Such talk about technology is banal now. Books that talk breathlessly about how everything has changed are common, but we've been remarkably uninterested in making sense of this condition in historical terms. Contrast this to modernity and postmodernity, both of which were inseparable from historicism, regardless of what modernists and postmodernists may have said of their day. The moderns sought to ground the flux around them by identifying the unique characteristics of their time, discerning the connections beneath seemingly disparate phenomena. The postmoderns claimed to be dubious of such narratives but they too couldn't escape from understanding their time as a distinct period, basing that distinctness on a traumatic rupture from modernity.^[1] In contrast, we have no sense that something has happened, we can point to no definitive moment or break when network culture emerged. The privatization of the Internet, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the crash of the dot.com boom, the 9/11 attacks, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the collapse of the real estate bubble are all historical signposts in network society but none of these mark a rupture. Nor is there any accepted sense of a clear discontinuity. Postmodernism just faded away. Apart from a few academics, nobody seemed to care.

If neither modernist evolution nor postmodern rupture serves as adequate model of historical succession for us, we need to employ a different model that takes into account continuityLet's think instead of force, plateaus, saturation, and intensity. As a force saturates a field, the degree of intensity within that field increases, simultaneously becoming both more economic and more effective. As energy levels rise and fall, they cause society to pass through tipping points, producing phase-shifts between states or plateaus. Read this way, network culture is an intensification of postmodernism and postmodernism, in turn, is an intensification of modernism.^[2] We have passed by a threshold or tipping point, leaving postmodernity behind, but one of the consequences of intensification is that whereas such passages were previously legible as ruptures, this threshold is imperceptible to us.

As a term, postmodernism was divisive, and its advocates insistence upon a rupture with modernism, forced theorists to position themselves for or against it. From the start, postmodernism is oppositional even if what it opposes is not always clear: its liberal advocates lead an aesthetic fight against the hegemony of a corporatized modernism, while conservative advocates cheer a return to historical form in the arts, and still others challenge earlier forms of thought with new, more contingent epistemologies.[3]

For us, the quarrel between the moderns and the postmoderns is a hard-to-understand war of the past. Not only are these movements distant from us, the very idea of a movement that advocates its time is. This is not to say t[4]hat theorists haven't tried to label the present in a similar fashion: "post-postmodernity," "fluid modernity," "second modernity," "altermodernity," "digimodernity," or "automodernity" are just a few of the labels that have been attached to the present. But these have failed to stick. Network culture simply does not take a stance toward the previous era or invoke a temporal break to justify itself.

Our model of intensification explains this: our inability to name our period is nothing less than an intensification of postmodernist anti-historicism. We realize what the postmoderns only dreamt in theory: an era that has stopped understanding itself historically. We regard history, when we do so at all, as an amusement, a disconnected set of trivia or a mine for styles more than as a lived reality. It isn't the history of the 1960s that concerns us; it's the veracity of the sets on Mad Men.

Even more tellingly, nobody turns to historians to understand the present. Books on network society have been written from the perspective of media studies, law, sociology, politics, even religion but historians have largely remained absent from this discourse. ^[5] A generation trained by the disciples of Karl Popper and Jean-François Lyotard has little interest in broad historical narratives, let alone ones claiming to frame the present day. Instead, historians confine themselves behind a thirty-year moving wall, the conventional wisdom being that a generation should have passed since the period that one studies to allow events to recede into perspectival distance. But this premise is flawed. Any history of the past is inadvertently a history of the present; the concerns, questions, and discourses of our time inform our reading of the other times. History, as the old adage goes, is a bag of tricks to play on the dead. No historian can claim objective and full knowledge of a topic. Instead, we produce insight through abstraction, carefully selecting facts and arranging them into compelling and meaningful, but still verifiable-or at least debatable-stories. Displacement is equally dangerous: if we can't pull the present out of our reading of the past, to seek allegories for the present in the past is as much a mistake.

