serial consign

About a month ago, I posted about my desire to get a handle on the origins of network culture. I'm quite interested in how this paradigm has manifested itself in the field of information visualization, but also on how it has driven mass culture and entered the popular lexicon. What is the backstory behind the network (as an abstract entity) and what types of metaphors do we use to represent connectivity? Both of these questions are quite important and lead into an interesting discussion about history and language.

An obvious point of entry into the network is etymology. The lineage of the word stretches back about 500 years to an appearance in the Geneva Bible. It has been used to describe reticulate structures in plants and animals, rivers and canals, railway systems and, over, the past century broadcasting and connectivity. Network divides into two root words, and in turn two discussions, addressing geometry and labour.

The word 'net' was first recorded in English in the ninth century and one of its early uses was in the description of a spider's web. The word would gradually become synonymous with objects characterized by fibers woven in a grid-like structure. Nets are compelling objects as they are flexible, perforated surfaces that can assume the form of whatever objects they store (or capture). The word 'work' can be tracked back to the Old English wyrcan and has always been associated with action, physical activity and even military fortification. Given the history of these two root words we can consider the network an active, reconfigurable membrane that provides connectivity and saves manpower. This definition maps quite readily onto the interface between rail systems and geography as well as communication protocols and the communities they bind together.

If you are interested in exploring the etymological roots of 'network' further be sure to examine Keith Brigg's meticulous examination of the word.

As if the tensile elegance of the net wasn't architectonic enough, there is a structural aspect to the history of the word network. Opus reticulatum is a Roman method of laying brick [see the above image of Hadrian's Villa] in which diamond-shaped bricks are placed around a core at such an angle that the mortar reads as a net. The words opus reticulatum translate almost directly into our contemporary understanding of the word network (although the Latin definition implies a certain "artistry" that isn't present in the English version of the word).

The way that we use language to describe the world around us is a fascinating window into our understanding of complex phenomena. The idea of the network is so incredibly pervasive it is inescapable. Mark Wigley pointed this out in his 2001 essay Network Fever and also drew attention to primacy of the internet in these discussions:

...It is as if our technologies feed on a kind of narcissistic self-reflection. Everyone has become a kind of expert, ready to discuss the different types of nets (computer, television, telephone, airline, radio, beeper, bank) or scales (global, national, infra, local, home) or modes (cable, wireless, digital, optical). And where would we be without our opinions about the Internet, a net of nets against which all others are now referenced?

Since the history of the language connected to the network paradigm is compelling, it follows that some of the terminology describing the internet is worth examining as well.

[nam june paik / video flag / 1958-1969]

The phrase information superhighway is now nothing more than an asterix in the margins of the history of technology. Despite the term's obsolescence, it is important to remember that at one point in time it was this automotive metaphor, the prospect of an infobahn, that people used to understand multimedia and the nascent world wide web. Just as the notion of the televised global village characterized the proliferation of mass media in the 1960s, the dawn of net culture was driven by associations to familiar roadway infrastructure. A little-known fact about the information superhighway buzzphrase is that it was coined by the media artist Nam June Paik in a 1974 study he prepared for the Rockefeller Foundation. The term only gained widespread recognition when it was attached to Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991.

Since we are all immersed in scores of discursive, social and economic networks (to say nothing of hardware) it is all too easy to take the language we use to describe this increased interaction for granted. It will be fascinating to see how the emerging infrastructure of open, interoperable social media will alter our understanding of connectivity and how these changes will be registered through language.