Network culture and online collections, theory for the politics of digital museums

Museums are often providing linked open data, but are also doing digital marketing on the social media silos. This neat division of activities is problematic, mostly because digital publics do not seperate into public relations on the one side and public knowledge on the other. This also means, it is not spectacle on the one side and heritage on the other – and this is where we need theory, to understand how to act and think politically and critically beyond artificial divisions of pure digital collections and the necessary evil of marketing. At least that is how I understand the political challenges for digital heritage institutions.

Tiziana Terranova wrote analytically and critically about today’s social media long before it existed in the present form of image circulation. For example this part from her 2004 book Network Culture helps to understand the image interactions on current mass media like Instagram and Tik Tok:

“Images are not so much decoded for meaning as consumed, that is absorbed and relayed. […] If the masses are what within society resist the social, what resist mediation by relating to images in ways that neutralize their social qualities and meanings, then this is not a subject on which reason really takes hold. The masses imply a distracted perception that can be related to only as such – that is, as perception. It is only in so much as the masses perceive that their material composition and political disposition can be affected.” Terranova, Network Culture, 2004, p. 140

Looking back at the book 20 years later, we can understand it as critical theory of the World Wide Web at that time, after the Dot-Com crash which put an end to the first attempts to extract profit from the internet. Back then the distinction could still be strongly felt between internet culture as a little economized space, with countless blogs and forums, and the coming economy which wanted to make this free labour profitable. Terranova has meanwhile published an essay collection that provides further analysis on this dynamic of how „free labor of users in the 2000s has come to be modulated into and channeled by something like a neo-Leibnizian software infrastructure and architecture“ (interview about her new essay collection „After the Internet“).

Companies like Google formed strategies to bring networked knowledge, networked goods, and networked people under their control and make profit from them. They do this, as later Shoshana Zuboff (“Surveillance Capitalism,” 2018) and others explored, primarily through control and governance: monopolization of sources, dependence on closed feeds (silos), surveillance, profiling, targeting, manipulation. Variety of networked communication is thus steered in a particular direction: control over people on the network. But as Terranova emphasizes, in contrast there are the collaborative and democratic aspects of an open and uncommercial network culture – which is therefore contested. But this is not the only thing that makes her study still important today.

Today we see a new Dot-Com boom, with AI startups competing on how to extract networked knowledge from the internet. History repeats itself? With Terranova we can take a step out and see network culture as a contradictory and contested field. Network Culture is a crucial book for understanding the internet, going indead far beyond the later analytical concepts of surveillance capitalism of Shoshana Zuboff or “enshittification” of Cory Doctorow, through references to cybernetic, social and biopower theory (Wiener, von Neumann, Deleuze, Negri, Baudrillard, and many more). Terranova shows how network culture is actualized capitalist production in a chaotic system through soft social control, but also a field of emergence and affects of a multitude.

Not only do museums participate in the image ecologies and economies of social media platforms, they also publish their own digital collections and form global platforms of linked-open-data. Terranova explains how this quality of the internet being a network of networks is crucial to understand its politics. Now, museums were always part of this multiplicity of networks, just think of the Googlebooks versus Gallica competition (which was related to libraries of course, but these conflicts between internet companies and digital heritage also played out more generally in Google’s Freebase versus the open Wikibase/Wikidata, or hubs like Europeana versus silos like Google Arts and Culture).

Currently for the first time, the data economies of platforms have reached the mainstream debate, with Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter coming under scrutiny, and the Fediverse, Bluesky, Nostr entering the spotlights. Again, zooming out with Terranova’s theory of network culture, let’s us see what is really at stake: the politics of a digital economy and digital knowledge sphere and how it relates to affect and emergence – how social relations are related to the material reality of networks. For cultural heritage institutions this is crucial: how to gain agency in this highly commercialized space? For Terranova network culture means to discuss digital commons anew, and 20 years later, this has not lost any urgency, quite the opposite, it is more relevant than ever.

Related to the history of museum digitization, we are talking about a quite special example of a field where there has been building of infrastructure: there are self-governed digital platforms for digital heritage. This is because the digital networking of museums began in the first phase of the web in the 1990s, characterized by open standards. This history can be understood to clash now with the aforementioned influence of surveillance companies that cut off openness, for example by introducing their own standards. To protect the digital commons in the tradition of the first web, we need an interweaving of the debate about the social role of museums with critical theory of network culture: museum critique meets data politics.

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