When I argue for a historical understanding of network culture, I am not suggesting we try to populate a timeline of events or turn to chronological succession. As Fernand Braudel once wrote, "Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion."^[6] My goal is to come to an understanding of the underlying structures of our time, not to reproduce its chronology through narrative. [7] As I will argue in chapter one, atemporality is a trap. If periodization is flawed as a model, repressing it is fatal. Claiming to avoid periodization, as Fredric Jameson suggests, allows the return of the repressed term at the level of narrative. Indeed, Jameson concludes "We cannot not periodize."[8] Even as historians claim to give up periodization, they continue to deploy terms like the renaissance, early modern, modern, or the postmodern. Having left behind the notion of the Zeitgeist, historians seem to be comfortable with the provisional frameworks they have become accustomed to as a means of testing relationships across disparate social and cultural phenomena. If we are unable to abandon periods then we need to be conscious about their use, not give in easily to arguments that need to be themselves placed in historical perspective.

If the network defines our time and if naming it doesn't come easily to us, perhaps we can accept "network culture" for provisional use, at least in this book. This is a nod to Castells's idea of the network society as a key reference point drawing together globalization with social and technical changes to produce a theoretical understanding of our era. Beyond Castells, however "network culture" seems to have some currency. Books such as Mark C. Taylor's The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture or Tiziana Terranova'sNetwork Culture: Politics for the Information Age establish a precedent for the term in scholarship. [9] Centers of study employ it as well, notably Geert Lovink's Institute for Network Culture and Douglas Thomas's Network Culture Project at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication. ^[10]

Existing analyses of network culture, however, largely isolate it in online media. Studies of new media are indispensable precedents for us, but network culture's effects are broader. Extending network culture from the purview of media studies to a broader historical understanding makes sense in part because of the more mature and pervasive nature of new media technologies today. During the 1990s, new technologies were still relatively isolated in culture, capable of being studied as "new media," their role circumscribed. Today new media have matured significantly, their influence spreading throughout society.

Historically, networks have been a fundamental human trait, civilization itself being the product of our need to make connections. We have been networked since the invention of language, if not before. Still, while we could understand all human history or, for that matter, modernity from the standpoint of the network-in terms of rapid forms of ocean and surface travel coupled with the telephone and the telegraph-something else is happening now. The network, Castells observes, is now the dominant means of social organization, the morphology of society. ^[1] Corporations, universities, even governments, not only embrace the network, they adopt it as an organizational model.

Where Castells's observations are primarily socioeconomic, with a side interest in culture, my ambition is to look at culture, which played a particular, crucial role in postmodernity. Postmodernism, for Jameson, is the cultural logic of late capitalism: capital colonized art as cultural technologies spread in industry. Postmodern artists reacted by abandoning the modernist project of autonomy and instead set out to blur the boundaries between high and low.[2] Under network culture, however, any distinction between high and low is leveled utterly. Contemporary art dismisses the populist projection of the audience's desires into art for the incorporation of the audience's desires into art and the blurring of boundaries between media and public. ^[3] Today whether a cultural artifact is cool or not matters more than its status in high and low (indeed, today unless the object is first cool, styling it as high ensures that it will be understood as kitsch). ^[4]

Beyond this kind of direct transaction between culture and the socioeconomic, my theoretical project is indebted to the Regulation School's understanding of how culture acts to regulate individuals and groups, allowing them to come together in a manner of behavior that keeps the regime of accumulation, or economic system going. Religion, class relations, family life, and habits of consumption all play a role in affecting the economic behavior of individuals. Employing the concept of culture as a form of regulation allows us to understand that subjectivity and desire have a crucial impact on the economic realm even if they are not directly determined by it.[5] In other words-and this can't be stressed enough-if technology and economy are key factors in shaping culture, they are shaped by culture as well.

Economic determinism is one danger for a project like this, but in stating that the network is the cultural dominant of our age, I can't avoid conjuring up the specter of technological determinism, the reduction of history to a product of the tools available to a society. But the error of technological determinism is not just that it reduces progress to technological developments, it's that it extracts technology from society. Technology is a social product, constituted by-and constituting-society: the acceptance and use of a given tool is dependent on a social milieu and in turn technological tools are necessary to produce society. As an explanatory model, neither social nor technological determinism is sufficient. And yet, the real lesson here is an epistemological one; network culture often understands itself as technologically determined. We are obsessed with technology as perhaps never before and thus more prone to think of it as a historical cause.

