Author Archives: praxis

Adrian Mackenzie’s focus is on the experience of ‘wirelessness’ which he frames through a reading of William James’ ‘radical empiricism’. In order to deal with the way that wirelessness is articulated through protocols, regimes of digital signal processing and what Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell call the “infrastructure of experience” (2007), Mackenzie develops a particular …

Continue reading “Mackenzie: network and the conjunctive”

While some writers have embraced or extended the concept of ‘network’ as a tool to imag(in)e the media ecology or information topology emerging around and through the Internet, others have been wary. Prefiguring many of the current discussions about ‘cyber-scpeticism’ (Lanier 2010, Turkle 2011, Carr 2010, Morozov 2011, Harkin 2009), Anna Munster and Geert Lovink …

Continue reading “Munster & Lovink: bringing network down to earth”

Like Castells, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker also draw on a variation of information theory within their account of network as a political ontology (2007). They use a discussion of graph theory, which “provides us with a standard connect-the-dots-situation” (p31).  This means: “a number of relationships can be quantitatively analyzed” (p31) and gives them the …

Continue reading “Galloway & Thacker: antagonistic clusterings and enfolded alliances”

The idea of the ‘network’ is an important one for discussions of the new scopic regime that I argue is being set in motion by actants including the jpeg protocol. Whether it is used with or without the definite article, singular or plural, capitalised or not, the concept is an active force in most, if …

Continue reading “Castells: enfolded nodes and networks”