G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell Us about Urbanity in the Digital Age The history of culture and urbanity is largely a history of networks. Since ancient times urban settlements acted as hubs for the exchange of goods and news, genes and memes. However, cities not only thrived as privileged parts of regional, wide area and even global networks. While growing larger and larger they also developed their own sophisticated networks within their walls, material ones such as water systems and sewerages as well as immaterial ones like the ever-shifting webs of economic, social, cultural and sexual relationships. In principle, two sets of networks important to human culture and specifically city life can be differentiated: biological and cultural networks, i.e., networks of life and networks of transportation and communication. The former ones came into existence billions of years ago when molecules began to form “the chemical circuitry of life. Unicellular creatures appeared: enclosed molecular networks that merged into bigger networks called organisms, which collaborated to form ecosystems and societies of primates that now call themselves humans” (Johnson). Besides consisting of networked molecules, all life forms are also part of socio-biological networks, particularly of sexual contact and of disease. This constant biological interchange is furthered by the second set of culturally produced networks that sprang up in response to the needs of early humanoids. As water and food or materials for clothing and weapons were not always located where it was safe or comfortable to live, organizing long-distance transport and communication became essential for survival. From the first water systems to the electric grid, from the famous Roman cursus publicus to modern freeway systems, from the network spanning what was then the known world that supplied wild animals to the Roman Coliseum to the national and international TV networks of the 20 th century: each culture - and namely life in its cities - is to a great extent defined by the contemporary state of networking technologies and by the way societies make use of available technologies. As important as these biological and cultural networks were, they stayed for thousands of years - like the air that we breathe - mostly invisible to human perception and reflection. In antiquity and the middle ages, there was little effort to observe and analyze the multitude of networking activities. Only in modern times was their defining role in human culture slowly recognized. The first mathematical theory of networks - the Graph Theory G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 56 (1736) - was developed during the Enlightenment. In the industrial age it was adapted - with the Random Graph Theory (1959) - to explain more complex industrial networks like the phone system. However, only recently, when scientists gained access to the huge amounts of information that digital networks provide, did network theory advance - with the Small World Theory (1998) and the Theory of Scale-Free Networks (1999) - far enough to finally be able to explain many of the biological and cultural networks that are defining our existence. Indeed, modern network science claims to have found “a common blueprint” for networks as dissimilar as food webs and the network of molecules in a living cell, the network of language and the World Wide Web, economic systems and the network of neurons in the human brain. “We have come to see that we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else” (Barabasi 6-7). In this essay, however, I concern myself not with these theories of networking per se but with the question of how networks of transportation and communication over time shaped urban everyday life as well as the arts flourishing in these cities. I will argue that today, in the early days of the digital age, we are experiencing the continuation of technological as well as cultural processes that started in the Renaissance with mechanization and later escalated in the Enlightenment with industrialization. The vanishing point of my historical investigation is therefore the radical change of urban life driven by the implementation of digital networking technologies: the emergence of a hybrid - partly material, partly virtual - everyday life in the city. Analyzing the strong relationship between urbanity and networking in the technological phases of modern times - mechanical, industrial, digital -, I will proceed in five steps. First, I outline the dominant networking technologies of each period. Second, I describe the prevalent practices of communication, third the prevalent practices of audiovisual production demonstrating the strong interchange between technologies of networking and the principles of narration, that is, between city life and how it is told - or rather: how it can be audio-visually represented. Fourth, I look into the perception and reflection of prevalent networking practices by their contemporaries, and fifth I analyze the consequences of these technological and cultural conditions for the advance of differently structured public spheres in the mechanical, industrial and digital ages. In the final chapter of my essay, I will then try to extend this history of networks and city life into the near future by identifying dominant forces and tendencies that seem to drive further change. 1 Cities and Life in the Age of Mechanical Networks What we are used to calling the Renaissance was initiated by the coming together of the - in Christian Europe almost forgotten - knowledge of the antiquity, which was the theoretical knowledge of philosophers and scien- Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 57 tists, with the knowledge of the Middle Ages, which was the practical knowledge of craftsmen. 