“Materials acquire more-than-local agency only occasionally, not in general.” – Andrew Barry, “Materialist Politics: Metallurgy,” pg. 10
“The more we associate materialities, institutions, technologies, skills, procedures, and slowdowns with the word ‘collective,’ the better its use will be: the hard labor necessary for the progressive and public composition of the future unity will be all the more visible.” – Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, pg. 59
Materialism, especially new materialism as articulated by Jane Bennett, Samantha Frost, Diana Coole – I would also add Bruno Latour to this list – and others, has a keen interest in the local, as the local, as opposed to the global or the abstract, is the place in which we can see networks most clearly. But what does the local look like in online environments? It seems more difficult to trace these less visible collectives and connections. Does hyptertext have a “local”? If it does, and I think it does, I think that network theories, especially those of Bruno Latour, offer the best way to delineate, to trace, that local.
The problem with the hypertext local is that it’s constantly in flux. It’s in a constant state of becoming. And so its shape is always changing: new actors are enrolled; others are severed from the network. Not only does the network shift in response to events and enrollments, the information itself “is in constant flux” according to James Porter, as there is “social interaction involved in the process of sharing it” (181). And yet, even as these changes take place, the hypertext network still thrives. It still reaches, communicates, and connects users and technologies. It’s, shall we say, constantly “thinging,” gathering, in the Greek sense of the word. Thing as a gathering conjures, at least for me, images of the Agora, the birthplace of, if not Western rhetoric, then at least Western rhetorical theory. And it was there that rhetors endeavored to gather as many actors to themselves as possible; they tried to persuade the members of their audiences to join their network/cause. It was here they built political movements.
And the digital Agora seems similar in that regard. In fact, rhetors have the power to gather even more actants via the web. Henry Jenkins, et. al, in their discussion of participatory culture and education, follow James Gee in suggesting that digital spaces that gather likeminded individuals (called by Gee “affinity spaces”) “offer powerful opportunities for learning…because they are sustained by common endeavors …, because they depend on peer-to-peer teaching with each participant constantly motivated to acquire new knowledge or refine their existing skills, and because they allow each participant to feel like an expert while tapping the expertise of others” (9). It’s dangerous, however, to imagine that these affinity spaces don’t also offer opportunities for exclusion. These local publics, bound by their affinity for a particular issue or subject, may gather around educational or social endeavors viewed by most as innocuous; they may also, however, gather around shared disbelief, disinterest, or dislike.
All of this, I’m sure, seems like a lot of nonsense. What does it matter whether a particular set of hyptertexts has a local context? What good does it do to trace such a network of links? It matters because tracing the links also means tracing the audience, both intended and actual, and knowing the audience gives us important insight into the imagined purpose of an interaction (the past) and the latent possibility of an interaction (the future). As Porter notes, the rise of internet communication, especially in terms of news sites and social networking, has made it “economically feasible to design and distribute tailored information for small audience groups” (173). In such networks, we may begin to think in terms of exchange and change. The producer and the reader, connected by the interface/text/message, participate in an exchange of value, though such an “exchange is not always a commercial one...there is an exchange of value that serves as the motivation for the production and circulation of rhetorical objects” (174). Tracing the networks in which these rhetorical objects are exchanged allows us to discover what is valued and by whom. We are able, through our tracing, to discover the local concern that binds nodes to one another.
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