Organized Networks

Book: Organized Networks, Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions. Ned Rossiter. NAi Publishers, 2006

URL = http:// www.naipublishers.nl/art/organ

Order online: http://www.naipublishers.nl/art/organized_networks_e.html

Concept Definition

Organized networks are contrasted to Networked organizations, writes Ned Rossiter at http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=53&Itemid=33

"let me briefly outline the concept of organized networks. Over the past 30 years or so we have witnessed the institutions of modernity - universities, governments, firms, unions - struggle to reconcile their hierarchical structures of organization with the flexible, partially decentralized and transnational flows of culture, finance and labour. There is much phenomena, in other words, that escapes the managerial gaze of modern institutions. In other ways, of course, we find increasingly sophisticated technologies of surveillance and data tracking deployed to determine our movements and practices. But this does not result in increased efficiencies or productivity in terms of the management of people and things. Just the opposite, in fact.

Accompanying these moribund technics of what can be called networked organizations is the emergence of organized networks. Whereas networked organizations can be understood as modernity's institutions rebooted into the digital age, organized networks, by contrast, are social-technical forms that co-emerge with the development of digital information and communication technologies.

Organized networks do not need to try and recalibrate existing institutional practices into social-technical dynamics of digital media. Instead, they need to undergo a scalar transformation that enables the possibility of sustainability for the proliferation of practices across numerous social-technological platforms, many of which are highly unstable and fragile." (http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=53&Itemid=33)

Book Description

"The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informational times. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labour in the creative industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital. Cutting across the fields of media theory, political philosophy, and cultural critique, Ned Rossiter diagnoses some of the key problematics facing network cultures today. Why have radical social-technical networks so often collapsed after the party? What are the key resources common to critical network cultures? And how might these create conditions for the invention of new platforms of organization and sustainability? These questions are central to the survival of networks in a post-dotcom era. Derived from research and experiences participating in network cultures, Rossiter unleashes a range of strategic concepts in order to explain and facilitate the current transformation of networks into autonomous political and cultural ‘networks of networks’."

Example

Jeffrey Juris (Book: Networking Futures on the People's Global Action Alterglobalization Movement:

"Rather than a networked organization, which refers to the way traditional organizations increasingly take on the network form, PGA is closer to an ?organized network? in Ned Rossiter?s terms, a new institutional form that is immanent to the logic of the new media (although in this case not restricted to the new media). The network structure of PGA thus provides a transnational space for communication and coordination among activists and collectives. For example, PGA?s hallmarks reflect a commitment to decentralized forms of organization, while the network has no members and no one can speak in its name. Rather than a traditional organization (however networked) with clear membership and vertical chains of command, PGA provides the kind of communicational infrastructure necessary for the rise of contemporary networked social movements. The challenge for PGA and similar networks, given their radical commitment to a horizontal networking logic, has always been sustainability. This is where the social forums, with their greater openness to vertical forms, have been more effective. In this sense, I find PGA much more exciting and politically innovative, but it may be the hybrid institutional forms represented by the social forums that have a more lasting impact."

About the author

Australian media theorist Ned Rossiter works as a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies (Digital Media), Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland and an Adjunct Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, Australia.

More Information

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, 'Dawn of the Organised Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), at http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/ lovink_rossiter.html

Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Towards a Political Anthropology of New Institutional Forms’, ephemera: theory & politics in organization 6.4 (2006), http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/6-4/6-4neilson- rossiter.pdf

Review: http://www.leonardo.info/reviews/jun2007/organ_cox.html