1 One of the results of this knowledge revolution was the development of mechanical technology based on mathematics - from the invention of the compass that changed sea travel to the invention of scaffolding that changed architecture, from the invention of perspective painting to the most powerful invention of all: the printing press. This rise of mechanical technology gave rise as well to a new class that developed and used these advanced means and techniques to their economic advantage: craftsmen, engineers and architects, merchants, traders and bankers, academics, scientists and artists. They all, of course, lived and worked in towns, which grew to become centers of commerce and communication, manufacturing and the arts. Slowly the medieval town gave way to a more secular and enlightened city shaped by the process of mechanization and its social and cultural consequences. New networks of transportation and communication connecting the prospering cities of early modern times sprang up. The book trade, for example, soon rivaled the widespread communications network of the Catholic Church in cultural influence. In both cases, physical storage devices - letters, books - had to be transported. The defining element of these and all other networks of the mechanical age therefore was that news could only travel as quickly as goods. With the rare exception of smoke signals, beacons or reflected light, there was - in stark contrast to the industrial and the digital age - basically no communication without transportation. Following the popular numbering scheme for software, we can call those practices for the distribution of goods or news that require physical movement driven by biological or at least natural energy Networking 1.0. Its central principle is the identity of transportation and communication, its most important technique the material bridging of geographic distances by covering the space in between. In the mechanical civilization that developed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment technology limited the range of transportation. Some long-distance networks covering sea and land developed as well, particularly in the context of the discovery of the New World. The average distribution of goods and media, however, happened within and around cities and between neighboring cities. Insofar as covering the space that separated the sender and the receiver of a message was the central technique in mechanical networking, bridges became one of its foremost technical achievements. By closing geographical gaps, they create the physical continuum between nodes that is needed to establish a mechanical network. Not surprisingly, the bridge soon turned into a mythical place, a space of existential transition whose construction and destruction, loss and conquest came to symbolize the triumphs, dangers and pitfalls of transportation and communication in the 1 My rendering of the process of mechanization and its cultural consequences follows Giedion, Habermas, Hauser, McLuhan (1962 & 1965), Panofsky, Romano and Tenenti. G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 58 mechanical age. 2 Crossing a bridge was risky on principle because its surface was always covering something up, be it an abyss, a raging river or enemies hiding. In that respect, bridges came to stand for the perils and shortcomings of mechanical networking itself: the arduous effort of bridging geographical distances that is critical for every successful act of physical transportation. A famous anecdote about the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe illustrates how ‘covering’ was the basic principle of mechanical networking. Crossing the Alps when traveling from Germany to Italy, Goethe - like the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann before him - allegedly kept the curtains of his carriage closed in order to spare himself the sight of the vast, tiresome and potentially dangerous expanse. One could say that by successfully bridging or covering visually the distance between several nodes in a contemporary network of transportation, Goethe sitting in the dark room of his carriage was treating himself like goods in a parcel or a letter in an envelope which are covered up for protection during transport and will only be opened once they have safely arrived. The significance of this anecdote, however, reaches further. The drama being the main audiovisual medium of the mechanical age and Goethe being an experienced dramatist, he was all too familiar with the aesthetic function of curtains. He didn’t just wrap himself up like a parcel; he directed his travel experience after the model of a stage play. Hence Goethe’s action points towards an important interrelation between networking and the audiovisual arts: all networking has to cope with time and space constraints as does all audiovisual story telling. At any given historical time, that is, at any given level of technological development, the techniques of networking and the techniques of storytelling deal with time and space in a very similar way as both have to rely on what is available to them to solve their time-space-problems. Simply put: the theater curtain, particularly on the proscenium stage, functions very much like a bridge ‘covering’ gaps of space - and time. 3 The significance of this observation becomes clearer once one compares - as I will do in the following chapters - this mechanical bridging of space and time on the stage with the industrial control of space and time in linear audio visions or later the digital control of space and time in nonlinear audio visions. Considering the important technological and cultural role of bridges in transportation and communication during the mechanical age, it does not come as a surprise that the first theory of networking concerned itself with 2 Most famously in 20 th century novels like Thornton Wilders The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) or Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and movies like David Lean‘s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Bernhard Wicki’s The Bridge (1959) or John Guillermin’s The Bridge at Remagen (1969). The International Movie Data Base (<www.imdb.com>) lists several hundred movies with the word ‘bridge’ in their title. 3 In this context we can think of the balcony - between Renaissance and Enlightenment in dramas a very popular setting - as a broken bridge that rather separates than unites the protagonists. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 59 their function for city life. In the early 18 th century, when Immanuel Kant, the foremost philosopher of German Enlightenment, was teaching in Königsberg, the citizens of this Baltic town engaged in a popular contest: who could find a way to walk through all parts of the city without crossing any bridge twice? Attacking the task by trial and error, nobody seemed clever enough to find a working solution. Then the mathematician Leonhard Euler approached the problem systematically. By thinking of each part of the town as a thing - in modern terms: an abstract vertex or node - and of each bridge as an action - in modern terms: an abstract connection or edge -, he created a mathematical structure called a graph that allows for the quantitative analysis of the interactions of nodes via edges. “Both Kant (in politics) and Euler (in mathematics) show how an adequate understanding of networks must not come from experience, but from an abstracting, spatializing procedure” (Thacker). Fig. 1: Graph of the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg.” 4 Euler’s mathematical reformulation enabled an epistemological shift. From the perspective of the user, who had to find the right solution to a problem that was thought of as in principle solvable, he turned to the perspective of the network, whose structure did or did not allow for certain uses. Implementing such a topological view in 1736 for the first time, Euler could not only prove that there was no solution to this particular problem - no way to walk through all parts of the city without crossing a bridge twice. 