Yet again the blog has hit the quick sand. Having recharged the batteries and experienced some excitement and wonder in a foreign land, I think that now it is time to recommit myself once more to the project of this blog. Following in the footsteps of my pal Ryan over at MetaBrandGreen, I suppose one way to encourage that recommitment would be to begin with a statement of principles that underlie my thinking about communication, technology and society, and drive the kind of coverage that I will be providing on Blunks.

1. We did not arrive in this contemporary networked condition by accident; it is rather the necessary consequence of the process of modernity that began in the Age of Enlightenment. In the modern industrial era, scientific methods and mathematical modeling were applied to social organization, establishing an ideology of measurement, analysis and forecasting that enabled the rapid advancement of material conditions in ‘developed’ nations. Through the application of statistics, the methods of organizing society (demography, education, planning) depended on the reducibility of social conditions to numbers on a spreadsheet that can always be analyzed and cross-referenced in relation to one another. Adorno & Horkheimer: “Society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract qualities.”

2. Increasing prosperity among a significant proportion of the populations of ‘developed’ nations and technological improvements in the means of production in the late 19th and early 20th century transformed the lifestyles of citizens. In addition to their existing cultural, physical and social identities, the people of modern industrial societies gained a new consumer identity as their social behavior adapted to the new material conditions facing them. In this situation, identity becomes inextricably related to consumption, and an individual’s taste in products that say something about what makes them different. Bourdieu: “Tastes (i.e., manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes.”

3. Following this process of data accumulation and identity formation, the Network Society has emerged as a consequence of the digitization and subsequent pooling of what had been individual data silos. Crucially (and consequentially), the ruling ideology that guided this process from the start was benevolent and not commercial, favoring increased access, data and redundancy over strict hierarchies of power and arbitrary restrictions on access. Castells: “[The Internet] was rooted in a scientific dream to change the world through computer communication.”

4. In the present network society, another transformational process is ongoing in the area of computer-mediated communication. With technology having conquered geography, individuals have ever greater ability to communicate with physically remote audiences. Barriers that once made mass self communication prohibitively expensive have crumbled for those with access to the network, and a new paradigm of networked communication prevails. In the social environment of the network, identity plays a crucial role in establishing relationships and developing connections between the actors and institutions that constitute the network itself. Zuckerberg: “Facebook … makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all of these people.”

These four principles underlie my thinking and reasoning on communication, culture and technology and the content of this blog will be concerned with exploring and expanding upon them. I will focus on exploring the development of the fourth principle, the ongoing transformation of life fostered by the network society, but will remain mindful of the first three and may often reflect on them in light of current events, campaigns, products or expressions.

As always, I encourage you to share your response to any post in the comments. You may also contact me through the various links on the right.