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This chapter presents the notion of the network as a template of knowing and acting up the world, and establishes the initial framework for arguing that the logic of the network is part of a capitalist order that exacerbates inequality. While the digital network increases the means of participation in society, it also increases socioeconomic inequality through strategies that include the commodification of social labor, the privatization of social spaces, and the surveillance of dissenters. These methods of capturing and measuring new kinds of social wealth are means of concealing the fact that participation in the network promotes a kind of inequality that can eventually nullify most of its benefits.

This chapter details the relationship between the network and the self. It discusses specific biases in the manner in which the network mediates the social reality of the individual terms of immediacy, intensity, intimacy, and simultaneity. It also reviews different models for conceptualizing how the network and the individual codetermine opportunities for action, including actor-network theory. Actor-network theory establishes that “artifacts and their properties emerge as the result of being embedded in a network of human and nonhuman entities. It is in this context that they gain an identity and that properties can be attributed to them”.

Related to the convergence between old and new media has been the profound transformation in the way power and information are distributed across society, geography, and technology. Thanks to low-cost digital authoring tools and pervasive digital networks, knowledge and culture have become easier to produce, publish, and disseminate. This has blurred the boundaries between producer and consumer, and between public and private. This chapter examines four domains that have flourished with the emergence of a culture of networked publics: amateur and non-market production, networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, niche and special-interest groups, and aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation. To illustrate these domains, the chapter presents four case studies on news blogs, viral marketing, anime fandoms, and amateur and remix music.

The maturing of the Internet and mobile telephony has given rise to a new societal condition known as network culture, which highlights broader societal structures, just as concepts like modernism and postmodernism did in the past. This shift in society is subtle yet real and radical. Digital networks have become the dominant cultural logic, profoundly transforming not only culture but also the economy, public sphere, and even people’s subjectivity. In contrast to digital culture, network culture makes information less the outcome of discrete processing units and more of the result of the networked relations between them, of connections between people, between machines, and between people and machines. It is in this context that networked publics are created.

This chapter examines the motivations for unmapping the digital network by focusing on the concepts of space and surveillance. While the uniform distancelessness of nodocentric space does not diminish social opportunities, it changes what counts as proximal and relevant and redefines our relationship with the local, and therefore must be questioned. Nodocenticism can be applied to space to produce a form of hyperlocality that filters out the unnetworked elements in our environment, making them irrelevant. The chapter then analyzes how network logic has changed the way in which dissent, security, and war are manifested and countered, and asks what some of the implications of this new order are.

This chapter explores how the increase in visibility, respect, and numerical representation for graffiti grrlz is due to the consistent cataloging of their graffiti art-making in various digital spaces that open their subcultural world to other graff grrlz across the diaspora. It traces how they have cultivated an affective network through the digital zine Catfight, the GraffGirlz.com website, the Chicks on Powertrips blog, the “Female International Graffiti” Facebook group, and the “Female Caps” Tumblr microblog. The chapter claims that because the performance of feminism is circulated through these digital places it creates a subcultural feminist sensibility akin to the results of consciousness-raising groups. Taking the risk of going public (by going online together) not only facilitated a solidarity inspired by shared experiences, but also ushered in a subcultural revolution with the potential to permanently change graffiti grrlz’ subcultural status.

Drawing on both documentation and extensive interviews with key industry and policy players, this chapter analyses the role that the transition to digital played in both the policy thinking and interventional practice of the UKFC. It examines the origins, development and impact of the Digital Screen Network (DSN), which became one of the flagship digital policy initiatives of the UKFC. It documents the conflicting industry views around the impact of the DSN on the UK film distribution sector and highlights the policy complexities that digital posed for the UKFC during its lifetime.

The digital network is pervasive in contemporary society. The proliferation of mobile phones and the growth of broadband in developed countries have increased the everyday accessibility, ubiquity, and mobility of technological networks. As a result, our concept of place has been dramatically altered, along with our sense of proximity and distance. This chapter examines both the networking of space and the spatiality of digital networks and looks at a series of key conditions ranging from the everyday superimposition of real and virtual spaces to the rise of a mobile sense of place and popular virtual worlds. It also considers the concept of telecocooning, RFIDs, and ubiquitous computing.

This chapter studies the scientific and technological paradigms behind digital networks, and how they have been applied in the assemblage of digital social networks. The technological part of digital networks is made up of computer code or algorithms. Human-computer interaction (HCI) enables easier computer interaction by moving away from designing procedures and toward analyzing interactions, the fluid interplay between machines and humans. The chapter then considers how computer science and network science give shape to a network that structures sociality for its users. These sciences help transform social signs and meanings into technological templates that organize reality.

This introductory chapter offers a contextual analysis of the relationship between media and politics within the Middle East and North Africa region and reflects on the relevance of the Tunisian experience. Pointing out the need to reconceive the relationship between media and political change, it highlights the significance of a digital culture of contention that developed outside institutional politics. This chapter also includes a section on the research design and the interpretative framework that were adopted in this story and an overview of the core chapters.

This chapter examines the political economy of networks and the process of commodification that allows them to increase participation while also increasing inequality. Digital networks are not different from other for-profit media systems in the patterns of ownership conglomeration they exhibit, to the extent that these corporations strive to eliminate competition in order to acquire larger audiences. The chapter then proposes that monopsony has emerged as the dominant market structure in the era of user-generated content. A critique of participatory culture is applied that presents it as both a form of pleasure and a form of violence that subordinates the social to economic interests.

This chapter presents the theoretical grounds for unthinking the network by discussing an ontology that accounts for the virtuality of networks. Digital networks give shape to social forms that were only virtual possibilities before. However, in the process of actualizing them, they become rigidified social behaviors. The chapter then explores how the process of unmapping the digital network involves reengaging the virtuality of possibilities. It also theorizes some general tactics for unmapping the network, identifies the analytical spaces where such strategies can be applied, and suggests the personal and collective viewpoints that unmapping might entail.

This chapter addresses the efficacy of peer-to-peer as a mode of social production that attempts to democratize resources. This mode exemplifies the limits of applying network logic to unthink networks because it simply manages to build a digital commons on top of infrastructure that is thoroughly privatized. The capitalist state and the corporation are typically portrayed as the stewards of the Internet, in charge of guaranteeing the rights of global citizens to freedom of speech, economic opportunity, and so on. The chapter then examines how their actions undermine the rights and autonomy of individuals by utilizing digital networks to promote surveillance, repression of minority voices, and disparities.

This chapter expounds on intensification by focusing on the importance of the outsides of networks, and offers a conclusion that provides additional thoughts about the unmapping of networked participation. Digital networks and the network episteme have already transformed who we are and how we interact with each other. The more realistic strategies for unthinking and unmapping networks will rely not on abandoning them in a technophobic reaction; they will rely on the intensification of the network, engaging in creative acts of disassembly by pushing the limits of its logic, and conceptualizing alternative modes of being through the paranodal.

The first chapter discusses how digital media increased, and are still increasing, the network in which cultural transmission can occur. Research inspired by the social brain hypothesis shows that our social networks did not change radically in the last years. The size of our digital social networks (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) is similar to the size of our offline social networks, and some of their characteristics, such as their geographical extension, are also comparable. Nonetheless, it is argued that digital connections, together with our tendency to share information for limited or null gains, made cultural transmission relatively detached from these networks. In cultural evolutionary terms, online digital media increased cultural population sizes, that is, the number of individuals with whom we may exchange information. This hyper-availability together with new opportunities pose new problems related to cultural evolution. One is that, when we can copy from everybody, it may become potentially more difficult to decide from whom we should.