5 He also demonstrated in general the pivotal position of network design: its layout is the limit. Whoever controls the structure of a network controls its uses. In contradistinction to later developments in the industrial and digital age, however, the public sphere in the mechanical age evolved relatively unaffected by national or international networks of communication and their layout. Social and cultural exchange in the cities was dominated by face-toface contact on streets, in coffeehouses, salons, marketplaces or theater foy- 4 All graphics by Leon S. Freyermuth. 5 In the 19 th century, the citizens of Königsberg built an eighth bridge, making possible what is now called an Eulerian path (Barabasi 12). G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 60 ers, i.e., public places that offered equal access to at least the educated amongst the citizenry. Their communication was, to a large extent, not yet influenced and predetermined by (mass) media but consisted primarily of peer-to-peer discussions, sometimes instigated and furthered by (low distribution) media like pamphlets, journals, books and theater plays. The first main characteristic of the public sphere in the mechanical age therefore is that it was largely unmediated, the second that it was geographically fragmented and intellectually diverse with participants and topics of discussion varying from town to town. Consequently, in wide parts of Europe the educated few who participated in the public discourse considered themselves rather citizens of their town than citizens of a larger political entity (empire, kingdom, nation state). In some respects - prevalence of peer-to-peer communication, high level of fragmentation - the public sphere in these pre-industrial times was obviously closer to our emerging digital public sphere than to the mass mediated public that the looming industrial age would bring about. At least since the Enlightenment the contemporaries in the most developed regions, however, sought to overcome exactly these characteristics of pre-industrial culture, namely the limited scope of the public sphere and the limited reach of its media. They longed for national debates, national print media and national forms of entertainment (like a national theater). Of course, existing networking and media technologies could not fulfill most of these desires. Mechanical culture reached its limits. As Harold Innis put it: We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of communication over a long period will to some extent determine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilization in which life and flexibility will become exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the advantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilization. (Innis 34) 2 Cities and Life in the Age of Industrial Networks Industrialization was mainly driven by the combination of two innovations: the increased availability of ever more efficient non-biological energy sources (i.e., steam, gas, gasoline, electricity) and the mathematical analysis and control of work processes (i.e., Taylorization of human labor and automation of machine work). 6 Again the rise of new industrial technologies gave rise to new classes that developed and used these advanced industrial means and techniques to their economic advantage: entrepreneurs, managers and professionals, skilled and unskilled factory workers, engineers, technicians and mechanics, administrators and bureaucrats as well as a new breed of intellectuals, academics, scientists, journalists and artists that catered to the industri- 6 My rendering of the process of industrialization and its cultural consequences follows Giedion, Hauser, Landes, McLuhan (1962 & 1965), Mokyr, and Mumford. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 61 al masses and their growing need for information and entertainment. Cities grew larger and larger and a new metropolitan way of life evolved that was shaped by the process of industrialization and its social and cultural consequences. One of its main characteristics was anonymity, the fact that in their everyday life - walking the streets, using public transportation, shopping in department stores, attending theaters or movie theaters - the inhabitants of the industrial city experienced a seamless string of close encounters with total strangers. Graph theory, of course, could not describe or explain the extremely complex social and economic web in the metropolis, the different degrees of separation between hundreds of thousands of strangers, the series of chance meetings with “The Man of the Crowd.” Nor could it help to plan and manage the many new networks that came into existence during the 19 th and 20 th century. On the one hand, the application of industrial technology to transportation and communication dramatically accelerated and widened the reach of goods and news. With the extension of the rail network, the growth of national highway systems and finally air travel, commerce and communication accelerated and expanded. On the other hand, and much more importantly, a radically new category of networking came into existence. With the telegraph and the telephone, later with the radio and TV broadcasting, long-distance communication became independent from physical transport. The defining element of these new industrial networks of communication was that now news could indeed travel faster than goods. Actually, for the first time in human culture they could travel in real-time. In contrast to mechanical networking, these new industrial practices of networking which do not require physical movement for communication while at the same time speeding up the transport of goods through the use of non-biological energy, automation and industrial division of labor can be called Networking 2.0. Its central principle is the faculty to separate communication from transportation, and its most important technique in regard to communication is the elimination of geographic distances by switching between various material or immaterial connecting lines. In the industrial civilization that came into being between the Enlightenment and postmodernity, the distribution of goods and news in everyday life was no longer just local or regional, but national. International long-distance networks of transportation and communication were established as well over sea, land and in the air, particularly during the second half of the 20 th century. The average distribution of goods and media, however, still