Week 2 - Virtual or Viral?

This week we discussed global connections. Basically that the world is now interconnected through the advancements in telecommunications technology. It was interesting to see that the rise of networked communications came from the need to decentralise (the decentralisation of WWII communications). The idea that "cutting off the head" of an organisation will no longer work.


This has shifted to a lifestyle where human communications are more dependent on the virtual world. Or as Stalder put it "This does not imply that people are somehow becoming virtual, but virtually all human actions rely, in varying degrees, on digital information networks". Today information "flows", and the continual flow of information though, relies upon the nodes which, act upon the information. Almost like a living organism, they need each other to survive. Information is passed through networks being distributed, duplicated and modified. Nodes and flows create, what Stalder describes, as the four dimensions of Information Ecology.


Interdependency - each node is independent, and choses how it wants to interact with the flow of information. However it is still dependent on another node to pass the information along to it.


Change - connecting two nodes together does not just allow information to be passed. It creates a link between these nodes which change how these nodes conduct their own activities.


Time-boundness - information is exchanged at the speed of light, and the nodes become dependent on this, changing their own activities to accommodate. Those who can't, fall behind.


Differentiation - the ability for one node to manipulate or change the flow, in an advantageous way to another node.


Looking at all this, to me it really seems like a living organism.