Networks Without a Cause is the fourth book by Geert in his series of studies into critical internet culture. For those unfamiliar with Geert’s work, the first book in this series is Dark Fiber (2001) which deals with early internet culture, from cyber culture to dot.com-mania. His second book My First Recession (2003) describes the aftermath of the dot.com mania and looks at the transition period of the dot.com crash to the early blogging years. His third book Zero Comments (2008) looks back on the blogging hype that has commenced since and addresses blogs as an unfolding process of “massification” and blogging as a “nihilistic venture.” It also looks at the Web 2.0 hype or Web 2.0 mini-bubble that echoes the dot-com era but also differs from it as described by Geert. His new monograph, Networks Without a Cause (2012), continues where Zero Comments has left off by describing the late Web 2.0 era.

The introduction of Networks Without a Cause starts with the important umbrella question “How do we capture Web 2.0 before its disappearance?” The rise of the real-time signifies a fundamental shift from the static archive and handcoded HTML websites toward “flow” and the “river” as metaphors of the real-time, where the software, social media platforms, are automatically generating content flows from the input from their users. Blogs and blog software have played an important role in this shift, with the reverse-chronology of blog entries and the river of fresh content produced by RSS feeds. Real-time is a key feature of social media platforms such as Facebook with its news feed and Twitter with its timeline, where content flows by, begging the question for researchers how to capture and archive this flow in order to be able to analyze it, and for Geert also the question of “why store a flow?” related to the notion of users no longer saving their files for offline retrieval but instead moving, storing and syncing everything in the cloud (think for example about Gmail and Dropbox) but also the question of identity management because “how do you shape the self in real-time flows?” (p. 11)

Social Media vs. Web 2.0: "the term Web 2.0 is called a buzzword, that on the one hand has been “emptied of its referent, it is an empty signifier: it is a brand.” || Comment Cultures: "“Current software invites users to leave short statements but often excludes the possibility for others to respond. Web 2.0 was not designed to facilitate debate with its thousands of contributions. […] What the back-office software does is merely measure “responsiveness"

Holdengraber said he had asked Koolhaas and Obrist to define themselves in seven words: Koolhaas gave a clear-cut six: mystic, rational, sober, baroque, patient, immediate. Obrist, sort of eight: catalyst, conversation, curating curiosity, guidance-making, and protest against forgetting. / In a brief introduction, Koolhaas returned to a subject he’d addressed at the Japan Society a few nights before: How Kisho Kurokawa managed to be a magazine-posing celebrity architect in his day (1950s and 60s) who was still taken seriously enough to influence the direction of postwar Japan. “He was prominent enough to interview the prime minister,” Koolhaas noted, and you could almost feel the waves of longing and envy welling up. Today, he said, the effect is the opposite: the more media exposure, the less architects are taken seriously. Even more, the architect said, Kurokawa provided a postwar model for being male in Japan. (And that without wearing a black turtleneck.)... The Metabolists worked together, and with the country almost entirely in ruins, their thinking as a group became “an extension of the imagination of the state.” Perhaps. What the Metabolists actually recommended in terms of architecture—floating fortresses, sky villas, pod-dwellings—seemed less of interest than the camaraderie of ideas. In contrast, Koolhaas said, “We are all lonely operators with very little cooperation. They could stand together and work in a movement.” And though the work itself dealt with impossibilities of scale and entirely broken down systems in desperate need, the united effort was “a miracle to behold.”... Glossing over the homogeneity of postwar Japanese society with competitive zeal fueled by peer humiliations, Koolhaas apparently finds that zeitgeist preferable to today’s market economy where “architecture has been warped and separated from anything important and no longer serves the public good, but only the good of private interests.”

"P.E.A.R. is an exciting new architectural fanzine, presenting work from a variety of contemporary architectural practices, researchers and individuals working in Europe. P.E.A.R. aims to re-establish the fanzine as a primary medium for the dissemination of architectural ideas, musings, research and works. Through its presentation of a wide range of architectural discourses, P.E.A.R. seeks to present the complexity and variety of contemporary architectural practices."

