This document discusses cultural networks through three lenses: systems, cities, and memes. It examines systems theory and how properties emerge at the whole system level. It explores cities as complex systems and how physical and digital networks intersect and influence one another. It also analyzes memes as basic units of cultural information that spread analogously to genes and discusses specific examples like LOLCATs. The document presents different approaches to studying the relationships between cities and telecommunications technologies.

1. Cultural Networks
Systems, Cities and Memes
March 2012//Cultural Networks Seminar

2. Systems and Networks
• Systems Theories:
“Their essential, or ‘systemic’ properties
are properties of the whole, which none of
the parts have”
Systemic properties are emergent –
dependent on level of system,
different properties may arise

3. Systems – Micro and Macro
Poperties of a
‘system’ reveal
themselves
When looking at the
behaviour of the
•WHOLE
•CONTEXT
•ENVIRONMENT
Credit Spike Walker, Wellcome Images
Credit: Wellcome Library, London

4. The Inner Life of a Cell (2006)
• TED talk by Medical animator David Bolinsky (in collaboration with
Harvard University)
• http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bolinsky_animates_a_cell.html
• Play from 6:40
• Without narration:
• http://www.studiodaily.com/2006/07/cellular-visions-the-inner-life-of-a-
cell/

5. System – maintenance and resources
Cell: organised, closed system
Exchange of energy /
matter / information
Membrane
Metabolic network
http://blogs.saschina.org/katherine01pd2016/category/science/

6. Communication – Exchange of Information
// Interdependence
• How Plants Warn Each Other of Danger
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-
environment-16916474

7. Partnership, Flexibility and Diversity
• Partnerships – sustainable community – co-
evolution – feedback loops – ideas and
information flow freely
• Pervasive cooperation – democracy and
personal empowerment – elements of a
successful community
• Flexibility and Diversity – allow systems to
react to outside disturbances & adapt to
changing conditions
• TOLERANCE LIMIT

8. Partnership, Flexibility and Diversity
• Diverse system is more resilient because of
overlaps in (ecological functions)
• Ethnic & cultural diversity – different
relationsihps – different ways of overcoming a
problem
• If web of relationships is not sustained –
fragmentation, isolation, prejudice, friction

9. Social Network – City as a complex system

10. Cyberspace - Electronic Networks // Cityspace
• Time/Space: “global village”
• Logical links rather than physical paths
• Navigation architecture/graphical interfaces vs.
building facades architecture
• Self-regulated moral codes
• Power to design
• Different social interaction based on common
ground, not chance
• Economic opportunities for small startups

11. Mapping
City - Telecommunications relations
• A range of different relationships between the
physical form of urban spaces and the
development of electronic spaces

12. Mapping
City - Telecommunications relations
• 1. Physical and developmental synergies
NTL Broadband coverage 2004
March 2007//Cyberspace and the City

13. Mapping
City - Telecommunications relations
• 2. Substitution effect
March 2007//Cyberspace and the City MAC e-world

14. Mapping
City - Telecommunications relations
• 3. Generation effects
Online mail-order companies generating
business

15. Mapping
City - Telecommunications relations
• 4. Enhancement effects
March 2007//Cyberspace and the City Digital Bus Timetable UK

16. City and Cyberspace - Experimental projects
Pushing the boundaries of converging
technologies and spaces:
• Loca
• Sonic City

17. Loca • project on mobile media and surveillance;
tracking the trail of digital identities that people
leave through physical space.
March 2007//Cyberspace and the City
http://www.loca-lab.org/

18. Sonic City
• exploring mobile interaction and wearable
technology for everyday music creation
• electronic music based on sensing bodily and
environmental factors.
• Mapping movement with real-time processing
of concrete sounds,
• generates a personal soundscape co-produced
by physical movement, local activity, and urban
ambiance.
– Encounters, events, architecture,
(mis)behaviours – all become means of
interacting with or 'playing the city'.
• http://www.tii.se/reform/projects/pps/soniccity/in
dex.html

19. Memes and Cultural Evolution of Ideas
• Richard Dawkins – Cultural Evolution
Theory: The Selfish Gene (1974)
“Most of what is unusual about man can
be summed up in one word: Culture”
• Meme: a cultural item that is transmitted
by repetition in a manner analogous to the
biological transmission of genes
(dictionary.com)

20. LOLCATZ
• http://icanhascheezburger.com/
• Global running gag: not just for select few,
but everyone involved – also in its
evolution
• Images with captions – have evolved a
cultural spectrum of species and
subspecies (HAPPYCAT)
• Even ‘Kitty Pidgin’ has certain rules and
standardized ‘grammar’ (or lack of)

21. LOLCATZ

22. Other Memes – Just Fun or Awareness?
• Bonsai Kitten
• KONY 2012
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-
africa-17336033

23. 4 approaches to studying city - telecommunications relations:
Technological Determinism
Telematics Technologies -> Urban impacts
Technology, then, shapes destiny. Public actions do
modify outcomes; social movements redirect them
temporarily. But ultimately, how we live, where we
live and near whom we live depend on the
underlying forces inherent in technological evolution
and subsequent economic change
(Pascal, A. 1987; 597 - The Vanishing City)
• Society adapts and learns to live with the
effects, rather than shape them

24. 4 approaches to studying city - telecommunications relations:
Utopianism / Futurism
• Telematics technologies -> Solutions to social,
economic, spatial and physical problems
The idea that the clean, dematerialised solutions
of electronic spaces will substitute for the material
ills of commuting and pollution in urban places…
Telematics networking has even been called the
‘alternative fuel’”
(Graham, S. and Marvin, S. 2001; p.87
-Telecommunications and the City)

25. 4 approaches to studying city - telecommunications relations:
Dystopian / Urban Political Economy
• Capitalist political, economic and social
relations
– -> The design and application of telematics
technology
– -> Uneven social and spatial development within
and between cities
Telecommunications are not neutral technologies.
They are not equally amenable to all users which
can be envisaged; an inherent bias is already
“locked in” to them, through the network design
process
(Gillespie, 1991; p.225 -Advanced
communications networks, territorial integration
and local development)

26. 4 approaches to studying city - telecommunications relations:
Social & Political Construction of
Technology (SCOT)
Social & Political shaping by organisations and
individuals
– -> Use and application of telematics
– -> Effects on cities
Some design alternatives can be key policy
choices in that they may bias a technology
towards particular social uses and outcomes.[…]
For example, a public information utility can be
designed to block or facilitate interactive versus
one-way communication.
(Guthrie, K. and Dutton, W., 1992; p.307-319 -
The politics of citizen access technology: the
development of public information utilities in four
cities)
• Society influences technology

27. Virtual Communities and the Urban Public
Sphere
• Cyberspace reviving a sense of
public sphere?
Playfulness, spontaneity, imagination and desire
are all diminished from the public and private
domains of career-building. Only the messagerie,
with its fictional self-constitution and perfect
anonymity, offers an apparent respite from what
has become for many a treadmill of reason.
(Poster, M., 1990; p.120 - The Mode of
Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context)

28. Cultural Networks:
Systems, Cities and Memes
March 2012//Cultural Networks Seminar