happened within nations and, to some extent, also between neighboring countries. Insofar as the central principle in industrial communications was the instant, realtime elimination of any space that separated the sender and the receiver of a message, one of the foremost technical achievements were practices of switching, namely the operator at the telephone exchange and later the circuit switch in telephony, as well as the techniques of link-up and switch over in radio and TV broadcasting. By interconnecting several shorter connections G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 62 to a new continuous line, switching achieves in industrial networks of communication what bridging achieves for mechanical (and industrial) networks of transportation: it creates the necessary physical continuum (edge) between two points (nodes). Although the operator or the circuit switch never became existential myths like the bridge, the practice of switching figures prominently in many mid-20 th century movies exploiting contemporary fears of intrusion and dangerous confrontations that mischievous connections by humans or faulty switches might produce. 7 In that respect the technical process of connecting symbolizes the perils and shortcomings of industrial networking itself: the somewhat uncontrollable effort of (re-) assembling various paths of communication that in the industrial age is a prerequisite for any successful act of non-physical long-distance communication. The strong affection that the movies and television always had for the telephone as a narrative ploy bringing together visually - in cross-cutting or even in split screens protagonists who are separated by space points one more time towards the important interrelation between the state of networking and the state of storytelling. Obviously, industrial networks of communication and film as the new audiovisual art form of the industrial age manipulate space and time in a very similar matter. Montage or editing accomplish in the movies what curtains provide in the theater: heightened control of space and time. While the curtain ‘covers’ spatial distance like a bridge or an envelope giving protection for the time consuming process of getting from place A to place B, the practices of editing - like switching in communications - manage to do away with the distance between place A and place B in no time. Geographic space is not covered anymore. It is switched away and cut out, erased, eliminated. While new national and international networks of transportation and communication experienced rapid growth during the 19 th and early 20 th century, there was no mathematical theory that could help with understanding (or planning) the expansion of complex and constantly changing networks such as the postal distribution system or the phone net, not to mention the web of social relations in an industrial metropolis or the dissemination of infectious diseases. Euler’s Graph Theory could be applied to uniform and essentially static or slow growth networks like systems of roads and bridges or rails where nodes have roughly the same amount of edges. But it could not, for example, model the highly dynamic phone net that allowed (or should allow) for arbitrary connections between all its millions of nodes. The need for a more advanced theory of networking was finally answered in 1959 when Paul Erdös and Alfréd Rényi published their paper “On Random Graphs.” It provided a model to understand the functioning of complex networks with huge numbers of nodes (Barabasi, 13-24; Buchanan, 34-40). The most surprising insight of the Random Graph Theory was how few randomly placed links are sufficient to close a network: 7 An outstanding example is Anatole Litvak’s Sorry, Wrong Number (1948). Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 63 For a network of 300 points, there are nearly 50,000 possible links that could run between them. But if no more than about 2 percent of these are in place, the network will be completely connected. For 1,000 points, the crucial fraction is less than 1 percent. For 10 million points, it is only 0.000001. (Buchanan 37) Fig. 2: Random Graph. The Random Graph Theory, however, was based on three basic assumptions in the tradition of Graph Theory that dramatically limited its usefulness. First, it still didn’t account for growth or other forms of change though almost all known networks tend to change and definitely most contemporary industrial networks were growing fast. Second, it still worked with regular graphs or uniform networks in which links are pretty much equally distributed. But in many if not most real-world networks some nodes - so-called hubs - have many more links than others. In social webs, some people are very popular, in economic networks some companies attract more customers, in sexual networks some have more partners, in any language some words are used more often, in road, rail or airline networks some nodes (interchanges, stations, airports) incur more traffic than others, etc. Third, Random Graph Theory did not differentiate between the qualities of nodes; on the contrary, it presumed that all nodes were created equal as this was a prerequisite for random linking. But we know from our own experience that networking does not happen randomly, that it is rather controlled by interests and preferences. In everyday situations at least, we don’t become friends with just anybody, we don’t buy just anything, we don’t call random phone numbers, etc. Hubs and clustering and not random distribution therefore characterize many networks. While it took almost thirty years until these shortcomings were fully realized and overcome through scientific research, the idea of random linking - that our cultural networks have random structures - encountered opposition already in the 1960s and 1970s from other academic disciplines, namely philosophy, media theory, psychology, and sociology. These different approaches had in common that they all tried to understand the complexity of what at first sight appeared to be pure randomness. Marshall McLuhan, for example, G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 64 secularized Teilhard de Chardin’s religious concept of a “global brain” evolving from the increasingly complex and meaningful network of transportation and communication that, as he wrote, was enclosing our planet like “a new skin” (Teilhard 182). Declaring electricity the expansion of the human nervous system, 8 McLuhan took Chardin’s vision of an emerging global brain and transformed it into his media theorem of the emergence of a “global village”: “The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village” (McLuhan 1962, 32). Thanks to networks spanning the globe, he stated, every piece of information now reaches everybody instantly. 