Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society

Electronic Mediations

by Steven Shaviro

Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays - on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other things. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself.
Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Philosophy, Sociology, Politics, Cthulhu Mythos

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Luna · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the network society, experience will be digital or not at all. But this also means that what you get is never quite what you paid for (249)

This was an interesting book. I liked its creativity and its use of interdisciplinarity to explore the meaning of living in Network Society

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. Steven Shaviro was my critical literary studies professor; I learned a ton from him. Or I think I did. I think he’d disavow that based on our few exchanges on twitter. He’s using my genre, science fiction, to explore life in a networked society. At least, I think science fiction is my genre; I’ve read maybe two thirds of the texts he cites, and one of the main ones, K. W. Jeter’s Noir, I’ve not read, previously heard of, or can imagine reading.

It had some great passages. Viz:

“The noir protagonist’s existential isolation is a virtue, but it is also what inevitably sets him up for a betrayal, usually at the hands of a femme fatale. The myth of noir, then, is really the myth of an autonomous (masculine) self. And the experience of being betrayed is the test, and the proof, of that self’s authenticity. In this secular world, it is no longer possible for Jesus to be betrayed and sacrificed in my place; I have to go through it all myself. The cogito of the noir might well read, I am ‘totally screwed.’ ([Jeter] 272), therefore I exist.” (146)

I am charmed by this passage. I am not versed well enough in noir to judge it (extent of my expertise: I have read The Maltese Falcon; I have seen Chinatown, and I have listened to Guy Noir on A Prairie Home Companion), but it has a chill and and sense of isolation that I’m willing to believe captures the essence of the genre. And it rather helps explain my lack of interest in noir; I tend to believe in the “autonomous (masculine) self” is a delusion and the invocation of Christ reminds me that it’s a grandiose one.

I have an unnerving suspicion that Professor Shaviro predicted Twilight. In a section titled “The Call of Cthulhu” he notes that Marx associated “the process of vampirism with capitalism” and in this modern age “the vampiric flow of blood is reduced to ‘nothing more than a flow of information’ [that can] be calculated and manipulated just like any other packet of bits.” He expands that “More than a century after his initial encounter with the technologies of capital, Dracula only survives as a retro fashion icon. . . . Vampires today are popular commodities, probably more popular than ever, but they are not really terrifying any longer. Rather, they feed our naïve hunger for a safe dose of exoticism. They are commodities that ironically embody our nostalgic yearnings for a time when not everything had been subsumed under the commodity form. In the network society, the monstrosity of capital cannot take the overly cozy and comforting shape of the vampire. It must be figured as something absolutely inhuman and unrecognizable: Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, rather than Stocker’s Dracula.” (167-68). Okay, there’s more than Twilight in there, but Twilight is in there.

It almost ends with a passage I quite like. “[S]cience fiction does not claim to be reportage, just as it does not claim to be prophecy. It does not actually represent the present, just as it does not really predict the future. Rather, it involves both the present and future, while being reducible to neither. For science fiction is about the shadow that the future casts upon the present.” (250). That’s not my definition of science fiction, but I can see it as an apt definition of the more noir-ish versions of science fiction, always afraid of the darkness falling.

But what this has to say about living in the networked society? I do not know.

[Henry · Rating 3 out of 5]

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