Comment on Peckham: contagion-epidemiological models and financial crises

Abstract

A number of contradictory metaphors are interwoven with network culture. Perhaps the most striking is the computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s image of a spider’s web, which is used to represent the open interstices of communication, but also raises questions about network vulnerability. For example, is being on the web tantamount to the experience of a spider or a fly? Indeed, the World Wide Web was preceded by a host of Internet creepy crawlies: namely, the viruses and worms, which surfaced as a threat to the culture of sharing in the 1980s. The viral metaphor was keenly implemented by early computer security researchers who made fairly close, but often crude, analogical comparisons between digital viruses and their biological counterparts, as well as drawing on immunology to inspire a business of viral containment. The dangers of too much connectivity As Robert Peckham argues in relation to the global interdependencies revealed by financial crises since the 1990s, 1 over the last three decades a paradigm shift has taken place: a shift away from a culture of free sharing towards a culture in which proliferating connectivity has given rise to new anxieties about infection. As the age of networks mutated into the age of contagion, the metaphor of virulent infection turned out to be a perfect justificatory device for an indiscriminate security paradigm. While diverse and conflicting interests, including those of marketers and anti-capitalist groups, sought to harness the ‘positive’ viral potential of this network, too much connectivity was deemed to be harmful. The purported danger posed by excessive connectivity provided a rational for organizing and exerting control over a network via, for instance, the application of epidemiological models of disease emergence in the social sphere, but also via the widespread imposition of generalized immunological defenses, anomaly detection and the obligation of personal hygiene. My own work in this area began by asking if we can look beyond these ubiquitous biomedical metaphors of viral infectivity to locate a different kind of contagious property inherent in the physics of network culture itself. 2 Might it be possible, in other words, to redirect theoretical discussion away from conventional biomedical analogies that have dominated discussion of the viral media ecology towards a new understanding of the ‘virality’ of communication? Here, my approach overlaps with Peckham’s critique of contagion theory in economics. While pervasive biomedical analogies have shaped (and constrained) popular discourses surrounding the networked nature of the contemporary media—fueling fears and propelling an ‘antivirus’ industry—the problem of too much connectivity readily dissipates into a transcendent comparison that fails to grasp the specific material relations of network culture. In contrast, ‘virality’ might be understood, not in terms of a divisive pseudo-biological threat that comes from without to disrupt, but as a quality intrinsic to contemporary network culture, where different forms of ‘contagia’— biological and cultural, human and non-human—interact: from trivial video virals and so-called ‘memes’ to more sobering ‘outbreaks’ of financial and emotional contagion.