9 Only a few years later, the psychologist Stanley Milgram proved empirically that the post-industrial world was indeed a small world. Trying to measure the social “distance” between any two Americans, he set up a simple experiment. He sent letters to randomly selected people asking them to get this letter somehow to a person in a different state. Nobody was given the address of the recipient, just the city he lived in (Boston) and his job (stockbroker). The participants were not supposed to research the address but to “hand” it to someone they personally knew and of whom they assumed that he or she might be “closer” to that Boston stockbroker (Milgram). According to Random Graph Theory in a population that large it should have taken at least several hundred thousand, in the worst case several million handshakes - depending how you account for social clustering - before the letters reached their intended recipient (Buchanan 38-39). Milgram’s letters, however, needed dramatically less ‘handshakes’: The experiment proved that there are just “six degrees of separation” between each of us and at the same time it proved that Random Graph Theory could not sufficiently account for real-life networks. Though the result was empirically sound and could be reproduced over and over again, it seemed counterintuitive, if not implausible to the common sense of most contemporaries and their perception of ‘mass man’ and social anonymity in the public sphere. Everyday life in the industrial age had been increasingly shaped by mass media, in the second half of the 19 th century by the rise of nationally distributed newspapers and magazines, in the first half of the 20 th century by the movies and radio and then, of course, in the second half of the last century by the omnipresence of TV. Particularly the broadcast media had caused radical transformations. Face-to-face and peer-to-peer discourses once dominating the pre-industrial public sphere turned into mediated discourses by proxy; diverse local and regional public spheres were 8 “Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned” (McLuhan 1965, 3). 9 Towards the end of the 20th century, Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of a global brain as well as Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a global village became epistemological models for a new generation of (media) theorists trying to understand the cultural consequences of the exponential growth of digital networks; among others Russell, Stock, de Rosnay, Levy, Dyson. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 65 replaced by a unified national public consisting of few participants and many listeners and viewers. City life thereby changed dramatically. National events broadcast by ‘the networks’ as the big TV conglomerates were called permeated local affairs. Radio and even more TV programming started to govern the daily schedule, remote controlling the flow of traffic, the success of local entertainment offerings and the topics of private conversations as well as the few surviving unmediated public debates. With regard to the present culture wars between old and new media and the raging debate whether and how the internet should be controlled and regulated, it is important to stress that the history of broadcasting in the 20 th century provides several conspicuous illustrations for the pivotal position of network design. Particularly instructive is the conversion of the radio from an instrument for two-way-communication, as it was invented in the early 20 th century and as it was used for more than twenty years, into a much simpler device that could only receive (Campbell-Kelly and Aspray 233-235). That move in combination with political decisions on how to license the airwaves transformed radio amateurs who took part in a public discourse into a passive mass of listeners - the audience. 10 Arguably, analog radio technology would not have allowed for millions of ongoing peer-to-peer-conversations, but the history of radio demonstrates how networking practices can act as a double-edged sword. Industrial technology realized the enlightened hopes for a nationwide public, but the new national audience was not able to participate in the new mediated public sphere anymore. Broadcasting reached millions but muted them at the same time, turning former participants into passive consumers - a national public united in silence. In the second half of the 20 th century, however, discontent with passive media consumption was growing. At the end of the mechanical age, more and more contemporaries had been longing for change, specifically for a public sphere of a wider than local reach. Now, at the end of the industrial age, more and more contemporaries were longing for change as well, specifically for a public sphere that allowed - again - for individual participation. What started with art installations that required audience interaction, avantgarde theater experiments like The Living Theater and underground practices like happenings, soon reached popular mass media itself. Television broadcasters realized that the audience was demanding more involvement; they developed already in the 1960s several strategies to compensate for the lack of a feedback channel in their analog networks - from proxy participation of the studio audience to experiments with the telephone as remedial medium (individuals participating in shows via phone, mass audience vote, etc.). But existing networking and industrial media technologies could hardly fulfill the growing desire for more participation and interaction. Industrial culture slowly approached its limits. 10 See Brecht and Enzensberger. G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 66 3 Cities and Life in the Age of Digital Networks The technological foundation of digital culture was established around the middle of the 20 th century when in 1945 John von Neumann conceived of the virtualization of tools and machines (programs) and Claude Elwood Shannon in 1948 propelled the virtualization of materials, storage media and their content (files). 11 In theory, the separation of hardand software was accomplished then, though it would take several decades before digital technology was powerful and user friendly enough to become part of everyday life. Again, for the third time in modern history, the development of a new technology gave rise to a new class of professionals who developed and used the new means and techniques to their economic advantage: IT entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, hardware engineers and software programmers, system administrators and webmasters, network and satellite technicians, specialists for IT-support or e-commerce, CGI-animators, CADand video game designers, scientists working in new fields like robotics, genetics, superconductivity or nanotechnology and, of course, intellectuals and academics who study and analyze the socio-cultural effects of the epochal transition from an industrial to a digital civilization. For this new class, Peter F. Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers,” Robert Reich spoke of “symbolic analysts,” and Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein of a “virtual class” whose members are “dependent for their economic support on the drive to virtualization” (Drucker 6, Reich 181, Kroker and Weinstein 15). Since the late 1990s, city life has undergone constant change, not so much by the diffusion of digital technology itself - the entrance of networked computers and their software into workplaces and homes - but by mobile digital networking. First with cellular phones, then with the succession of mobile Von Neumann machines such as laptops, PDAs and GPS navigators, smart phones, net books and networked tablets, a mobile information infrastructure evolved, overlaying the analog reality. During the 19 th and 20 th century cities had, in direct response to the anonymity of everyday life and the fact that most of its enormous urban space stayed unfamiliar even to its long time inhabitants, built up their own communications infrastructure - street signs, house numbers, signposts, traffic signs, billboards, traffic control systems, etc. By these means, locals as well as strangers could partially “read” and navigate the industrial city. As long as the information was conveyed in analog form, however, it had to be more or less standardized. Everybody, for example, passing by an intersection had to read that a certain direction lead to downtown though he or she was trying to find their way to a friend’s house around the corner. And everybody looking at a billboard was offered, perhaps, diapers though their kids were teenagers by now. At the turn of the 11 Neumann, Shannon. - My rendering of the process of digitalization and its cultural consequences follows Abbate, Campbell and Aspray, Castells, Freyermuth, Friedewald, Levinson, Shurkin, Waldrop. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 67 21 st century, mobile digital broadband networking in combination with the proliferation of networked mobile communicators started to personalize the information and, of course, the entertainment that individuals could receive while navigating the city. The consequences were manifold. For one, the urban space, in the mechanical age to a large extent part of the public sphere and in the industrial age mostly an anonymous space of transition, suddenly became privatized. Today, on the sidewalks, in public transportation or in restaurants private affairs are openly discussed, though most of the time not with those physically present, and personally selected entertainment - music, movies, games - can be enjoyed as before only in the privacy of one’s own home. However, something else, the unique characteristic of digital networking, had an even stronger impact on city life and the public sphere: that it allows for peer-to-peer interaction. This ability is, of course, an effect of the basic principle of digitalization: the separation of hardand software, i.e., the replacement of hardware tools, machinery, materials and artifacts by software programs and software files. Consequently, while industrial networking uses hardware switching, digital networking replaces the hardware switch as well as the analog transmission of analog information with software. The central process of letting packets of data, consisting of some bits of information as well as navigational instructions, find their own way from place A to place B - so-called packet switching - was conceptualized already in the early 1960s and first tested in 1969 with the Arpanet (see Baran, Kleinrock, Abbate). Comparing this procedure to, for example, the analog transmission of a phone conversation illustrates the radical difference. First, the analog phone system can only transmit sound; digital packet switching on the other hand does not differentiate between media. It is by definition transmedial as software packets are no different whether they transport parts of an oral conversation or a letter, of a book or a movie. Therefore digital networks of communication can double as networks of transportation, at least for virtualized media, goods and services. In that respect, we have come full circle since the mechanical age: from the analog unity of transportation and communication to the digital unity of communication and transportation. Secondly, and more importantly, hardware-switched lines eliminating the space between place A und place B are, for the duration of the call, closed for all other communication. Packet switching does not require closed lines. On the contrary, a system of open channels is needed for it to function. So, instead of merely eliminating physical distance, digital networking also opens up a virtual space between place A and place B, a new frontier, room to move, to communicate and to interact with others as well as with software, from virtual banking to gaming. In contrast to mechanical and industrial networking, the new digital practices of networking that allow for interactive and transmedial peer-to-peer communication, while at the same time making it possible to deliver virtualized goods in seconds or minutes around the globe, can be called Networking 3.0. Its central principle is virtualization, i.e., the conversion from hardware practices G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 68 and artifacts to software programs and software files, and its most important technique in regard to communication and transportation is virtual spatialization, the transformation of the distance between communicating parties - users - into a virtual space of (inter-) action. Like the bridge in the mechanical age, this new space of transportation and communication soon turned into a mythical, partly utopian, partly dystopian place, which promised freedom and fun but threatened to entrap and enslave. 