北大MTI真题 阅读全文文档格式.docx

1、Whereas in postmodernism, being was left in a free-floating fabric of emotional intensities, in contemporary culture the existence of the self is affirmed through the network. Kazys Varnelis discusses what this means for the democratic public sphere.Not all at once but rather slowly, in fits and sta

2、rts, a new societal condition is emerging: network culture. As digital computing matures and meshes with increasingly mobile networking technology, society is also changing, undergoing a cultural shift. Just as modernism and postmodernism served as crucial heuristic devices in their day, studying ne

3、twork culture as a historical phenomenon allows us to better understand broader sociocultural trends and structures, to give duration and temporality to our own, ahistorical time.If more subtle than the much-talked about economic collapse of fall 2008, this shift in society is real and far more radi

4、cal, underscoring even the logic of that collapse. During the space of a decade, the network has become the dominant cultural logic. Our economy, public sphere, culture, even our subjectivity are mutating rapidly and show little evidence of slowing down the pace of their evolution. The global econom

5、ic crisis only demonstrated our faith in the network and its dangers. Over the last two decades, markets and regulators had increasingly placed their faith in the efficient market hypothesis, which posited that investors were fundamentally rational and, fed information by highly efficient data netwo

6、rks, would always make the right decision. The failure came when key parts of the network the investors, regulators, and the finance industry failed to think through the consequences of their actions and placed their trust in each other.The collapse of the markets seems to have been sudden, but it w

7、as actually a long-term process, beginning with bad decisions made longer before the collapse. Most of the changes in network culture are subtle and only appear radical in retrospect. Take our relationship with the press. One morning you noted with interest that your daily newspaper had established

8、a website. Another day you decided to stop buying the paper and just read it online. Then you started reading it on a mobile Internet platform, or began listening to a podcast of your favourite column while riding a train. Perhaps you dispensed with official news entirely, preferring a collection of

9、 blogs and amateur content. Eventually the paper may well be distributed only on the net, directly incorporating user comments and feedback. Or take the way cell phones have changed our lives. When you first bought a mobile phone, were you aware of how profoundly it would alter your life? Soon, howe

10、ver, you found yourself abandoning the tedium of scheduling dinner plans with friends in advance, instead coordinating with them en route to a particular neighbourhood. Or if your friends or family moved away to university or a new career, you found that through a social networking site like Faceboo

11、k and through the every-present telematic links of the mobile phone, you did not lose touch with them.If it is difficult to realize the radical impact of the contemporary, this is in part due to the hype about the near-future impact of computing on society in the 1990s. The failure of the near-futur

12、e to be realized immediately, due to the limits of the technology of the day, made us jaded. The crash only reinforced that sense. But slowly, technology advanced and society changed, finding new uses for it, in turn spurring more change. Network culture crept up on us. Its impact on us today is rad

13、ical and undeniable.Network culture extends the information age of digital computing.1But it is also markedly unlike the PC-centred time that culminated in the 1990s. Indeed, in many ways we are more distant from the era of PC-centred computing than it was from the time of centralized, mainframe-bas

14、ed computation. To understand this shift, we can usefully employ Charlie Geres insightful discussion of computation inDigital Culture. In Geres analysis, the digital is a socioeconomic phenomenon as much as a technology. Digital culture, he observes, is fundamentally based on a process of abstractio

15、n that reduces complex wholes into more elementary units. Tracing this process of abstraction to the invention of the typewriter, Gere identifies digitization as a key process of capitalism. By separating the physical nature of commodities from their representations, digitization enables capital to

16、circulate more freely and rapidly. In this ability to turn everything into quantifiable, interchangeable data, digital culture is universalizing. Gere cites the universal Turing machine a hypothetical computer first described by Alan Turing in 1936, capable of being configured to do any task as the

17、model for not only the digital computer but also for that universalizing aspect of digital culture.2But today connection is more important than division. In contrast to digital culture, in network culture information is less the product of discrete processing units than of the networked relations be

18、tween them, of links between people, between machines, and between machines and people.Perhaps the best way to illuminate the difference between digital culture and network culture is to contrast their physical sites. The digital era is marked by the desktop microcomputer, displaying information thr

19、ough a heavy CRT monitor, connected to the network via dial-up modem or perhaps through a high-latency first-generation broadband connection. In our own day, there is no such dominant site. The desktop machine is increasingly relegated to high-end applications such as graphic rendering and cinema-qu

20、ality video editing, or is employed for specific, location-bound functions （at reception desks, to contain secure data, as point-of-sale terminals, in school labs, and so on） while the portable notebook or laptop has taken over as the most popular computing platform. Unlike the desktop, the laptop c

21、an be used anywhere: in the office, at school, in bed, in a hotel, in a caf, the train or plane. Not only are networks an order of magnitude faster than they were in the dial-up days of the PC, but Wi-Fi makes them easily accessible in many locations. Smart phones such as the Blackberry, Google G1,

22、and the iPhone complement the laptop, bringing connectivity and processing power to places that even laptops cannot easily inhabit, such as streets, subways or automobiles. But such ultra-portable devices are also increasingly competing with the computer, taking over functions that were once in the

23、universal devices purview.3What unites these machines is their mobility and their interconnectivity, making them ubiquitous companions in our lives and key interfaces to global telecommunications networks. In a prosaic sense, the Turing machine is already a reality, but it takes the form not of one

24、machine, but of many. With minor exceptions, the laptop, smart phone, cable TV set top box, game console, wireless router, iPod, iPhone, and Mars rover are the same device, becoming specific only in their interfaces, their mechanisms for input and output, for sensing and acting upon the world. Inste

25、ad, the new technological grail for industry is a universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video, Internet, voice, text chat, and any other conceivable networking task efficiently.Increasingly, the immaterial production of information and its distribution through the network is t

26、he dominant organizational principle for the global economy. To be clear, we are far from the world of immaterial production. We manufacture physical things, even if increasingly that manufacturing happens in the developing world. Moreover, the ease of obtaining goods manufactured far away is due to

27、 the physical network of global logistics. Sending production offshore itself a consequence of new network flows may put it out of sight, but doesnt reduce its impact on the Earths ecosystem. And, beyond global warming, even in the developed world there are consequences: Silicon Valley contains more

28、 EPA （US Environmental Protection Agency） Superfund sites than any other county in the nation.4But as Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells have concluded, regardless of our continued dependency on the physical, the production of information and the transmission of that information on networks is the ke

29、y organizing factor in the world economy today. Although other ages have had their networks, ours is the first modern age in which the network is the dominant organizational paradigm, supplanting centralized hierarchies.5The ensuing condition, as Castells suggests inThe Rise of the Network Society,

30、is the product of a series of changes: the change in capital in which transnational corporations turn to networks for flexibility and global management, production, and trade; the change in individual behaviour, in which networks have become a prime tool for individuals seeking freedom and communica

31、tion with others who share their interests, desires and hopes; and the change in technology, in which people worldwide have rapidly adopted digital technology and new forms of telecommunication in everyday life.6As we might expect, the network goes even further, extending deeply into the domain of c

32、ulture. In the same way that network culture builds on digital culture, it builds on the culture of postmodernism outlined by Fredric Jameson in his seminal essay Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism, first written in 1983 and later elaborated upon in a book of the same title. For Jameson, postmodernism was not merely a stylistic movement but rather a broad cultural determinant stemming from a fundamental shift to the socioeconomic phase of history that economist Ernest Mandel called late capitalism. Both Mandel and Jameson concluded tha