Network and Strata


The network assumes that everyone wants access to all information.

That is, if I want obscure or partisan information, I will tolerate everyone else's need for the same. This implies huge stratas of information lying under or over one another, sometimes neatly abutting, sometimes shifting uneasily against each other; a virtual plateau of information, all of which must be assumed to be important to someone - or else they wouldn't post it.

I want access to all of you...

Past, Present and Future - the space of the monitor.

Within this heaving mass there are rhizomatic  structures of nodal entry, each of which exists at minimal distance (seconds, or at walking pace, 5 metres at most) from the users terminal. This intense cluster, the gravitational black hole of cyberspace, displays itself as we call it, a page at a time on the monitor. We sit looking at this, with our own duration ceaselessly moving forward. It's like our past is behind us, the present is on the screen and the future, in it's fractal cloak, is waiting for us behind the screen.

Rhizome: A node within a network, both a thing and a logic in the way that a category is a thing and a logical principle of a hierarchy.
Nodal Resonance.

Our personality changes when we are here, new nodes appear within the complex of our own fractal self, resonating with virtual nodes that are beacons for a new development. We dial in and enter a plateau, new plane of consistency, the abstract machinery of virtuality elides with that of the virtual and we are a `becoming virtual', a developing node of the network. On-line we engage this virtuality, taking up our data-shadow  as our own, move into and through it and when we find something that lures us, we are `moving with' and our duration assimilates the virtual as equal to the actual.

Data-shadow: In a sense we are already virtual before we go on-line; the bank account, the electronic traces of our lives that desperately try to pin us to one locality, to make us account for ourselves.
A Net.Politic.

The network becomes the way we see ourselves, becomes the way we organise our own personality and our lives, the way we structure our identity. We exercise some choices in this process, of course, and this choice ties us to the network, and gives the becoming virtual an intensely political bent, something we ignore at our own peril...

Plateau? Plane of consistency?
Fractal cloak?
Duration?
How do we structure our identity?


Phase 3: What are the political ramifications of the networked self?