Social Media and Affect: Seminar @ University of East London (chaired by Tony D. Sampson) 27Feb2015

Networkologies A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age - A Manifesto by Christopher Vitale (Zero Books, September 2014)

Networkologies

A Philosophy of Networks for a Hyperconnected Age - A Manifesto

Networkologies is the first text to develop an entire new philosophy based upon networks. While many contemporary texts on networks have presented critiques or analyses of network formations in our world, this book is the first to develop an entirely new worldview based on the structure of networks themselves. From global capitalism to artificial minds, evolutionary biology to quantum physics, networks are our future. Networkologies presents us with a new image of thought for our hyperconnected age.

• We all know that we live in a networked world; but we do not really know just what a "network" is. In this important and vital book, Christopher Vitale provides us with a full-fledged philosophy of networks. He considers the questions of where networks come from, of how they change and develop, and of what conditions may lead to their (and our) continued flourishing. Networkologies is solidly grounded in the latest science, but it is also a powerful work of speculative philosophy. It gives us both a vision of what we are, and intimations of what we might become. ~ Steven Shaviro, author of "Post-Cinematic Effect", Professor of English at Wayne State University
• Vitale is opening a truly philosophical, typological and topological understanding of networks in Contemporary Culture, well beyond the usual technical accounts of Internet development. Entering in a natural dialogue with some masters which have reflected on the concept and practice of relation (Bergson, Deleuze, Simondon among others), Vitale turns himself as a profound new voice which unveals the fascinating philosophical combinatorics of cultural complex systems. Through a series of well-defined tetrads, including immanence/relation/refraction/emergence, and node/link/ground/process, Vitale circumnavigates the explosive contradictions of our times,to offer new perspectives of visualization and integration. ~ Fernando Zalamea, Professor of Mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Colombia
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Nascista del populismo digitale: Il modello organizzativo eterarchico (Par. 24) by Obsolete Capitalism

Il modello organizzativo eterarchico (Par. 24)

(Febbraio 2013. Nascista del populismo digitale) - Scarica l'intero saggio in PDF

Il network, la Rete, anche nella sua declinazione social non può avere una struttura gerarchica. Il network deve essere necessariamente orizzontale: è nel suo DNA. Il web non ha ragione d’essere se non nella sua costitutività realizzata da nodi, archi, connessioni. Il modello organizzativo top down non può dunque essere perseguito. La rigidità dell’organizzazione del partito classico “fordista-taylorista” è pertanto rifiutata dal populismo digitale nel nome di un “governato” disordine, utile però a fronteggiare la non-prevedibilità dei sistemi complessi. Per il M5S è necessario un modello sperimentale, un prototipo organizzativo che tenga insieme l’orizzontalità dei social network e la necessità di un indirizzo da remoto, quanto mai discreto. Le risposte di Casaleggio alle domande del nuovo modello sperimentale, oltre alle logiche googliste che compongono lo scenario principale, saranno l’eterarchia e l’autopoiesi. E’ una scommessa difficile da sostenere e da vincere. Persino le aziende dot-com e 2.0 sono “tradizionali” nel loro modello aziendale gerarchico. Una rete sociale, composta da persone reali e non da trolls o fake è una sorta di sistema vivente. Al suo interno convivono emozioni, spontaneità, accumulazioni di esperienze, interconnessioni e  differenziazioni. Come governare queste caratteristiche senza la presenza di una leadership forte, di un modello “eroico” condiviso sia dal populismo analogico sia dai più tradizionali partiti novecenteschi? La risposta di Casaleggio risiede nel modello eterarchico di organizzazione. E’ noto che eterarchia non significa né gerarchia né anarchia. Essa prevede una posizione più sfumata, quasi nascosta, di leadership, come nella migliore tradizione dell’hidden agenda dell’ideologia di Internet. Il modello eterarchico è policentrico, moltiplica i punti di potere e le multipolarità non diventano gerarchicamente subordinate al vertice. All'interno del M5S infatti, i continui assestamenti e le ondivaghe frizioni tra i gruppi parlamentari e il nucleo di smart marketing della Casaleggio Associati, o tra la comunicazione militante, quella parlamentare e il blog di Grillo, o ancora tra gli attivisti del Meetup e i rappresentanti eletti nelle varie tornate elettorali, hanno rappresentato autonomi punti di potere in conflitto tra di loro. E’ un panorama caleidoscopico, quello del M5S: a vittorie parziali dei singoli segmenti di potere seguono autonomie decisionali, a cui a loro volta succedono prevaricazioni e normalizzazioni, richiami all’ordine ed espulsioni. L’autonomia e il potere politico-comunicativo del singolo militante o del singolo cittadino-deputato sono fortemente compressi e limitati dalla non-linearità strategica perseguita dalla Casaleggio Associati. Il modello organizzativo sperimentale eterarchico del M5S è in fase di test e di assestamento empirico: ogni attività politica del populismo digitale, tra il 2013 e il 2014, ha mostrato quale iato profondo sussiste tra una visione eterarchica reale e una pratica falsamente eterarchica, quale quella applicata dal duumvirato Grillo-Casaleggio. Lo slogan coniato per le masse pentastellate - uno vale uno - teso a glorificare il potere decisionale egalitario del singolo cittadino-utente, è contraddetto dalla realtà empirica che mostra un sostanziale autoritarismo del binomio Grillo—Casaleggio.

