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’."
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), 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