Modernism has a more mixed relationship with regard to technology and change. In Marshall Berman's summation: "To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformations of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are…" [6] From the celebration of the technological destruction of tradition by the Futurists to the scientific understanding of vision at the Bauhaus to the machine aesthetic and technologism of Le Corbusier in the 1920s, many modernists embrace social, political, and technological change. Others, such as Paul Klee, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, and even the late Le Corbusier set out against the threat of unrestrained progress, declaring what Berman describes as a "decisive 'No!'" to aspects of modern life.

Postmodernism is more resolutely post-technological, dissatisfied with technology and rejecting the Utopian promises of modernization. With nuclear weapons a constant threat and a reminder of the dangers of science, the energy crisis, the end of the Apollo missions to the moon, the bankruptcy of modernist urbanism, the collapse of the modernist project in art, all lend postmodernism the sense of lateness, the mood of an era of limits. Under postmodernism, technology is regarded with wary pessimism. As late as the early 1990s, historian of science Leo Marx writes"'Technological pessimism' may be a novel term, but most of us seem to understand what it means. It surely refers to that sense of disappointment, anxiety, even menace, that the idea of 'technology' arouses in many people these days."[7] Marx observes that the Enlightenment ideal of progress toward a just society shifted toward first to the idea that technology was a key means to help achieve that aim, then to the belief that technology was itself the basis of societal progress. Disillusioned by a series of technological disasters (oil spills, environmental pollution, an out-of-control arms race, and so on) and the failure of a better society to come about due to technological advance, people became much more gloomy about its prospects. Generally seeing postmodernist skepticism as healthy, a cause for optimism, Marx also raises a flag of caution: "What many postmodern theorists often propose in rejecting the old illusion of historical progress is a redescription of social reality that proves to be even more technocratic than the distorted Enlightenment ideology they reject." That new technocratic narrative is none other than the network. [8] Marx observes that for two of the most important theorists of postmodernism, Lyotard and Jameson, the new global telecommunications networks are analogous to late capitalism, their flows of data thoroughly permeating society. This concerns Marx, since he feels that this too is a technologically determinist position even as the fatalism of the postmodernists strikes him as disconcerting. [9]

If theories of the network are latent in postmodernism, they are still unformed. The network's future role is unclear. Even in the early 1990s when Marx is writing, networks and media had hardly changed in a half-century. Television had acquired color, cable, and videotapes, but the mass media of the 1980s was structurally little different than the mass media of the 1950s, only marginally more differentiated. Television still dominated a media system in which signals flowed top-down from a relatively small number of producers to a vast body of consumers. For postmodern theorists, media is all but equivalent to the television, the networked computer being either an abstract idea derived from secondhand knowledge about mainframe technology or, alternatively, an enhanced television (for passive reception) more than anything else.

The network, then, is the limit of the postmodern. Sensing the network's all-pervasive nature, the postmodern theorists are unable to dwell fully within it or see past its horizon and instead are forced to describe it only as an analog for capital, a vague conflux of mass media.

As postmodernism faded in the 1990s, techno-utopianism replaced techno-pessimism. The rapid transformation of everyday life through technology in the 1990s and 2000s suggested to enthusiasts that technology would naturally lead to positive societal change. Soon, media writers brought back techno-utopianism, blending the bohemianism and libertarianism prevalent in the San Francisco Bay Area with an enthusiasm for technology. Proponents of this position argue that new communications technologies make possible a Jeffersonian democracy of equals, capable of freely expressing themselves and deliberating about the crucial issues of our day in the electronic agora.[1]

Even with the collapse of the economy in the fall of 2008, few seem to expect a slowdown in technological progress. On the contrary, to many technology is the way past economic collapse. In stark distinction from postmodernism, technological pessimism is now hard to find. Although the limits of nature continue to be keenly felt-global warming, peak oil, and genetic abnormalities are all great concerns of our day-generally speaking our hope is that innovation will rescue us. We've absorbed a market mentality: live for the moment and let new technologies or net businesses take care of old problems. The environmentalist movement of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is now replaced by the thoroughly commodified "green movement," the call to action of Silent Spring replaced by recycled-plastic shopping bags. Even the concern about global warming evokes technological solutions.

