‘Faces in the sky’, social network agencies

Abstract

In this paper, the author brings into consideration certain modes of functioning of the networks, as well as their technological, social, political and biological aspects. Now that the integrated view of networks as a combination of biological, technological and social principles has become widespread, and the idea that networks are universally operable both on the level of biotechnology and that of social politics is prevalent, there emerges the problem of the elements of a network which are identifiable despite it still being widely recognized in the literature of the subject that network dataflow can neither be controlled nor decomposed. Combining Bruno Latour's vision of a network as claiming to uniformly include both human and non-human quasi-objects, constructed to explain processes of translation and substitution, with the conclusions about the elementary constituents of networks found in the works of technologically oriented media theorists, the present author argues that a more exact description of a network demands an analysis of the topological points where different subject areas intersect.