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February 09, 2005
break, glean, assemble
I want to pick up on Mike's provocative suggestion of a 19th Century network literacy. One of the potentially productive ambiguities about networks is the fact that it can mean at least three distinct things:
- we speak of all sorts of technologies, from computers to television to transportation to telecommunications, as being linked together in networks
- we speak of networking (or schmoozing) as a social, professional activity--sometimes opposing "who you know" and "what you know"
- finally, there's the network/net/matrix/cyberspace that has emerged in the past decade or so
Now obviously, I'm asking primarily about this last one, but Mike's right, I think, to observe that these other networks are part of the "bundle" that we bring with us as we think about contemporary networks. And perhaps one answer to this week's question is that a network literacy can help us look both forward and backward.
I'm thinking, for example, of Clay Shirky's essay on the Dean campaign, "Exiting Deanspace." Although there's certainly more to it than this, one of Shirky's themes is the contrast between Dean's massive fund-raising and buzz-generating network, much of which took place online, and the geographical networks (primaries, caucuses, etc.) that accord a disproportionate amount of political clout to Iowa and New Hampshire, to say nothing of the media networks that emplotted his campaign in a particular way.
And that's a tension I see operating in Derek's thoughts on the increased overlap between his physical, interpersonal network (aka CCR) and his more distributed blog network.
Part of my advice is to avoid jumping to the conclusion that there is a (single, monolithic, given) network that you either know or you don't--that yes/no threshold is one of the problems that I have personally with the idea of literacy, and I hope that we can get past this threshold tomorrow during discussion. That's all for now...
Posted by cgbrooke at February 9, 2005 11:23 PM
Comments
this intersection w/what mike brought up prompted (in part) the post i wrote in c&a mid-day yesterday. it's on enough other tangents that i didn't want to clog up the works over here by re-posting, but if anybody wants to take a look, it's there.
Posted by: ttobryan at February 10, 2005 09:23 AM