“In the pre-internet era, the value of audience was tied to the number of participants in the exchange. In situations where audience has a high value, there are few hearers and many speakers (Court of Audience, psychotherapist). Scarcity is the determinant for control and power, just as it is when there are few speakers and many providing aural capacity (the loud concert in the park across the street from me, an ice cream truck). In both cases we see an imbalance between the raw number of participants on either end—few to many.”

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From the description at networkingart.eu:

The book represents a first tentative reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy, through an analysis of the realities which during the past twenty years have given way to a creative, shared and aware use of technologies, from video to computers, contributing to the formation of Italian hacker communities.
Written by Tatiana Bazzichelli, with the preface of Derrick De Kerckhove and the epilogue of the videoartist Simonetta Fadda.

Networking means to create nets of relations, by sharing experiences and ideas in order to communicate and experiment artistically and where the publisher and the reader, the artist and the public, act on the same level.

In Italy, thanks to the alternative use of Internet, during the past twenty years of experimentation a vast national network of people who share political, cultural and artistic views has been formed. Active in underground environments, these projects use diverse media (computers, video, television, radio and magazines) and deal with technological experimentation, or hacktivism, depending on the terminology used in Italy, where the political component is a central theme.

The Italian network proposes a form of critical information, diffused through independent and collective projects where the idea of freedom of expression is also a central theme.

The book describes the evolution of the italian hacktiviam and net culture from the Eighties till today. At the same time, it builds a reflection on the new role of the artist and author who become networker, operating in collective nets, reconnecting to neoavant-garde artistic practices of the 1960â€s (first and foremost Fluxus), but also Mail art, Neoism and Luther Blissett.

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“While Friending is a social act, the actual collection of Friends and the display of Top Friends provides space for people to engage in identity performance. As Judith Donath and I argued in ‘Public Displays of Connection,’ people display social connections to reveal information about who they are.”

Rather than “friends” resulting from an active performance of identity in a social context, in the world of online social networks, identity has become increasingly reliant on the active performance of social context itself. A Star Wars fan will reify his connection to the community of other Star Wars fans by becoming “friends” with the likes of Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker. While this example is quite concrete, the practice, as danah explains, operates more subtly as a performance of identity for the user’s audience – an audience, which it is important to note, is also made up of his/her “friends.” For a high school student, the choice to have the prom queen versus the geek (as two familiar characters in the popular American vision of education) in his/her “top 8” becomes the explicit and public navigation of an otherwise rarely articulated social universe.

danah also makes sure to note the importance in seeing online and offline interaction as two entirely separate beasts:

“Jenny Sundén (2003) argues that, in order to exist online, we must write ourselves into being. From the flow of text in chatrooms to the creation of Profiles, people are regularly projecting themselves into the Internet so that others may view their presence and interact directly with them. Social network sites take this to the next level because participants there write their community into being through the process of Friending. In doing so, they help define themselves and the context in which they are operating.”

Unlike our interactions offline, online subjectivity is the direct product of archived cultural production. Within a public and self-determined environment, “friendship” – and indeed identity – becomes a very different concept. We write ourselves into being and into an ever expanding cultural database from which others will attempt determine the minutiae of our being; and in such a world, context becomes everything. danah’s analysis hits these crucial points that are often missed in analyses of online social networks. It it becoming ever more clear that the conceptual and cultural preeminence of singular autonomy has begun to distintegrate within the reified context of these networks. We interact in an increasingly peer-to-peer environment, and as a network of peer-to-peer subjectivities.

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