Painting: Stelios Faitakis

Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks By Rodrigo Nunes @ Post-media Lab, May 2014

Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks

By Rodrigo Nunes

Series editors: Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles & Oliver Lerone Schultz. 

Rejecting the dichotomy of centralism and horizontalism that has deeply marked millennial politics, Rodrigo Nunes’ close analysis of network systems demonstrates how organising within contemporary social and political movements exists somewhere between – or beyond – the two. Rather than the party or chaos, the one or the multitude, he discovers a ‘bestiary’ of hybrid organisational forms and practices that render such disjunctives false. The resulting picture shows how social and technical networks can and do facilitate strategic action and fluid distributions of power at the same time. It is by developing the strategic potentials that are already immanent to networks, he argues, that contemporary solutions to the question of organisation can be developed.

PDF download

Part of the PML Books series. A collaboration between Mute and the Post-Media Lab

Rodrigo Nunes is a lecturer in modern and contemporary philosophy at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. He coordinates the research group Materialismos (http://materialismos.tk), which investigates the resurgence of metaphysical speculation in contemporary philosophy and its interfaces with other fields such as politics, science and anthropology. He has been involved in several political initiatives over the years, such as the first editions of the World Social Forum and the Justice for Cleaners campaign in London. He is a member of the editorial collective of Turbulence (http://turbulence.org.uk).

Rodrigo Nunes is a co-editor of What Would it Mean to Win?, Turbulence Collective (Eds.), PM Press,  2010

Nascita del populismo digitale:Il web marketing va in paradiso. I movimenti politici strutturati come network semantici (Par. 20) by Obsolete Capitalism

Il web marketing va in paradiso. I movimenti politici strutturati come network semantici (Par.20)

(Febbraio 2013. Nascita del populismo digitale) - Scarica o leggi online l'intero saggio in PDF

Funzionale alla googlizzazione della politica è lo strumento del web marketing. Abbiamo visto che Casaleggio considera i partiti politici alla stessa stregua dei dischi in vinile, o dei giornali, modelli obsoleti destinati alla futura estinzione, come i dinosauri. Perchè perdere tempo con il futuro dei dinosauri? Il futuro della rappresentanza politica, per Casaleggio, risiederà nei movimenti. Quando il cyber-manager milanese parla di movimenti intende il clustering di elettori prosumer ben profilati che possono essere utilizzati come bacino d’utenza e laboratorio di condizione umana per i propri ed esclusivi fini di potere politico. Che altro è se non una webcrazia il manipolo, enfaticamente definito la Rete, di circa 50.000 militanti-tesserati dei MeetUp o iscritti al movimento, che sono stati innalzati a perimetro decisionale dinamico per tutte le presenti e future decisioni politiche? La scelta webcratica, nata con le Parlamentarie alla vigilia delle elezioni del Febbraio 2013, risponde a tre obiettivi precisi: l’attivazione di una rudimentale forma di democrazia diretta elettronica; la trasformazione e plasmatura del movimento, o almeno del suo nocciolo duro, come network semantico autopoietico; ed infine, la possibilità di monitorare da remoto le cluster analyses del network semantico messe in atto dalla techware del populismo digitale della Casaleggio Associati. Tale sorveglianza elettronica viene attuata attraverso software sviluppati, testati e gestiti direttamente dalla Casaleggio Associati – nonostante l’idea di una piattaforma aperta e costruita dal basso, nella migliore tradizione di Internet e dei PiratenPartei, venga spesso reclamata all’interno del M5S. L’esperimento di marketing politico, ovvero isolare un gruppo consistente di prosumer-elettori all’interno di un cluster ben delineato, sorvegliarlo e testarlo nell’ambito delle sue azioni durante un periodo temporale relativamente esteso, è il nec plus ultra di qualsiasi tecno-evangelista coinvolto nell’interazione tra data science, social network e marketing. Ecco il vero diluvio di dati. Il paradiso del web marketing.