Much of the contemporary writing about technology and society today is enthusiastic about change. This is particularly true for those writers who investigate new, technological forms of cultural production. In part, this is necessary for political purposes-for example to encourage reform (or at least discourage negative change) of copyright laws that inhibit the use of remix or to stimulate government policies that would support the deployment of new media in education. Provisionally, such work is necessary, but such arguments get in the way of fully examining our moment historically. There is much to applaud about network culture, but much to condemn as well.

I set out writing this book without a preconceived idea that network culture is either positive or negative, a position likely to ensure a negative reaction from both network culture's critics and its enthusiasts alike. Unquestionably, there is much to be said for the new, networked life that is emerging. But we must be critical, challenging network culture where it needs to be challenged, curbing our enthusiasm where necessary and agitating against it as conditions warrant.

Finally, a word about the scope of this book. If my goal is a global understanding of network culture, I set out to do this as someone who teaches both in the United States and Ireland and also has roots in Lithuania. One of the defining characteristics of network culture is its global scope. But if the network has no center, its most dominant nodes are nevertheless in the United States and Europe, even as the rest of the world continues its rise. The West continues to dominate the network through its control of political institutions, finance, media, and technology. That said, nothing could be more important than counter-narratives of our time from other cultures, a task for which I am by no means qualified.

This book is organized around six chapters, each of which addresses a key chapter of network culture.

Chapter One, "Time" opens with the paradox: how to understand ahistorical network culture in a historical context? The chapter begins with a discussion of how history emerged under modernity, flourished through postmodernity, and met its demise at the end of the millennium. Continuing to set the theoretical and historical stage for the book's main arguments, the chapter inventories changes in temporality and historicity in society, their impact on cultural forms as and crucial changes in the temporality of capital.

Chapter Two, "Space" compliments the chapter on time with an examination of the development of space within network culture, offering a geographic and spatial understanding of the contemporary moment. This chapter looks at how networks structure a new spatial condition, exceeding the capacity of the Cartesian grid. The world is thoroughly urban and yet, for the first time, social encounters are as likely to occur in placeless media as in a physical place. This chapter introduces theories of networked economies and globalization as well as the structure of networked, converged communications and surveys attempts to map networks visually in art and design.

Chapter Three, "Publics" builds on the idea of networked publics that we developed in the volume of the same name. ^[1] As place gets more demographically fragmented, so does the idea of the public. This chapter contrasts the idea of the public sphere and mass culture to a networked public in which consumers and producers begin to blur and cultural consumption takes place along a long tail of niche audiences. I explore how network culture witnesses the fall of both the institutions of mass culture-the record labels and television networks-and the institutions of the public sphere-the newspaper, magazines, and academic journals. This chapter also addresses the political consequences of networked publics and the art movement of relational aesthetics.

Chapter Four, "Poetics" provides an overview of the change in culture from Enlightenment ideas of realism to an immediated reality (a paradoxically unmediated presentness embodied in media). In particular, this chapter looks at our construction of reality through the cultural forms of network culture. Along with the fall of the periodical, the dominant literary form of the Enlightenment, the novel, is increasingly obsolete, replaced instead by the documentary. This chapter also explores the rise of reality television and, a new obsession with reality in art. Here I also turn to related trends in art, especially oversaturation which uses sensory intensity to embody its presentness. The chapter concludes with a discussion of video games as an emerging form of art in network culture.

Chapter Five, "Subjectivity" explores the dispersal of the subject under network culture. Here I draw a sharp contrast between the Enlightenment, an era dominated by specialization and distinction, and today, in which these begin to disappear. After a brief discussion of poststructuralist theories of subjectivity, I turn to the impact of the network on the subject today. In particular, I read this through the rise of remix as a cultural practice, not only in music but also in visual art. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the end of privacy and our collective renunciation of privacy.

Chapter Six, "Control" concludes the book with an assessment of both economy and political ideology. The chapter begins with a survey of economics the last two decades and the network effects that animate it while leading to greater disparities of wealth and power. The book concludes with an assessment of how network culture and neoliberalism have shaped each other and the prospects for change under these conditions