to nodes and edges, for networks are about edging: pulsations that frustrate neat separations and create sticky connections between the molecular and the molar. Understanding the difference between the experience of flows and maps is important, and understanding the generative nature of contact is central to reimagining networks. However, the double-faced nature of networks, as both trace and flow, is exactly what makes networks so compelling. Networks spatialize the temporal by tracing and projecting: by being both too early and too late. Networks are both science fiction and the historical present. The UNIX command “traceroute,” which allegedly offers a trace of our data packets, illustrates this point nicely. To work, the “traceroute” tool sends out a series of packets with increasing TTL (Time to Live) values, starting with one “hop.” Whenever the packet “dies” the router at which the packet expires sends a message back to the originating machine. However, since packets can take different routes through the network and since many routers will refuse TTL error messages, this “trace” is not entirely reliable. Through timed TTL settings, “traceroute” offers us a pastiche of packets to map what allegedly has been, is, and will be. Networks also spatialize the temporal by imagining and creating connections, by cutting up amorphous space into lines. CDMA (Code-Division Multiple Access) also exemplifies this logic. At first, the idea that cell phones comprise a network seems strange, since all transmitters and receivers send their signals into the air. Technically speaking, a cell is not a single phone, but rather the area covered by one cell phone tower. To create networks, cell phone networks such as CDMA use different frequency bands and individuating codes to “create” connections: to encode and decode signals between a single transmitter and the
readers and characters become a “we”: the diffuse address of the novel—its typical third person narrative—creates a general sense of nearness, rather than a targeted and responsive connection. Newspapers, through their regularly planned obsolescence, create daily “extraordinary mass ceremonies,” so that, reading a newspaper in the privacy of her own home, “each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” Imagined synchronous mass actions create an imagined community, in which the multiple “I’s” are transformed every morning into a “we” that moves together through time, hence KONY 2012’s invocation of the New York Times. Newspapers, however, are not what they used to be; as the early twenty-first century crisis in print publications has made clear, “we” can no longer be certain of these extraordinary mass ceremonies, if “we” ever could. From both perspectives—the intimate and the global—the notion of a national “we” seems quaint at best, even as it persists in our imagining of the global (think again of figure 2 from the previous section, the image of the earth/U.S.A.). This provokes the obvious question: does this mean the death of imagined communities? Rather than participate in the long and endless debate over whether new media enable or destroy communities—whether they create new online communities or alienated, disconnected individuals; whether they create hordes or empowered networked individuals—this book focuses on new media as generating imagined networks. These networks generate a “you,” rather than “we,” and modulated temporally by asynchronous habits and crises, rather than mass synchronous ceremonies. Collective habits, such as reading the paper, still matter, but they matter and collect
differently. As I elaborate in the next chapter, rather than enabling a “homogeneous empty time”—a time that buttresses notions of steady progress—networks produce a series of crises or “Now’s” that create bubbles in time. In these constantly updating bubbles, the new quickly ages and the old is constantly rediscovered as new. Hence network time is not conducive to imagining a collective entity traveling together through time, but to envisioning a series of individuals that (cor)respond in their own time to singular, yet connected, events. Imagined networks are both more and less than communities: they are glocal collectives that create seemingly direct, traceable trajectories between the local and the global, the historical and the psychical, the collective and the individual, as well as the technical and the social. These glocal collectives are based on YOUS value: a series of interconnecting and connected YOUS rather than a collective “we.” Again, new media relentlessly emphasize “You:” YouTube.com, “You” as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. “You,” crucially, is both singular and plural. In its plural mode, though, it still addresses individuals as individuals. In this sense, networks are very different from communities, which create a new identity, a “we,” from what is held in common (even if, as Maurice Blanchot has argued, that which we hold in common is our own incommensurability and finitude). In a network, when a “we” or mass simultaneous access happens, the network crashes: from multiple simultaneous hits on a website to synchronous electricity demand, from popular fakesters to flashmobs, the communal (both technical and nontechnical) brings down networks. The “We” is a temporary network weapon.
philosophical reference, appearing in articles in Wired Magazine and in PowerPoint presentations made by those advising the US Intelligence Community. Although this reference is often made glibly, it highlights the importance of habits to understanding how causality, correlation and anticipation work in the era of the inexperienceable experience. Deleuze, reading Hume in Experience and Subjectivity (a text that would have a profound affect on his later work), outlines the linkage of experience and habit in Hume’s theory of causality as follows: causality, Deleuze explains, does not proceed on the basis of certainty (it is not based on intuition or demonstration), but rather on the basis of probabilities. This does not mean that causality is derived from probability, but rather that causality forms gradually and is the result of habit, which presupposes experience, even as it does not coincide with it. According to Hume, “experience is a principle, which instructs me in the several conjunctions of objects for the past. Habit is another principle, which determines me to expect the same for the future.” Experience presents cases of constant conjunction to the inspecting mind, but “repetition by itself does not constitute progression.” Habit allows the mind to transcend experience: to reason about experience “as it transforms belief into a possible act of understanding.” Causality is thus both “the union of similar objects and also a mental inference from one object to another.” Crucially, though, habit and experience are not—and do not—always have to be unified. Habit, for Hume, poses the possibility of falsifying experience, for it “can feign or invoke a false experience, and bring about belief through ‘a repetition’ which ‘is not deriv’d from experience.’ ” These beliefs, however inevitable, are, Hume stresses and Deleuze underscores, illegitimate: they “form the set of general, extensive, and excessive