12 What William Gibson famously called “cyberspace,” the new digital transmedium lent itself, of course, to new kinds of aesthetic forms, specifically audiovisual storytelling. With mechanical technology and culture the picture-frame stage with its curtain and numerous other techniques to manipulate space and time had evolved. Industrial technology and culture had given birth to the feature film with its heightened editing techniques that could create a new continuum of space and time. Not surprisingly, digital technology is spawning something radically new as well: nonlinear and interactive audiovisual storytelling. Games and specifically MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) make use of the unique qualities of this new global data space of communication and transportation, transforming it into a virtual meeting place and playground. The speed and size of the exponential growth since the mid-90s when the average citizen in the developed world became aware of the World Wide Web and more and more people also started to use it, didn’t seem incomprehensible just to most observers. The uncontrolled and random growth of the web was indeed incomprehensible even to those who then were studying and researching network effects. Almost thirty years after Stanley Milgram’s experiment had questioned Random Graph Theory, the counterintuitive result of ’six degrees of separation’ - the empirically researched truth that we are living in a so-called ‘small world’ - could still not be explained mathematically. In fact, a few years after Milgram’s experiment another study had even added to the confusion. Trying to research the most important social links in communities, Mark Granovetter asked people how they had found a new job. Not friends and family (“close ties”) were statistically most helpful, he discovered, but distant acquaintances (“weak ties”) and particularly those Granovetter called “bridges”: people who were part of different social circles that usually didn’t have contact (Granovetter). A quarter century later this observation of “The Strength of Weak Ties” (1973) helped solve the small world problem as it gave Duncan J. Watts and Steven Strogatz the idea to improve on a regular Random Graph by adding randomly “weak ties,” break-out short cuts to other social environments. To their surprise, the computer simulation showed that only a few random extra links, while only minimally reducing the clustering, significantly decreased 12 See for example William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) or movies like Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982) or the Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003) by the Wachowski brothers. Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 69 the separation between the nodes - down to the empirically proven “six degrees of separation.” As Mark Buchanan puts it: We find here an explanation not only for why the world is small, but also for why we are continually surprised by it. After all, the long-distance social shortcuts that make the world small are mostly invisible in our ordinary social lives. We can only see as far as those to whom we are directly linked - by strong or weak ties alike. We do not know all the people our friends know, let alone the friends and acquaintances of those people. It stands to reason that the shortcuts of the social world lie mostly beyond our vision, and only come into our vision when we stumble over their startling consequences. (55) Fig. 3: The Strength of Weak Ties. When Watts and Strogatz published their findings in 1998, it soon became clear that they had found the solution to an old problem but that their solution could only explain a small fraction of actual networking. The starting point for this discovery was the most popular result of digitalization: the World Wide Web. When physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and his team sent out a web crawler to measure its connectedness, the findings fit neither the classical, still accepted Random Graph model nor the improved Watts and Strogatz model as both shared a relatively even distribution of links. On the web, however, almost 90 percent of all sites had only a few links - about ten - while very few sites, super connected hubs like Yahoo or CNN, had millions (Barabasi 58). The newly discovered network structure still allowed for the small world effect - a low degree separation -, but its main characteristic was a power law distribution in the number of connections to single nodes. Barabasi called networks of this extremely uneven connectedness “scale-free”: I am repeatedly asked a few basic questions when I lecture about networks: Why did it take this long? Why did we have to wait until 1999 to discover the impact of hubs and power laws on the behavior of complex networks? The answer is simple: We lacked a map. The few network maps available for study before the late 1990s had a few hundred nodes at most. The enormous World Wide Web offered the first chance to examine the intricate anatomy of large complex systems and established the presence of power laws. (Barabasi 227) Soon he and others discovered that not only the Internet and the World Wide Web are structured like this: “In complex networks a scale-free structure is G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 70 not the exception but the norm, which explains its ubiquity in most real systems” (Barabasi 90). Very few highly privileged nodes can be found in networks as different as the AIDS pandemic and the English language, cancerous cells and air travel connections, social relations in Hollywood and the distribution of wealth in most developed countries. 13 Fig 4: Scale-Free Network. Digital networking - structured by a combination of small world qualities that enhance peer-to-peer communication and the exploitation of weak links on one hand and by the dominance of ‘aristocratic’ super hubs on the other - is increasingly shaping everyday life in contemporary post-industrial and not yet digital cities. The deployment of ever-faster mobile broadband access and the social diffusion of portable personal communicators are again causing radical transformations. The once pervasive influence of broadcast media - of its schedules as well as of its standardized content - is waning. The old analog electronic networks remote controlling city life in the 20 th century are being replaced by a virtual, i.e., software-based infrastructure produced by the spatialization of virtuality as well as by the virtualization of space. Fluid and pervasive, virtual information and entertainment is not just overlaying the material world as a separate level, it is permeating and augmenting it. Already certain parts and aspects of what we once considered the material reality of a city can be googled like a website. He or she who walks through a city offline these days is cut off from a wealth of glocal - global and local - virtual information and entertainment, communication and interaction that the next person has at hand or rather on their screen. Mass mediated proxy participation slowly gives way to virtual participation in an emerging and 13 In hindsight, Milgram’s famous experiment already showed that structure: One of its strange results was that the Boston stockbroker received most of the letters from just a few of his many acquaintances - from the few who were super connectors and social hubs. The reason for the existence of super connectors, Barabasi stated, was simply that networks don’t grow randomly as had been assumed for so long: “[T]he Network evolution is governed by the subtle yet unforgiving law of preferential attachment”, i.e., wellconnected nodes - websites, for example - are preferred by most users and therefore grow fast: “The rich are getting richer.” (Barabasi 86) Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 71 largely self-organizing virtual public sphere. In many respects it negates the anonymity, passivity and conformity of the national mass public. While it is far too early to say where exactly these developments will lead us, three possible elements of city life in the digital age are clearly taking shape. Epilog: “The future is already here - it’s just unevenly distributed.” 