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Beyond the Beyond

The Difference Between Kindly, Old-Fashioned Digital Culture and Brand New, Extremely Scary Network Culture

*Gosh, I bet you didn’t even know there WAS a difference.

“One striking example of the difference between digital culture and network culture can be seen in their physical sites. The digital era is marked by the desktop microcomputer, displaying information through a heavy CRT monitor, connected to the network via a dial-up modem or perhaps through a high-latency first-generation broadband connection.

“In our own day, there is no such dominant site. The desktop machine is increasingly relegated to high-end applications such as graphic rendering and cinema-quality video editing or is employed for specific, location-bound functions (at reception desks, to contain secure data, as point-of-sale terminals, in school labs, and so on) while the portable notebook or laptop has taken over as the most popular computing platform. Unlike the desktop, the laptop can be used anywhere: in the office, at school, in bed, in a hotel, in a café, or on the train or plane.

“Not only are networks an order of magnitude faster than they were in the dial-up days of the PC, but Wi-Fi makes them easily accessible in many locations. Smart phones such as the Blackberry, Google G1, and the iPhone complement the laptop, bringing connectivity and processing power to places that even laptops can’t easily inhabit, such as streets, subways, or automobiles. But such ultraportable devices are also increasingly competing with the computer, taking over functions that were once the universal device’s purview.

“What unites these machines is their mobility and their interconnectivity, necessary to make them more ubiquitous companions in our lives and key interfaces to global telecommunications networks. In a prosaic sense, the Turing machine is already a reality, but it doesn’t take the form of one machine, it takes the form of many.

“With minor exceptions, the laptop, smart phone, cable TV set top box, game console, wireless router, iPod, iPhone, and Mars rover are the same device, but they become specific in their interfaces, their mechanisms for input and output, for sensing and acting upon the world. Instead of a universal machine, network culture seeks a universal, converged network, capable of distributing audio, video, Internet, voice, text chat, and any other conceivable networking task efficiently.”

(((So it’s kind of like the difference between this dying, moaning laptop and this portable and extremely hazardous 32-gigabyte thumb drive that’s stuck into the side of it like a lamprey awaiting its victim’s imminent death.)))