Network Fever:

( Page 87) ‘Doxiadis launched the field of ‘Ekistics’. The idea was to think at the largest possible scale by domesticating vast amount of global information. If the data could be controlled, cities could be controlled.’ 

Doxiadis saw settlements as continually evolving organism and statistical analysis of data as an important tool for city planning.

In the book, SMART CITIES: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for A New Utopia, Anthony Townsend talks about smart urbanism, where he focusses on the definition of smart cities that use information technology and networks with big data to address timeless urban problems. Some of the concerns of such smart city development plans as he discusses are the role of stakeholders and decision makers in top down model , over simplistic way of looking at complex problems , digital divide, creation of exclusions and growth of networks that control the flow of resources.

Q) How can we position the concept of smart cities of today from a standpoint of the field of Ekistics launched by Doxiadis?

The rise of Network Culture:

1)

Varnelis in his discussion about the impact of network culture on art talks about it as:

‘Rather than producing art that somehow channels their innermost being, artists, musicians, videographers and DJ act like switching machines, remixing sources and putting them out to the internet for yet more remixing.’

Though Varneli’s opinion about the shift in the focus of art to simulation and reproduction in post modernism, seems agreeable, his idea about the impact of network culture and referring to artists as switching machines seems hard to agree on.

Q) What is the impact of network culture on self-expression? Has the participative framework of communication and the remix model of art in network culture opened more possibilities for creating and sharing products of self-expression or has it transformed artists as links or nodes to the information flow?

2)

As Varnelis quotes Manovich, ‘If a traditional twentieth century model of cultural communication described movement of information in one direction from a source to a receiver, now the reception point is just a temporary station on information’s path’

Also Varnelis talks about the remix model and the fascination of reality , ‘Instead of nostalgia and allegory network culture delivers remix and reality, shuffling together the diverse elements of present day culture, blithely conflating high and low.’

How does this new model of communication and emergence of concepts of remix and reality affect authenticity? Softwares like face2Face, that demonstrate the creation of fake videos, is an example of a blurring line between real and fake in a communication model with a distributed configuration of sources. How does this impact on one’s perception of the reality?

face2Face video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttGUiwfTYvg