene of communication is reduced to its minimum condition: that of making contact by clearing a channel from the threat of noise.
p 16 The first condition of a successful communication becomes that of reducing all meaning to information– that is to a signal that can be successfully replicated across a varied communication milieu with minimum alterations.
p18 The relation of communication for (Gilbert) Simondon does not take place between two reconstituted individuals, but between the preindividual (what within the formed individual resists individuation) and the collective (the dimension within which another type of individuation takes place)
p19 In as much as information concerns the problem of form it also poses the question of the organization of perception and the production of bodily habits which it foregrounds with relation to the emergence of social meanings. Within design and architecture, for example, information is also about the active transformation of bodily habits as this takes place around keyboards and chairs, games, trains and cars, buildings and small objects with which we perform all kind of daily actions. Information is not about brainwashing as a form of media effect, but it does informs habits and percepts and regulates the speed of a body by plugging it into a field of action. In this sense, the informational dimension of communication is not just about the successful delivery of a coded signal but also about contact and tactility, about architecture and design implying a dynamic modulation of material and social energies. Information works with forms of distracted perception by modulating the organization of a physical environment.

The Limits of Possibility


Nonlinearity of Representation
p28 Because information theory draws its theoretical underpinnings from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, it understands material processes as implying a nonlinear relation between macrostates (such as averages, but also identities, subjectivities, societies and cultures) and microstates (the multiplicity of particles and interactions that underlie macro states in as much as they also involve irreversible processes). This has a double consequence for our understanding of the cultural politics of information: on the one hand, it implies a shift away from representation to modulation which emphasizes the power of the mutating and divergent; on the other hand, it locates informational dynamics outside the perspectival and three-dimensional space of modernity and within an immersive, multidimensional and transformative topology.
p 34  (t)he cultural politics of information does not address so much the threat of "disembodiment," or the disappearance of the body, but its microdissection and modulation, as it is split and decomposed into segments of variable and adjustable sizes.
The emergence of information as a concept, then, should also be related to the development of a set of techniques, including marketing strategies and techniques of communication management– as they attempt to capture the increasing randomness and volatility of culture.
The New Economy apologists, for example, famously postulated three stages of media power: broadcasting, narrowcasting and point casting. The latter corresponded to a digital mode in which messages were not simply directed at groups but tailored to individuals and even sub-individual units (or as Gilles Deleuze called them, 'dividuals', which results from the decomposition of individuals into data clouds subject to automated integration and disintegration. )

p35 Gender, race and sexuality, the mantra of the cultural politics of difference in the 1980s and 1990s, have been reduced to recombinable elements, disassociated from their subjects and recomposed on a plane of modulation– a close sampling of the micromutations of the social, moving to the rhythm of market of market expansions and contractions.

p.35 (t)he foregrounding of informational flows across the socius also implies a crisis of representation (both linguistic and political). The statistical modulation of information is highly disruptive in its relation to representation because it undermines the perspectival and three-dimensional space which functions as a support for relations of mirrors and reflections as they engender subjects, identities and selves.
eg. recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence       representational map replaced by a direct relationship between sensors and motors

p.37 Space becomes informational not so much when it is computed by a machine, but when it presents an excess of sensory data, a radical indeterminacy in our knowledge, and a nonlinear temporality involving a multiplicity of mutating variables and different intersecting levels of observation and interaction. ... An informational space is inherently immersive, excessive and dynamic... It is not so much a three-dimensional, perspectival space where subjects carry out actions and relate to each other, but a field of displacements, mutations and movements that do not support the actions of a subject, but decompose it, recompose it and carry it along.