Painting: Stelios Faitakis

Wistar rat retina outlining the retinal vessel network and associated communication channels @ The Guardian 24.Oct.2013

Cameron Johnson, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. Wistar rat retina outlining the retinal vessel network and associated communication channels, (100x). Confocal Seemore

Memes, spam, nodes and moods: Dr Tony D. Sampson on creating super–clusters of attention @ Warwick University/GMC Course + Virality Blog

The GMC course welcomed visiting researcher – Dr Tony D. Sampson, Reader in Digital Culture at the University of East London, co-editor with Jussi Parikka of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009) and author of a new book Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012). Our postgraduates got to grips with some new and challenging critical thinking around neuro-culture, attentional marketing, global protest and crowds, contagion on and offline, ‘pass on power’ and the vulnerabilities built into robust networks. Sampson was adept at drawing together a wide and inter-disciplinary range of theories and methodological thinking to create a new framework for tackling the ways in which the social is made and assembled in our increasingly attention-capturing economies. From Tarde, Bergson and Baran to Deleuze, Foucault and Stiegler, Sampson took us on a journey through difficult terrain to show us how propositions such as ‘nudge’ theory, geographies of mood, meme marketing and happenstance viralities emerge and gain ground both in terms of business strategies and political discourse. Our postgraduates come from 19 different countries and bring with them a wealth of experience of working and living in communications and media landscapes, ecologies and environments that are increasingly connected to each other. Sampson was able to explore succinctly the centralised, decentralised and distributed networks of communication (Baran) that afford (or not) connectivity, allowing us to reflect upon our local experiences.

Fundamentally, Sampson asked us to understand the social as never given but always being made and this allowed us to reflect upon our roles, agency and activities in that making of the social. At the same time, Sampson highlighted the different ways in which hierarchies of networks are produced: super clusters and super nodes of attention that produce aristocratic networks that may look more like a decentralized network than the distributed vision that cyberculture theory may have promised us in the 1990s. Oprah Winfrey was a good example of a super node! The GMC postgraduates come from a variety of different experiences of communications histories and practices that do not always follow these patterns of development, so it will be interesting to see what they find applicable in their own local contexts.

Sampson’s presentation of his new thinking allowed us the time to unpack his ideas on virality and digital contagion which was useful for engaging in the areas we are studying: spreadability of media, the politics of fear and anxiety around online culture, the attention economies many of our students have been, are, or will be employed within, and our own desire to tackle inequalities through new communication paradigms. Our students were interested in Sampson’s take on web analytics, how the arts and sciences can work together on these issues, and whether we should continue to fight for a distributed network. There were lots of references to Nigel Thrift’s work in the session and the students learned a good deal about the relationship between media, emotion, affect and the biological. We all went away wondering whether we were sleep-walking our way through the spreadability of media content or whether we were awake and alert to what Sampson defined as the ‘mechanisms of capture.’ For more on Dr Tony D. Sampson’s work then visit his blog.

Read Sampson's interview on Crowd, Power and Postdemocracy

Clare Saunders - Environmental Networks and Social Movement Theory - Bloomsbury Academic, Uk, April 2013

Clare Saunders' book is an important contribution to the literature on social movements and environmentalism. Using the concept of 'environmental networks', it explores the extent to which social movement theory helps us understand how a broad range of environmental organizations interact. It considers the practicalities of social movement theories and it goes on to relate them to the practices of environmental networks. Theoretically and empirically rich, the book draws on extensive survey material with 144 UK environmental organizations, as diverse as not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) groups, reformists, conservationists and radicals; interviews with more than 40 key campaigners and extensive participant-observation, particularly in London.

Focussing particularly on the crucial question of networking dynamics, the book reveals that there are broad ranging network links across the movements' spatial and ideological dimensions. Combined with inevitable ideological clashes and a degree of sectarian rivalry, these links helps produce vibrant environmental networks that together work to protect and/or preserve the environment. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone concerned with environmental issues, politics and movements.

Table of contents:
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Environmental movements and environmental networks
Chapter 3. Key organisations and campaigns in London's environmental network
Chapter 4. The role of resources in relationships
Chapter 5. Political structures, political contingencies and environmental networks
Chapter 6. Environmental networks and new social movement theory
Chapter 7. Collective identity and solidarity. Do they unify or factionalise environmental networks?
Chapter 8. Towards a synthetic analytical framework for understanding interaction in environmental networks


Clare Saunders is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Southampton, UK.
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Virality : Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks by Tony D. Sampson - University of Minnesota Press, Usa, August 2012

A new theory of viral relationality beyond the biological

In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not limit itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is the way society comes together and relates.

Sampson argues that a biological understanding of contagion has been universally distributed by way of the rhetoric of fear used in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This understanding is also detectable in concerns over too much connectivity, including problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson’s “virality” is as universal as that of the biological meme and microbe, but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson leads us to understand contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze’s ontological worldview.

According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking—including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers—allows language to over-categorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological.

Dr. Tony D. Sampson is senior lecturer and researcher in the School of Arts and Digital Industries at the University of East London.

Contents: Resuscitating Tarde's diagram in the age of networks -- What spreads? from memes and crowds to the phantom events of desire and belief -- What diagram? toward a political economy of desire and contagion -- From terror contagion to the virality of love -- Tardean hypnosis : capture and escape in the age of contagion.

Read more on Sampson's blog

Manuel Lima - The Power of Networks - RSA Animates Video