Elias Redstone has constructed a virtuoso and light tool that identifies the architectural culture, its presumed margins, its hazy intentions, its self-referentiality and its fragility. It is an Internet website that brings together and showcases more than 60 specialist magazines and journals. From the Chilean fanzine to the French scientific six-monthly, passing via a UK monthly printed in the format of a daily, this vibrant universe is contained within a simple and elegant descriptive format that does not betray its documentary nature. In our social-networking era, YouTube provides the surfing public with an astonishing wunderkammer of clips from the recent past—the 20th century—but the Archizines operation is a digital archive amassing essential information on the culture of the near future, that of the Noughties.... Elias Redstone has lent visibility to many marginal and isolated magazines published today and brought into contact publishers who, all too often, are unaware of the wealth of the system they are operating in but the most paradoxical and interesting aspect of this story is that, as stated by the curator, "No institution asked me to do this project, it was my own decision, born out of a personal desire to share a heritage that I see as a great resource. People started to appreciate my collection on the Internet site and many contacted me, sending me new magazines, so I decided the best thing would be to put all these magazines together and make them physically available, creating an experience of exchange and growth." His role has, indeed, been crucial in making the magazines, in all their many facets, public and accessible, and showing readers the importance of the work that most of these publishers are doing.... Understanding how the Internet can be shaped as an infrastructure that brings visibility to these emerging archipelagos of knowledge is undoubtedly an issue that written architecture will have to ask itself in the coming years, and find effective strategies if it is to continue producing a political project as complex as that of the magazine.

“The X just means we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he adds. This is the spirit of experimentation behind Studio-X, an ambitious global educational initiative currently underway at GSAPP. Equal parts learning space, public forum, and international think tank, Studio-X “affords an enormous bandwidth for thinking about the future of cities,” Wigley says—a mandate that he cites as the core mission of the program, and the reason he first proposed it four years ago... With sister offices now open in Mumbai, Amman, Beijing, and Rio de Janeiro, and more in the offing in South Africa and Japan, Studio-X New York is one spoke in a wheel of architectural activity that is at once international and intensely localized. The overseas branches aren’t intended to be subordinate to either Columbia or the Manhattan pilot office—“not like Starbucks selling some sort of wisdom from New York,” as Wigley puts it. They’re idea incubators in their own right, feeding new knowledge about how cities live and change into a greater community of thought... “It’s about expanding the notion of the university beyond the institution itself,” explains Jeffrey Johnson, the director of the New York–based China Megacities Lab, who has led groups of students on semiannual visits to Studio-X Beijing since it opened in 2009... Situated, like the New York studio, in the very heart of their respective downtowns, each Studio-X satellite operates as a discrete unit, with local directors setting a specific agenda. Yet all of the outposts, following the program’s mission, look to reinvigorate the urban conversation in their particular cities by engaging not just designers but culturally omnivrous thinkers from diverse backgrounds... Gavin Browning, who preceded Twilley and Manaugh at Studio-X New York, admits that the two halves of the Studio-X population are often “operating in separate spheres.”... The space’s social character is part of its appeal. “The potential for the contact there to be informal allows for discussions to take place that don’t take place in a more official setting,” says Jeffrey Inaba, the head of C-Lab, another fixture of Studio-X New York... And then there is the question of how the overseas locales are meant to work in concert with one another, as well as with the university. When they’re not being visited by one of the American student groups (which is to say, the majority of the year), the far-flung outposts operate entirely independently of Columbia. Although that gives them considerable leeway to chart their own course, it reduces the overall coherence of the program. “We all have access to each others’ planning calendars,” says Twilley, referring to her fellow Studio-X directors, “and I check what they’re up to.
But we haven’t translated that information into a coordinated series.”... Some of Studio-X’s satellites are located in places where certain political issues, the kind of things that might be spoken about freely on the campus of Columbia University, simply cannot be addressed. Wigley, who also sees the program as a vehicle for bringing corporate figures into architectural conversations, believes there’s room for healthy debate, but he tends to downplay the potential for outright conflict.

