digital networks like the Web can simulate and experiment with different social architectures more easily than other forms of media (and, it would seem, other forms of direct human interaction).
Steven Johnson • Future Perfect
the eroding boundaries between top-down pop culture and bottom-up folk culture in contemporary society.
Limor Shifman • Memes in Digital Culture (MIT Press Essential Knowledge)
History books are ink on paper. They are linear narratives with beginning and ends. They are stories created from archival documents and from other books. Network culture, not really into that. Network culture differs from literary culture in a great many ways. And step one is that the operating system is an unquestioned given. The first thing you ... See more
Bruce Sterling • Atemporality for the Creative Artist
The power of these tools to make the world legible to humans in turn contribute to techno-determinism and network power: the belief that the tools produced in the most dominant societies by the most dominant groups are not only the best for everyone, but are inevitable and unassailable.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
(iii) Previously closed networks of production and knowledge are now open and accessible to creative and determined people everywhere. (iv) Open networks of production and communication are, in turn, enabling globally distributed collaboration and innovation on a massive, unprecedented scale.
Philip Auerswald • The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy
For the modern information economy, the computing grid is the railway system, the highway network, the electric grid, and the telephone system rolled into one.