14 “Not all people exist in the same Now,” Ernst Bloch stated in 1932 outlining his concept of “Ungleichzeitigkeit” (22). Hard to translate, the term denotes a temporal incommensurability, a cultural nonsynchronism between individuals and groups effecting non-contemporaneity within societies. Presently, the diffusion of digital networking is escalating this kind of cultural and social misalignment by implementing what I call arbitrary globalization. In the near future, I think, we will be able to communicate in any medium with any other person wherever on the planet she or he may be. At the same time we should have, independent from our whereabouts, instant transmedial access to all knowledge that humanity has accumulated thus far. The social effect of this arbitrary globalization will be the intensification of virtual vicinity between individuals and groups separated by space and thereby as well the formation of virtual vicinities existing ‘next’ to the urban space we inhabit. As a complement to these processes of arbitrary globalization we will experience arbitrary localization. GPS navigators and smart phones already provide a glimpse how life in cities can be augmented when virtual information and virtual peer-to-peer interaction overlay and permeate the ‘real’ world. The combination of location awareness, i.e., the automatic filtering of globally available online-information according to our current location, and embedded information, i.e., real-time data that is locally made available by businesses, media, other users or as a public service, should create a new dense ‘virtual urbanity’ augmenting the city and its analog attractions. The social effect of arbitrary localization will be a virtual situatedness that turns social or geographic strangers into instant insiders enabling them to independently navigate an unknown urban space and to select its offerings as informed and confident as long-established residents. Last but not least, mobile networking should empower arbitrary association within the urban space. Many citizens in the developed nations already use software providing real-time ambient awareness to connect with friends and acquaintances that are close enough for impromptu meetings or short-term help but still out of sight and reach in the real world. At the same time the tremendous success of Open Source practices suggests to expand processes of self-organizing collaboration between like-minded strangers to areas other than software production. The information and opinions that individuals 14 William Gibson, qtd. in “Books of the Year 2003”, The Economist, Books & Arts, 4 Dec. 2003. G UNDOLF S. F REYERMUTH 72 collect virtually and the many contacts that the virtual sphere facilitates can trigger - as flash mobs have shown - collective actions in the urban space. The social effect of such arbitrary association, i.e., the ordinariness of personal encounters and collaborations with strangers driven by similar interests and goals, will be the emergence of a new virtual public sphere that turns virtual strangers into instant peers or “smart mobs” (Rheingold). In conclusion, cities and their networks have gone through three phases in modern times, accumulating processes and practices. During the mechanical age, transportation and communication depended on physical transport powered by biological or natural energy, the main networking principle being bridging, a material covering of the space between place A and B. In the industrial age, transportation accelerated as it gained access to new forms of energy while communication became separate from physical transport. The main networking principle in communication was switching, the technical elimination of the space between place A and B. In the digital age, communication as well as an important share of transportation moved into the virtual realm establishing on a higher technological level a new unity between the circulation of goods and news. The main networking principle now is a virtualization of the distance between place A and B, which opens up a new virtual space for communication and interaction. The historical analysis further demonstrated how each level of networking technology affected the cultural and social life, namely the practices of audio-visual storytelling and the structure of the public sphere. Theater, film and games exercise their narrative control of space and time in strong interrelation to the technological state of networking in the period they came into being: the theater covering space and time gaps with its curtain, the film eliminating these gaps through editing, games using the virtual space created by digital networking as their staging area. Similarly, the qualities and constraints of contemporary networks of communication effected that the public sphere of the mechanical age was local, therefore geographically fragmented and dominated by unmediated face-to-face discourses and interactions. With the industrialization of networking and media, the public sphere grew to be national, therefore uniform and dominated by mediated few-to-many proxy discourses and interactions. Now, in the early digital age, the public sphere changes again, becoming virtual, therefore geographically as well as socially fragmented and dominated by mediated peer-to-peer discourses and interactions. Reviewing the radical change that city life has incurred and trying to imagine the outlined trajectory of possible further change to arbitrary globalization and the establishment of virtual vicinity, arbitrary localization and the empowerment to become an instant insider as well as arbitrary association and the empowerment to become an instant peer, one cannot help but wonder how a citizen of a typical city of the mechanical or industrial age, if he or she could time travel, would perceive the emerging city of the digital age. But then, of course, Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known third law comes to mind: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets 73 Works Cited Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. 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