Editorial


In recent years, the term Net has become a widely-used abbreviation for the Internet, for new forms of communication and of war, for the exchange of information between agencies in order to monitor and control complex and disparate processes — medicine, politics, media and entertainment. The Net has led to the prospect of new possibilities in the world of design: wherever we look, new opportunities appear to be emerging. The terms Net and network have come to represent the very essence of the past decade — and rightly so to the extent that the Internet has indeed brought with it new forms of networks: networks that bring together technical and social contexts with new technologies encroaching on more traditional practices and patterns of behaviour in such a way that smart new developments often simply ignore, repress or obscure social functions. The last three months have shown that new technological qualities do not automatically translate into social change. New technology might be normed, formatted, standardised and indifferent; it might be cheap and flexible; but that does not automatically go to say that networks are democratic, open and horizontal: they can just as easily be hierarchic, closed and vertical. The widely-propagated notion of fairness and equality in or through the Net is misleading and ideological. Although technology forms social processes, by encouraging and training attitudes and methods, social functions in turn influence technology: every development must be commissioned and there must be a developer. The idea of the net is, of course, older than the Internet: it is complex, convoluted and ramified. A net can be used for carrying things or to fish with; a net can be knotted or intertwined, either from one thread, as in knitting or crocheting, or several, as in weaving — textures made of knots and Weg. A net can grow through familial ties, or within a specific social group or class — either voluntarily or inadvertently. Networks are not static, not unchangeable, and they, too, are subject to time. In contrast with technical networks, which become obsolete, redundant, are surpassed, updated and phased out, social networks are preserved as history, are constantly re-formed and adapted.

The articles in the current edition focus on the dialectic of technical and social in a variety of net-networking-netweaving contexts. Is the Internet really more than just a military-style arrangement of complex news-media-entertainment traffic? Are independent cooperative groups, like those developed at the Bauhaus in the face of all-pervasive tradition, stable enough to have a lasting and avant-garde influence? Could the same tendencies, pushing us all in the same direction, serve to undermine the privileges and powers of the private sphere and, at the same time, serve the purposed of exploitative monopolies? Can technical structural contexts — which are what fabrics are — be charged up with culture when the constructional rules that apply are shared by all? Is it even possible to understand a network in terms of the structure that transmits the current, or ought it to be understood in terms of the space that encloses these links, in terms of the people who make up the chain? Does the power that flows through a network, the current which it carries, only exist for this particular network — that is, is it self-serving —, or are the social and political functions, through which the network becomes visible, something which the technical structure uses or abuses in order to achieve goals of either liberation or oppression in a most complex manner?

form+zweck includes contributions to the 3rd Rotis Symposium, »Trading in the Net. Dimensions of Globalisation«, organised by Ulm Museum / HfG Archive Ulm in May 2001, to mark Otl Aicher’s birthday. The idea of staging the symposium originally came from Florian Aicher; the Director of the 3rd Symposium was Chup Friemert.

Chup Friemert