Net art diagram from MTAA

Any excuse to use that image, I’ll take it.

1. In Network Fever, Wigley’s narrative history of the spread of “network thinking” was interesting. He also does a decent job of selling the lifestyle of hanging out discussing ideas on a boat all day, then visiting heritage sights and eating and drinking the night away. Seems pretty pleasant. The network he initially describes here, however, is very centralized one. There is a group of ‘luminaries’ who convene together, only to disperse and send their message to others. Is it possible that these early proponents of ‘network thought’ were influenced by this star, or hub and spoke, model of network so that their thinking and proselytizing was influenced by it? What if they were not this elitist group, but a decentralized or distributed network to begin with, would they have a different story to tell?
2. The talk of city growth was interesting, particularly the postulation that the city center should extend along a path, and not be surrounded by concentric rings of later expansion. I’m reminded of Dubai, which extends along the coast of the Arabian Gulf, and continues to expand along the waterfront, or nearby, instead of extending deep into the desert. This growth has created a series of micro sites in the city that are constantly being torn down and rebuilt, as one Emirati told me, “we were once nomads, but now we make the bricks become nomads.” I’m not sold on the idea that imposing any sort of structure on a city from the get-go is good, and it’s better to follow the organic hybrid model that was positioned in the reading. How can we reconcile planning with what best serves communities? How do you balance the needs of a city vs the needs of a neighborhood?
3. Varnelis warns at the end of the article about installing “a new regime of big aggregators” in place of the monopolies that used to manage network communication via the phone lines. We’ve clearly reached a point where these aggregators have swiftly become the dominant gateways to information on the web. With Facebook and Google acting as the gateway to the majority of web traffic (I saw an article earlier today, but can’t find it at the moment), these aggregators are the bottleneck in the network of information. If the network is the latest and most pervasive type of media we have created/encountered/identified, what can supersede that; what comes after the network? Or have we reached a point of diminishing returns on new extensions of our nervous systems? EDIT : found the article I was referencing above : The Web began dying in 2014