Books and texts are forums for speculation, experimentation, inquiry, and creativity, and are understood as important undertakings for any academic school or cultural organization. In recent years, a performative approach to books and texts has also emerged, encompassing exhibitions, blogs, and social practices. Moreover, the discursive turn in arts and museums programming now finds a venue in schools of architecture and design as well.

But what do these so-called conversations achieve beyond offering yet another platform for self-promotion? Can they compete with the scholastic rigor of the peer-reviewed journal or the editorial integrity of newspapers? Should they compete, or is this formulation at once reductive and no longer productive? How does a school or cultural organization invite discourse that does not replicate it's agenda but rather produces it? What are the outcomes? What "counts"? Who decides? And at what cost?

There was a time until very recently that an archive was off-limits; you needed white gloves and a letter of recommendation. Now it's all online, and there's something astonishing about that. I'm sure there are still things missing, but so much is in the public realm. Who needs me?" But ultimately there's still a role for historians, who have a "protracted engagement with the material."..."When you get beyond the GSD to places like land grant universities...you find that in architectural education there's a reticence to assign the term scholarship to what architects do. And there's a big distinction between research and scholarship...I also tell them in seminars that if I've done a good job, nothing that we talk about will be useful; they won't be able to take it to studio and plug it in. Architectural theory is reflective. You reflect, and then you make. Once they understand that, they understand the utility of architectural discourse."...When I did my PhD, my advisor Alberto Pérez-Gómez impressed upon all of us the importance of entering a close and sustained dialogue with our material of study without being impatient to get to what he calls "the punchline."

McLuhan foresaw that expanding digital media would reshape the very fabric of society. His vision was cultural, not technological; his methods, to look askance, and ask probing questions. In his honour, we aim not at the (so-often fetishized) technologies, digital and social media, patterns of communication, and effects of information on society. Rather, the aim of the Monday night seminars will be at a higher level. How will we fashion discourse, community, culture, authority & expertise? What will be the cartographies of learning, responsibility, and compassion in this digitally mediated landscape? What will happen to learning, to inquiry, to critical intellectual debate? What will be the role of the university—and what will such a university be like?
We will set aside a priori commitment to institutional form, and imagine where intellectuals, (re)searchers, artists, practitioners and cultural activists can convene to explore the possibilities of inquiry, investigation, and debate. What would it be to recognize the far-flung forms of intense intellectual dialogues—from edgy seminars to off-beat journals to intense conversations in coffee-houses and parks? How can we exploit our familiarity with digital media and harness the technologies of change to unleash a vibrant future for profound, discontinuous, soul-redefining encounters?

"A digital dialogue about the practice of tactical urbanism and socially active design. "

"I doubt that the growth of speculative realism would have been so insistent without these communities scattered all over the world, or so rapid. 1) they are a key preserve of particular communities like postgrads + early career researchers, not least because so much activity can go on below the radar, outside the attention of the kind of journals'/institutions' disciplinary policing. 2) they are a means for established figures to communicate in a different + more immediate register + often to become more prominent more quickly. 3) they are a much easier means of importing material from other disciplines, in ways which might be frowned upon if the material was to appear in formal outlets. 4) they allow all manner of researchers to communicate with each other, establish rdg groups; there is real debate. 5) new material reaches an audience much more rapidly than it would through the normal means of communication."

"Leagues and Legions (#LGNLGN) is a think tank at the intersection of architecture and publishing. Composed of architects, urbanists, graphic designers, and writers -- we like to provoke discourse."

"If urban history can be applied to virtual space and the evolution of the Web, the unruly and twisted message boards are Jane Jacobs. They were built for people, and without much regard to profit. How else do you get crowds of not especially lucrative demographics like flashlight buffs (candlepowerforums.com), feminists (bust.com) and jazz aficionados (forums.allaboutjazz.com)? By contrast, the Web 2.0 juggernauts like Facebook and YouTube are driven by metrics and supported by ads and data mining. They’re networks, and super-fast — but not communities, which are inefficient, emotive and comfortable. Facebook — with its clean lines and social expressways — is Robert Moses par excellence."