“1989 saw the introduction of the World Wide Web: the information space whose name metaphorized the network form which commonly characterizes and defines contemporary life”
“I think of the world in which we now live as a web or a network of connections, in part because I’ve never known anything else. Yet the relative youth of the network form, or at least the technology that has helped it proliferate, should give us some hint that it is not at all a stable one, and our understanding of its function and role in our day-to-day experiences is anything but complete.”
“Questions, then, of what a network actually looks like and what it feels like are refreshing ones, ones that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.”
“Without forcing readers to vacate the territory of interconnectedness that they’ve occupied for years (or in my case, my entire life), Patrick Jagoda’s Network Aesthetics demands that we reconsider the omnipresence of the term “network” and the seemingly concrete meanings that have come to adhere to it.”
“It asks us to think seriously about what we mean when we talk about networks, what it means to undergird our daily life with network logic, and what possibilities exist once we start imagining networks — and the connection they enable — differently.”
“Network Aesthetics seeks to do just that by arguing that we cannot think through the conditions of contemporary life without first attending to the features and contours of the ubiquitous network form.”
“This turn to what Jagoda calls a “network imaginary” is an incisive one that accounts for the impossibility of comprehending, mapping, or describing networks in any tangible way.”
“This is not to say that networks in the 21st century lack materiality; their physical infrastructures are inextricable from the ephemeral connection they enable, and recent work from scholars like Tung-Hui Hu, Nicole Starosielski, and Allison Carruth (to name only a few) shows the wide-ranging ecological, political, and ethical stakes of that materiality. But the network, as a form, is too vast and in flux to be fathomed as whole.”
“As Caroline Levine has noted, “At any given moment we know that we cannot grasp crucial pathways between nodes, and this points to our more generalized ignorance of networks. We cannot ever apprehend the totality of the networks that organize us.” It is no surprise that Levine resonates here, as the approach she suggests in her 2015 book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network grants form the same primacy that Network Aesthetics develops.”
“Its investment in aesthetics posits that our media shape the way we think about the networks we occupy. In turn, the way we imagine those networks informs how we exist within, move among, and relate to them.”
“Comparative in the richest way, Network Aesthetics never privileges one media form over the other, but productively explores how each medium enables different kinds of network imaginings.”
“Lionizing humanities and networks this way, though, puts us at risk of slipping into an easy, uncritical view of both, which in turn can stagnate the exact revolutionary work we aspire to. Jagoda is anything but uncritical of the power of the humanities. However, in his careful attention to the interplay between media and the modes of relation they give shape to, he does make the simple, necessary case for aesthetic work and the study of that work in today’s political and cultural reality.”
“Network Aesthetics opens with an epigraph from Howards End, an imperative to “Only connect!” that Jagoda rightly notes is a condition that seems to go without saying in the 21st century. He spends the rest of the book complicating this, though, gently pushing at each turn against the sentiment that connection is as predetermined as we think. “Everything is connected” is a truism we like to cling to for a variety of reasons.”
“It suggests something like a unified whole, one whose seemingly disparate parts are connected and do, despite evidence sometimes to the contrary, add up to something that coheres in an understandable way, a way that makes sense. Perhaps most significantly, it projects a kind of mastery, an insider knowledge of what that unified whole looks like, and how it makes sense.”
“But it also indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the network(s) it invokes, a misunderstanding that takes for granted the different kinds of networks we encounter, ones that are constantly evolving and developing, responding to innumerable stimuli and variables.”
“There is certainly something attractive about the idea of network as totality: certainty itself. But continuing to treat our current form of networked life as a predetermined and immutable fact tricks us into also accepting as fact the uneven development of control and power that has underwritten the rise of contemporary structures of culture, economics, and politics.”
“When we celebrate the connective power of Twitter, we miss the violent sexist and racist discourse that countless users face every day. When reserving an Uber is as simple as a few keystrokes on an iPhone, it is easy to miss not only the exploitation of labor and resources that made the iPhone possible, but also the exploitation of labor and resources that made the Uber possible. Conversely, when insisting that the success of YouTube celebrities, or the notoriously toxic comments left on their videos, is a sign that culture has reached a new low, we overlook the tight-knit and inclusive online communities that have built up around those content creators. None of these realities supersede each other, but rather exist simultaneously with each other, and a deeper understanding of our network imaginary can help us see this multiplicity of interconnectedness.”
“In the face of the impossibility of moving outside of or beyond these networks altogether, Jagoda’s closing thoughts are useful, proposing ambivalence, rather than opting out entirely. Ambivalence here is a kind of “extreme presence” that demands “a deliberate intensity, patience, and willingness to forgo quick resolution or any finality at all.” It is a necessary position of uncertainty, one that creates the space for other ways of thinking about networks to emerge.”
“Ultimately, spending time attending to network aesthetics teaches us something important, generous, and hopeful about how to be in this world now, not only with the networks we’re constantly shaping and reshaping, but also with each other, the myriad friends, loved ones, acquaintances, and total strangers alongside whom we shape and are shaped.”